PLAIN TALK ABOUT HATRED AND VIOLENCE by John W. Gardner (Reader’s Digest, 1968)

This article, written during the worst part of the 1960s racial tensions, is very interesting to read today. I could not find it online in text format (it was entered in the Congressional Record)  so I am publishing it here.

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Most white people are neither haters nor practitioners of violence. Nor are most Negroes. The majority of each race earnestly wishes that constructive, non-violent solutions could be found to the racial problems that rack—and may yet wreck—the nation.

But there are whites that hate, and whites who advocate violence. There are Negroes who do the same. And, unfortunately, the whites and Negroes who do not hate and destroy too often quietly tolerate those who do.

Those who hate and those who resort to violence—whether they are white or black— cannot resolve the problems that divide this nation. They can only intensify the senseless spasms of emotion and savage action.

There are many levels at which we must seek solutions to the problems which are tearing the nation apart. We must attack hard-core poverty with renewed vigor— through education, job-training, employment, housing and other measures. We must attack discrimination in every form. We must take steps to ensure civil order.

But, at the same time that we are working on such basic problems, we must cope with the upward spiral of mutual fear and corrosive hostility between white and Negro communities.

Hatred and violence used to be chiefly the stock-in-trade of the white racist. Then they became the stock-in-trade of the Negro extremist. Both justified their malevolence with cogent arguments.

But today there is a curious contrast between the two. Negro hatred of whites is often expressed openly. It is frankly defended and widely discussed. In contrast, white hatred of Negroes has gone underground. It is rarely discussed publicly, rarely debated candidly. Indeed, when the President's Commission on Civil Disorders spoke of it openly, many people thought the authors of the report had done an unseemly thing.

Yet the white hatred is there. And everyone who reads this article knows it. The long tradition of white brutality and mistreatment of the Negro has diminished but has not come to an end.

It still excludes Negroes from white neighborhoods, and bars them from many job opportunities. No Negro reaches adulthood without having been through many experiences with whites that bruise his self-respect and diminish his confidence. That is hard for him to understand, living as he does in a society that bases its moral claims on the worth and dignity of the individual.

Such attitudes on the part of whites must come to an end if this nation is to survive as a free society. Each one who adds his bit to the storm of hatred does his share to move us toward a final reckoning that no free American will like.

Negro extremists who advocate violence assert that non-violence did not work. It is untrue. The greatest gains for the American Negro came in response to the non-violent campaigns of Martin Luther King, Jr., and (before it turned violent) the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

It is the fashion now to belittle those gains, but they were great and undeniable. They were registered in historic civil-rights legislation and even more emphatically in social practice. Compare Negro voting patterns today with those prevailing as little as three years ago; or southern school desegregation today with practices of four years ago; or patterns of restaurant and hotel desegregation over the same period; or employment opportunities now and then.

The gains are not enough. They cannot satisfy our conscience. But they were substantial. And they came in response to non-violence.

The violent tactics of the past two years have brought nothing but deepened hostility between the two races and a slowing down of progress in the necessary drive toward social justice.

Many white liberals have now allied themselves with the Negro extremists in the sanctioning of violence. They speak approvingly of past riots as having “dramatized” the problem. They never speak of the negative consequences of the riots, but everyone who observed the session of Congress that followed the riots of 1967 knows that the negative reactions were reality, and diminished the possibility of constructive solutions.

Nor do those who condone violence ever speak of the legacy of bitterness and division that will be left by increasingly harsh outbursts of destructive interaction. What good will it do to dramatize the problem if, in the process, hatreds burn themselves so deep that the wounds permanently cripple our society? Nor do those who condone violence ever face up to the likelihood that the paroxysms of public disorder will lead ultimately to authoritarian countermeasures.

One of the difficulties in halting the interplay of fear and violence is the tendency toward indiscriminate indictment of one race or the Other. One man killed Martin Luther King—and Stokely Carmichael indicts the whole white race. A small minority of Negroes loot and burn, and many whites indict the whole Negro race.

Where will it lead? Negro extremists shout slogans of hate. White racists whisper their rage. Each justifies himself by pointing to acts of members of the other race. Hatred triggers violence, violence stirs further hatred, savage acts bring savage responses, hostility begets hostility, and the storm rages on. At some point, the terrifying interplay must have an end.

We must break through the terrible symmetry of action and reaction, assault and counterassault, hatred and responsive hatred. And the only way to do that is to ask the moderates on each side to cope with the haters and the doers of violence within their own ranks.

There is no way for the Negro moderate to curb the white extremist, or the white moderate to curb the Negro extremist. If they try, they just give further impetus to the interplay of hostility. That is why moderate Whites must curb the haters within their own ranks, and moderate Negroes must curb their own extremists.

To date, the moderates—both Negro and white—have been all too silent. It was predictable. Moderates are alike, whatever their race. They don't want to become involved. They don't want to appear controversial. They don't like trouble.

But, increasingly, the extremists of both races are giving them trouble, whether they like it or not. And it will get worse before it gets better. It's time for the moderates to speak up and assert their strength.

This “revolt of the moderates” must go on day in and day out—in offices, factories, homes and clubs. Those who promote hatred must be called to account. Those who commit or condone destructive acts must feel the full weight of disapproval by their friends and neighbors. Each contributes his little bit to the destruction of this society.

In a curious way, the whites who hate and destroy and the Negroes who hate and destroy are allies moving the rest of us toward a terrible climax. Martin Luther King understood that, and fought against both all his life, by word and deed. And so must all of us who care about the future of this society.