Integration is Communization

Mr. Price’s book was originally a thesis done at the University of Florida. Dealing in the statistics and “trends” of social science, it surveys the role of the Negro in recent Florida politics and, with an occasional jab at conservatism, concludes that he is there to stay. Go South to Sorrow is low-grade political journalism. Declamatory, shrill, and containing wild misstatements (e. g., “No child in South Carolina gets the kind of schooling given to youngsters in Michigan,” and “Everyone in Alabama is poorer than everyone in Pennsylvania”), it is a sorry specimen of Negro intellectual leadership. Mr. Kuper’s book centers on the apartheid movement in South Africa and, at the expense of considerable jargon, comes to the conclusion that passive resistance is proving a useful political instrumentality.

If this were all, Mr. Kuper’s book might be the most innocuous of the three. But this is not all, for it is Mr. Kuper who, unwittingly or not, opens the real issue. In his discussion of race relations in South Africa, he notes that Communism is there being progressively redefined in racial terms. That is to say, Communism is coming to be identified in racial integration. The blame for this he tries to shift to the apartheid laws themselves. But surely this is artless. The Communist attitude toward race stems from Communism’s positivistic representation of man, which has always had as one of its cardinal tenets the dogma that there are no real differences between people except economic differences. Remove the economic differences and all the others—racial, cultural, social, and moral—disappear. Thus the collectivizing of the economy can be depended on to obliterate the various differences that keep people from being “socialized.”

RW

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Richard M. Weaver

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Mr. Price’s book was originally a thesis done at the University of Florida. Dealing in the statistics and “trends” of social science, it surveys the role of the Negro in recent Florida politics and, with an occasional jab at conservatism, concludes that he is there to stay. Go South to Sorrow is low-grade political journalism. Declamatory, shrill, and containing wild misstatements (e. g., “No child in South Carolina gets the kind of schooling given to youngsters in Michigan,” and “Everyone in Alabama is poorer than everyone in Pennsylvania”), it is a sorry specimen of Negro intellectual leadership. Mr. Kuper’s book centers on the apartheid movement in South Africa and, at the expense of considerable jargon, comes to the conclusion that passive resistance is proving a useful political instrumentality.

If this were all, Mr. Kuper’s book might be the most innocuous of the three. But this is not all, for it is Mr. Kuper who, unwittingly or not, opens the real issue. In his discussion of race relations in South Africa, he notes that Communism is there being progressively redefined in racial terms. That is to say, Communism is coming to be identified in racial integration. The blame for this he tries to shift to the apartheid laws themselves. But surely this is artless. The Communist attitude toward race stems from Communism’s positivistic representation of man, which has always had as one of its cardinal tenets the dogma that there are no real differences between people except economic differences. Remove the economic differences and all the others—racial, cultural, social, and moral—disappear. Thus the collectivizing of the economy can be depended on to obliterate the various differences that keep people from being “socialized.”