Response to McNeal

McNeal, your point about freedom of choice is the tension in the set of essays Alice Walker published around that post-civil rights movement time (see In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens). She praises the both the hard-won freedom of blacks to live where they want to and do what they want to do and then she laments their lack of continued radicalism. Of course, the choice to be complacent after you get yours is part of the prize of the CRM. I think Walker was concerned and disappointed that so many chose extreme short-term self-interest over sustained group action. Part of the consequence of that choice in the late Sixties and Seventies is what led to this culture of abdication (I’ll post more on that later) that we see today. Recently however, blacks who really don’t have to get involved, middle and upper-class scholars and businesspeople, are deciding to get back into the fray for black people they don’t know and don’t share living space with. The idea of collectivity has returned. In my view, that’s a good thing.