Initiation for Whitey: Notes on Poverty and Riot

As I write the slum areas of several dozen large American cities have been ravaged by Negro rioters and by the cops and guardsmen who put them down. For urban Negroes, the pull-back of the poverty program may have been that final straw which broke down their habitual patience and resignation. The ballyhooed War on Poverty was sabotaged, according to the burgeoning number of left ideologists, by an essentially racist country conducting an imperialist war in Asia and bent on holding down exploited dark-skinned masses everywhere. Whether or not such generalizations are justified, the hysteria which prompts them finds ready symbols in the bombing escalation in Hanoi and toward the Chinese border, in the photos of “Vietnam-type” t...