Wright's penultimate paragraph is simply silly. I personally faced the
McCarran Committee (Senate) in 1952 for the crime of writing a book;
Joe McCarthy in 1953 for the same book and for an article in the
American Sociological Review; HUAC in 1960 for anti-Cold-War
broadcasts on Pacifica and also the San Francisco public TV station. I
was expelled from college permanently before my sixteenth birthday;
was blacklisted from academe for 22 years, 1947-69 (having been
invited to teach at Syracuse and to a post-doc at Stanford based on my
books despite like of formal education), from publishing for 18
(1946-1964) after have had four publishing contracts, with advances
big enough to support my family on, in four years; from salaried print
journalism permanently at the end of World War II, after having
entered it at the top, with my own national byline; from professional
lecturing permanently as well, after having been under the management
of the same outfit that handled Eleanor Roosevelt.
So I know something about repression. But I have, obviously, not
been executed or lynched; never served more than one-day jail
sentences; never beaten by a cop although a participant in hundreds of
demonstrations, strike picket-lines, and you name it.
Friends of mine -- people I can say with confidence who respect
me as I respected them (see correspondence in my SAYING NO TO POWER)
-- have served repeated substantial jail terms, have survived the war
in Spain, have been sunk on ships carrying Lend-Lease to Murmansk;
have been staked out to dry in the sun by the OSS at the end of their
usefulness to it behind the Italian lines in World War II; have been
beaten badly by the cops. I walked the Rosenberg children around Shea
Stadium one day when their parents were awaiting execution.
I repeat: I know what repression is. I am white. The people I
have spoken of in the paragraph above were (some still are; most
aren't any more) white and Black and Japanese-American. That whites
suffered political repression, up to and including execution, is fact.
It is also fact that the police and prosecutorial and judicial
psychology (fundamentally race prejudice) that results in the wry
expression, "driving while Black," extends into every manifestation of
repression, so that the longer sentences, more brutal treatment,
refusal of medical care in jail, being put in the hole, etc., etc.,
etc., manifest themselves in directly political repression as they do
in the indirect repression that has made it possible to extract
super-profits from the lower wages paid to Blacks.
William Mandel
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