"Now we maintain that we cannot be afford to be concerned about 6 percent of the children in this country, black children, who you allow to come into white schools. We have 94 percent who still live in shacks. We are going to be concerned about those 94 percent"
About this Quote
Carmichael is doing something deliberately abrasive here: he refuses the moral satisfaction of integration-as-spectacle and drags the listener back to the arithmetic of American abandonment. The “6 percent” isn’t a statistic offered for nuance; it’s a rhetorical weapon aimed at liberals who treat a handful of Black children in formerly white schools as proof of progress. He frames that fixation as a kind of political vanity project, a photo-op solution that leaves the overwhelming majority untouched.
The line works because it turns “concern” into an accusation. Carmichael isn’t denying the value of desegregation; he’s interrogating what kind of concern America can “afford” when concern becomes an alibi for not paying the real bill. The subtext is economic and structural: if 94 percent “still live in shacks,” then the fight is not just access to white institutions but power over housing, jobs, healthcare, and the distribution of resources. Integration, in this telling, can be a narrow pipeline for a small number of people while the system keeps producing poverty at scale.
Context matters: Carmichael is speaking out of the mid-1960s turn from civil-rights liberalism to Black Power politics, a moment when patience with symbolic wins was collapsing under the weight of Northern segregation, Southern backlash, and persistent deprivation. His blunt “you allow” also punctures the paternalism embedded in integration debates: rights aren’t supposed to be permissions granted by white gatekeepers. The provocation is the point; it forces a choice between celebrating access and dismantling the conditions that make access exceptional.
The line works because it turns “concern” into an accusation. Carmichael isn’t denying the value of desegregation; he’s interrogating what kind of concern America can “afford” when concern becomes an alibi for not paying the real bill. The subtext is economic and structural: if 94 percent “still live in shacks,” then the fight is not just access to white institutions but power over housing, jobs, healthcare, and the distribution of resources. Integration, in this telling, can be a narrow pipeline for a small number of people while the system keeps producing poverty at scale.
Context matters: Carmichael is speaking out of the mid-1960s turn from civil-rights liberalism to Black Power politics, a moment when patience with symbolic wins was collapsing under the weight of Northern segregation, Southern backlash, and persistent deprivation. His blunt “you allow” also punctures the paternalism embedded in integration debates: rights aren’t supposed to be permissions granted by white gatekeepers. The provocation is the point; it forces a choice between celebrating access and dismantling the conditions that make access exceptional.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
|---|
More Quotes by Stokely
Add to List
