Race in Ecotopia: Apartheid or Equality? PDF

RACE IN ECOTOPIA: APARTHEID OR EQUALITY? San Francisco, May 29. There are surprisingly few dark-skinned faces on San Francisco streets, and I have now learned why. After Independence, the principle of secession became a lively factor in Ecotopian political life. Thomas Jefferson and other early Amer...

RACE IN ECOTOPIA: APARTHEID OR EQUALITY? San Francisco, May 29. There are surprisingly few dark-skinned faces on San Francisco streets, and I have now learned why. After Independence, the principle of secession became a lively factor in Ecotopian political life. Thomas Jefferson and other early American patriots were quoted in its defense. The black population, whose economic deprivation under white control had made it increasingly nationalist and separatist even before Independence, apparently joined in the general exultation when the great break with Washington came. But in the months following, black separatist parties grew up to dominate the ghettoes of Oakland and San Francisco---having been strangled by the white suburbs earlier, the black population now wanted to control their own territory. After a long and bitter political struggle, the black areas (and also Chinatown in San Francisco) were officially designated as city-states within Ecotopia. They had their own city governments, levied the usual taxes, had their own police and courts, their own industries, and owned farms in the nearby countryside. In fact they possessed all the attributes of tiny independent countries---even including the issuance of postage stamps and currency---except for the carrying on of foreign relations. This situation, though it satisfies many blacks, seems to others inherently unstable, and they argue for full independence as the only long-range solution. One scheme, which is currently being debated, would relocate the entire black population in a new territory including Monterey Bay and the Salinas Valley, which would provide abundant agricultural resources and direct access to the Pacific sea lanes. The political and economic problems posed are monstrous, of course, but such things were carried out in Eastern Europe after World War II. uncomfortable irony for Americans. We look with horror on the apartheid society of South Africa, where the dominant white minority has enforced rigid segregation in every aspect of life. In Ecotopia, the black minority has itself enforced a similar segregation---though of course it makes some difference that this was voluntary whereas that of the Africans was forced upon them by the whites. But this admission that the races cannot live in harmony is surely one of the most disheartening developments in all of Ecotopia, and it clouds the future of our nation as well. Its example bodes ill for our own great metropolitan areas, whose black center cities are themselves already rife with talk of secession.