LIBERATION, NOT LIBERTARIANISM

To the Editors of the Crimson:

Mark Frazier's editorial on the Herrnstein controversy "Hypocrisy in SDS" would be no more than a petulant exercise in name-calling if it did not disguise a particularly pernicious argument on American social policy.

According to Mark, racism is "a belief that skin colors really are important." His assertion, as it stands, is meaningless. Are doctors who advise sickle-cell anemia tests to more black patients than white patients racist? Are geneticists who advise light-skinned people to wear protective clothing in warm, humid climates racist? Are historians who point to the exploitation and oppression of blacks, Indians and Chicanos racist? Should they deny reality? Should they suggest that blacks were targets of discrimination on a geographical basis, a metaphysical basis, a divine command? Such questions make Mark's definition look ridiculous, but, alas, these are not the questions to which Mark alludes.

The definition is formulated to disguise a belief that social assistance on the basis of race is, in fact, racist. That is, it would be Mark's position, apparently, that a scholarship fund established for blacks is racist because it helps only blacks. There should be programs only for the improvement of humanity; Martin Luther King becomes the counterpart of Robert Welch and George Lincoln Rockwell.

Such an argument is so deficient as to be insulting: deficient in its implicit analysis of history, economics, sociology, and social philosophy; Insulting in its fear to declare itself fully as the advocate of an end to all programs of assistance designed to help right three centuries' wrongs.

Such programs are, indeed, deficient and may be frequently criticized on their own terms for not doing enough. However, human liberation requires the liberation of each individual from material insecurity. Every man and woman must be able to eat, work, clothe himself, and find suitable shelter before spiritual liberation becomes meaningful. The racial minorities did not render themselves poor. If their material well-being must be assured. If Mark advocates human liberation let him join the fight against injustice as it has been perpetrated against the minorities. He should not resort to libertarian abstractions and perversions of humanitarianism for the sake of calumniating SDS. Peter Shane '74