Black Power and White Reactions: The Revitalization of Race-thinking in the United States

The Black Power movement emerged as a reaction to lagging, uneven progress toward equality and as a challenge to the assimilationist theme of the Civil Rights movement. The current controversy over affirmative action and the revitalization of what Jacques Barzun called "race- thinking" stem from white reactions to both movements. Black Power leaders introduced the theme of group rights, demanding reparations for black slave labor. The demand was for compensation to Blacks as a community, not to individuals as members of a genetically defined category. Affirmative action as protective or remedial discrimination deviates from both the notion of community reparations and proposals such as the Domestic Marshall Plan for eliminating poverty among all groups. The emergent governmental policy of collecting statistics based on descent as a means of identifying the "victims" in the society constitutes both a revival of race- thinking and a simplistic solution to the question of who are the deserving have-nots. The choice of currently "protected categories" can be explained only in terms of an implicit rule of non-European descent.