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365 “We Can Run But We Can’t Hide” appeared in the winter 1993 issue of the Save Our Sons and Daughters Newsletter. We Can Run ButWe Can’t Hide Detroiters have been living so long by the slogan “They won’t let us” that we now have two generations who blame everything on “the system” or “the man” and don’t believe that we can do anything ourselves. We can only see the external contradictions and we forget that as human beings what we do depends upon both external and internal contradictions. Throughout our history in this country African Americans in particular have had to endure both class and race oppression. But until the civil rights period thirty years ago we were clear that we couldn’t expect any help from the external enemy. Therefore, any change for the better had to come from mobilizing our inner selves to struggle and to overcome. Today we still face external contradictions and enemies, but our main contradictions and enemies are internal and we don’t know how to struggle against them. So when all around us blacks are robbing and killing, all we can say is, “Child, everything has gotten out of hand. I just don’t know what we’re going to do.” What we’re saying in essence is that if a white person or a person of another ethnic group disrespects or beats or kills an African American, we know what to do. Within an hour we’re out there, organized to protest, march, fight back. But when an African American does the same thing to another African American, we’re immobilized. All we can say is, “It’s crazy.” That is because we have a set of principles for how the external enemy should conduct itself. But we have not developed a set of principles for ourselves. So in our neighborhoods African Americans kill, rob, and terrorize one another and we are afraid to get involved. “Child, they might burn up my house,” we say. The fear we now have of one another is like that we used to have of the white man. We were able to summon up the courage to stand up against the external enemy. We sent our little children to schools from which we had been excluded. We sat in at “his” lunch counters and “his” libraries. But today we escort or drive our children to “our” schools to protect them from African American terrorists. And many of us shop in the suburbs because we feel safer there and dream of making enough money so that we can move there to live. In 1993 we have to face up to some very painful realities that we wish we could keep from other ethnic groups and that we are ashamed to face ourselves. The reality is not only that our young people are killing and terrorizing each other. Ward.indb 365 12/21/10 9:28 AM Part IV 366 The reality is also that we are now more afraid of one another than we are of white people. The reality is also that we are afraid to admit and struggle against our own weaknesses. We don’t get together to shut down the crack house next door because we are afraid that one of our own children is running it. We don’t get involved in stopping our youth from rolling and robbing and killing one another because it could be one of our own children who is doing the rolling, robbing, and killing, and some of us are even sharing in the loot. Our schools are in such turmoil that the children who want to learn can’t even study and our children take guns to schools because we haven’t summoned up the courage to challenge and transform the youth who are doing the terrorizing. Who do we expect to bring about the changes in our schools and in our neighborhoods that we so desperately need? Who are we waiting for to change our families, our youth, our communities, and our schools from the way they are now to the way they have to be if we and our children are to have a future? Until we face and overcome our internal contradictions, the enemy within, we can’t even face, let alone overcome, our external enemies. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, we were so confident of ourselves that we used to tell whites, “You can run but you...

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