Unbought and Unbossed

by Shirley Chisholm

The attitudes some members of Congress display toward the rest of humanity, including their constituents, sometimes irritates and sometimes dismays me. They act like aristocrats. It has been a long time since Thomas Jefferson was sworn in as President, then rode his horse back to a boardinghouse and sat down to dinner with the rest of the roomers. Now even

Our repre- sentative democracy is not working because the Congress that is supposed to represent the voters does not respond to their needs. I believe the chief reason is that it is ruled by a small group of old men.

Congress has to have leaders, and it would be paralyzed without its committee system. The trouble lies with the way leaders and chairmen are chosen, particularly the chairmen. They rise by seniority. Nothing else matters — competence, character, past performance, background, or orientation. All a man has to do is stay alive and keep getting reelected, and he will be a power in Washington in twenty or thirty years. He may be from a rural backwater. The odds are that he will be, because the "safe districts" are generally that kind. He may be a reactionary, a bigot, a mediocrity. The odds are that he will be, if nothing worse, a man of narrow out- look and modest endowments, because a man of that caliber is the kind who will be satisfied to stay in the House and do nothing for decades that would risk his chances of reelection.

Maybe, in addition to their other faults, the old men just can't work fast enough. If so, they ought to step back and give the young a chance.

Conflicts of interest should be grounds for impeachment. Banking and Currency Committee members now are allowed to be directors of banks — a shocking state of affairs. The best way to ensure that this cannot happen is to require com- plete financial disclosure by members of Congress. Every- thing they earn and every business or professional connection they keep should be fully public. As things are now, no one can tell to whom members of Congress are responsible, except that it does not often appear to be to the people. Every- one else is represented in Washington by a rich and powerful lobby, it seems. But there is no lobby for the people.

At the price of becoming pseudo-whites, we have been admitted in small numbers as probationary members of American society.

They had thought that the custo- dians of power were going to be persuaded to surrender some of that power out of the simple goodness of their hearts. No way. Frederick Douglass had gone through the same evolu- tion 100 years earlier and ended with the stark conclusion, "Power concedes nothing without a struggle."

American blacks are in the position of a colonial population.

It is necessary for our generation to repudiate Carver and all the lesser-known black leaders who cooperated with the white design to keep their people down. We need none of their kind today.

There is no longer any alternative for black Americans but to unite and fight together for their own advancement as a group. Everything else has been tried, and it has failed.

Thousands like me kept saying, "Let us in a little. Give us a piece of the pie." What hap- pened? Watts, Newark, Hartford. And what was the re- action? We started to hear a new jargon about "the urban crisis" and "law and order" and "crime in the streets."

Shirley Chisholm on policing

Today I am a militant. Basically I agree with what many of the extremist groups are saying — except that their tactics are wrong and too often they have no program. But people had better start to understand that if this country's basic racism is not quickly and completely abolished — or at least controlled — there will be real, full-scale revolution in the streets. I do not want to see that day come. But I think often of what Malcolm once said about freedom: "You get your freedom by letting your enemy know that you'll do anything to get your freedom. Then you'll get it. It's the only way you'll get it."

roughly 2 percent of the people of this country control 80 per- cent of the resources and wealth. One has to be very good at make-believe to think that the remaining 98 percent are con- trolling anything. They are, in fact, being controlled by others. Just because all the hands on the reins of power are white, it does not follow that all whites have their hands on that power. But they feel that they do. This fact is impor- tant, because it reveals to us one of the major functions of racism in this society. Racism keeps people who are being managed from finding out the truth through contact with each other. It serves the insidious purpose of the wars in George Orwell's novel 1984.

One of the functions of racism is to force black Americans to take the simplistic view that all whites are powerful, just because they are white. White Americans generally link up psychically with the statement, "We control." Blacks are supposed to connect psychically with the corollary, "Whites are in control, as we are powerless." Before we make any change in the way this country functions, which is to benefit a small ruling minority, whites and blacks will have to learn that the true statement should be "Some whites control this country and much of the world, for their own purposes."

How can we define a role in this society for the black politician? First, whether he represents an urban or a rural black district or a racially-split one, there is one thing he should never forget — that he is black.

What Evers implies is that disenfranchised people through- out the country must begin to disregard party and racial labels. That is, I believe, extremely important. It will do black Americans absolutely no good to be politically and economically enfranchised into a system that systematically denies human values and destroys the environment that sus- tains life. By affirming and fighting for the values that are life sustaining, black politicians can become the vanguard of the forces that will save this country, if it is to be saved.

From the beginning I felt that there were only two ways to create change for black people in this country — either politically or by open armed revolution. Malcolm defined it succinctly — the ballot or the bullet. Since I believe that human life is uniquely valuable and important, for me the choice had to be the creative use of the ballot. I still believe I was right. I hope America never succeeds in changing my mind.

Most of the poor were poor because they were labeled niggers or greasers or hillbillies or canucks or spics. They belonged to despised, powerless groups. There was no way the antipoverty strategists could see the importance of this factor. They knew about it theoretically, but they had not been there themselves. They didn't know where it was at. If they had gotten together with their "clients" in the poor communities from the start, things might have been different.

hand-picked, middle-class, and "responsible" lead- ers who had more in common with the existing power struc- tures than with the truly deprived.