In his 1967 book,\u00a0The Temper of Our Time<\/span>, Eric Hoffer took on the question of race relations, as they’d be called today, or “The Negro Revolution” as he called it then. \u00a0There are at least two new ideas and several interesting sentences in the essay, but I’ll take as my text his description of how the white unionized longshoreman outside the South<\/em> saw matters:<\/p>\n

The simple fact is that the people I have lived and worked with all my life, who make up about 60 percent of the population outside the South, have not the least feeling of guilt toward the Negro. \u00a0The majority of us started to work for a living in our teens, and we have been poor all our lives. \u00a0Most of us had only a rudimentary education. \u00a0Our white skin brought us no privileges and no favors. \u00a0For more that twenty years I worked in the fields of California with Negroes, and now and then for Negro contractors. \u00a0On the San Francisco waterfront, while I spent the next twenty years, there are as many black longshoremen as white. \u00a0My kind of people does not feel that the world owes us anything, or that we owe anybody – white, black, or yellow – a damn thing. \u00a0We believe that the Negro should have every right we have: the right to vote, the right to join any union open to us, the right to live, work, study, and play anywhere he pleases. But he can have no special claims on us, and no valid grievances against us. \u00a0He has certainly not done our work for us. \u00a0Our hands are more gnarled and workbroken than his, and our faces more lined and worn. \u00a0A hundred Baldwins could not convince me that the Negro longshoremen who come every morning to our hiring hall shouting, joshing, eating, and drinking are haunted by bad dreams and memories of miserable childhoods, that they feel deprived, disabled, degraded, oppressed, and humiliated. \u00a0The drawn faces in the hall, the brooding backs, and the sullen, hunched figures are not those of Negroes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The South has a special burden to bear (although to what extent it still does is another question), but for most of white America outside the South, I think this fairly sums up the attitude, if not universally the work experience. \u00a0And I think it’s about right. \u00a0People should be able to pursue their life’s path without laboring under legal handicaps because of their race. \u00a0I have no doubt that it accurately reflects Hoffer’s own inclinations, and that of his brother dockworkers in mid-1960s San Francisco. \u00a0They worked hard, and didn’t create or perpetuate the hardships that blacks had suffered.<\/p>\n

But if Hoffer understands that the black man’s tragedy is that he can’t be an individual\u00a0without being seen as black first, he seems to miss who’s doing the seeing. \u00a0Hoffer’s a union guy through and through, but the union movement in the North gained great strength\u00a0in response to the influx of black workers during the Great Migration, especially during the Depression, and worked hard to deny blacks the benefits of union membership. \u00a0Hoffer doesn’t have to answer\u00a0for<\/em> that behavior, but he should have at least acknowledged that it existed, and the effects it had on blacks outside the South.<\/p>\n

The more relevant question is what it does for blacks. \u00a0Hoffer’s main point, which I’ll examine in greater length in another post, was the what blacks needed wasn’t cheap, easy, flashy political victories, but community institutions that would give him pride, security, and and self-respect.
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