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Respect will also come, as Jackson and many of his peers among the new black leaders see it, when the slowly expanding middle class in black communities commits itself more completely to racial progress rather than self-service. "The black doctor should study medicine in order to improve public health and not just to secure personal wealth," warns Jackson. "The black lawyer should study law to distribute justice, not just to secure a judgeship. The black teacher should teach to spread information and not want to tear the school down for a $10 raise."
Such a change would not erase racism overnight, but today's restive blacks insist that racism is a white, not a black problem. "When blacks are unemployed, they are considered lazy and apathetic," observes Jackson. "When whites are unemployed, it's considered a depression. That's racism. And this pink-skin worship is pathological. It must be dealt with by psychotherapists and not by politicians."
If this is no prescription to remedy the nation's racial ills, it does reflect the growing disillusionment of many of the nation's most concerned and thoughtful blacks with the often professed, but too rarely fulfilled, good intentions of white leaders and white institutions. At a time when blacks feel they are being further repressed, rather than liberated, they are turning inward, but this does not dismay them. In Jesse Jackson's apt summation: "There is still reason for optimism. But it is not based upon what the white man is going to do. It is based upon what we are going to do—and upon what we are going to make the Man do."