Greff Fabrics Blues, 1971 (1)

By late August 1971 there wasn't much of a 1960s New Left left in New York City. Most of the late 1960s white New Left student activists and yippies had either gone underground, moved out of Manhattan to cities with larger white youth ghettos like Cambridge, Massachusetts or Berkeley, California or to the country in places like Maine, Vermont and New Mexico, had gotten off-campus 9-to-5 straight jobs or alternative jobs, or had returned to U.S. university campuses to resume their professional training for yuppie job slots within the "real world" of work or within the academic world of imperialist Amerika by the mid-1970s.

The scene on the beaches on Long Island like Long Beach didn't look much different than it had looked in the summers of the early 1960s, except for the fact that the teenage white guys and college student white guys now had longer hair than they had had in the pre-Beatles period of the 1960s; and some of the teenage and college student white guys now sometimes smoked pot and shared joints outside on the beach.

The teenage and college student white suburban women on the beach in their bathing suits seemed not much different than their counterparts had been in the early 1960s; and still seemed content to mostly just lie next to each other on blankets getting suntans and relaxing under the sun for a few hours, in-between brief intervals of swimming in the ocean and letting the men on the beach notice how they each looked in their bathing suits that summer.

But even during August 1970 of the previous year, only a few months after the post-Kent State/post-Jackson State campus upheavals in the United States, the suburban beach scene at Long Beach on Long Island probably still looked similar to how it had looked in August 1960 and failed to reflect the political crisis that the U.S. was in at that time.

Beaches on Long Island are probably the last place that the change in mass consciousness would be reflected, unless, of course, a change in local demographics and ethnic group or racial group numbers on the beach created some kind of inter-group racial or ethnic tensions on a particular beach. But even when the racial or ethnic background of the people who go to a particular beach on Long Island changes dramatically over a decade, what usually just seems to happen on these beaches is that many of the whites who used to go to a particular beach seem to end up finding another beach to go to swim at or sit on blankets at, if they're the type of white beachgoers who always want to be surrounded by a "white majority" at the beach.

Kind of crazy response, perhaps. But given the level of interpersonal racism, institutional racism and racial/ethnic tensions and divisions that have been built into U.S. capitalist society and its socializing process historically by the white racist U.S. white corporate power structure and its corporate media propaganda machine, perhaps not too surprising.