Do we Love the Vietnamese More than our Black Brothers? (1967)
Do we Love the Vietnamese More than our Black Brothers?
By Carol Wallace
On July 18th I sat-in at Newark City Hall, middle of the floor; dialogued gently with all comers including rifle-toting cops; got off pretty nicely to a bloodlined paddy wagon; was released at the police station and offered bus fare to go home to my children.
It’s real good to be white. A white woman sitting alone on the floor of Newark City Hall looking quiet and pious gets lots of respect. Maybe I should never do it again.
If you want to know what I think as a pacifist about the Afro-American ”Viet Cong, read the July 28 edition of LIFE Magazine and stare a long, long time at the cover. It could have been my kid lying in a pool of his own blood-except that I’m white, and we don’t live in the ghetto. Joe Bass, Jr. got it the day he was born black, not the day he was shot. He is recovering from his blackness. He will be a target.
All the revolutions I have ever heard of involved property changing hands. The 13 American colonies were taken from an absentee landlord in 1776. All the shooting done in Newark by black people, LIFE says, was shots fired in the air to decoy the police away from the looters. All the shooting done in Newark by the police, LIFE says, was to protect private property to take vengeance on those who stole milk and beer. People were shot in the back of the head for taking food and clothing from the stores that live off them.
Is this revolution? Revolution WOW! What will poor pacifists do? The natives are restless, and the Viet Cong would never invade the CNVA farm. Pacifists keep mum in public on whether it’s right for the NLF to use guns instead of reason, and the NLF will never move to Queens. Pacifists keep our sights trained on the Pentagon, knowing that some people are more violent than others and the Pentagon is the most violent of all. The Viet Cong never called me honkie and could not come down from Harlem and loot the stores on Avenue B.
Man, it’s hard to live right next door to a Viet Cong!
The revolution is here, in America, in every ghetto in the United States, and some pacifists want to say to the black people Shhhhhh, now, don’t do anything destructive-the war in Vietnam comes first. The Viet Cong won’t come to 5 Beekman Street. The Viet Cong only kills American Soldiers who go to Vietnam. The black people are right here, and what if they make a mistake and attack me without realizing I’m on their side? (Thereby losing the best friend who ever told them to cool it at any cost-to themselves.)
The whole point, of course, dear fellow pacifist, is that the black people have been and are nonviolent. They are not killing. They are being killed for taking food and clothing from the stores that cheat them. The black people have traditionally been Christian pacifists living in the midst of ku kluxers, brutal cops, and the constant death of hunger and rat-ridden firetraps. Now black people are messing around with private property, and some pacifists quake at the words ”black power.
We are pacifists because of our conviction that we need to love our brothers, to love all men. But we love the Vietnamese easier than we love our black brothers. We have looked long at pictures of napalm-burned children. Have you seen how many Afro-American children have burn scars on their bodies from exploding gasoline stoves, tenement fires, and the many times they have been left so young to cook for the small babies when mother had to go to work? And the deepest wounds of all are the destruction through contempt of the human heart and mind-and the destruction through segregation of self-respect. No Vietnamese ever walked around with such wounds as some people have whose self-respect has been insulted every day for a hundred years.
Source: Win Aug 1967
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