In the last chapter of his definitive work, Black Reconstruction, W.E.B. Du Bois called these false historical beliefs “propaganda,” which he traced to certain Columbia University faculty such as John W. Burgess and William A. Dunning.³ This ideological/propagandist racist history writing became a battleground for the hearts and minds of both White and Black America. The hallowed ground of Gettysburg, Bull Run, Vicksburg, and other Civil War battlefields became institutionalized in the American Historical Association (AHA) through the rapprochement between its northern and southern White “founders,” many of whom either had fought in the war or had strong memories of it.⁴ By the 1884 founding of the AHA, most White southerners agreed that the war closed a chapter in southern history and, with the “betrayal of the Negro,”⁵ set the stage for a quid pro quo with northerners based on the understanding that, in the words of Virginia Senator John W. Daniel, “The instinct of race integrity is the most glorious, as it is the predominant, characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon race; the sections (North and South) have it in common.”⁶

This sentiment expressed the reunion, reaction, and reconciliation of White America based on the ideology of racism and exploitation of the Black peasant and working classes.⁷ Reunion and the South’s reaction to Black freedom were in part a byproduct of the process underlying the Union military victory.⁸ The struggle over a certain type of freedom for the freed people intensified White supremacy in popular culture⁹ and also in scholarly/educational circles. Important members of the AHA led this “pouring” of the cement.¹⁰ John Burgess noted that “a black skin means membership in a race of men which has never of itself succeeded in subjecting passion to reason and therefore [has] have never created any civilization of any kind.” William A. Dunning observed that Blacks “had no pride of race and no aspiration or ideals save to be like the whites.” Prominent AHA member Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer remarked that northerners should support southern home rule and creation of the shadow of slavery with Jim Crow, peonage, and the chain gang because naïve northerners “have never seen a nigger except Fred Douglass.” Even Du Bois’s Harvard mentor, Albert Bushnell Hart, argued:

The negroes as a people have less self-control, are less affected by ultimate advantages, are less controlled by family ties and standards of morality, than the average even of those poor white people, immigrants or natives, who have the poorest chance…. Race measured by race, the Negro is inferior, and his past history in Africa, and in America leads to the belief that he will remain inferior.

However virulently racist the above quotes are, they were driven by the way many historians viewed the salient events of American Slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction. Racist historiography of these events began with the 1918 publication of American Negro Slavery by U.B. Phillips and continued with his 1929 work, Life and Labor in the Old South. The contemporary critic, David Novick, notes that Phillips, in his own words, saw the slaves as innately “submissive,” “light-hearted,” “amiable,” “ingratiating,” and “imitative.” Because Phillips unearthed primary documents of plantation records coupled with his racist assumptions, his interpretation of these documents went unchallenged. Subsequent historians solidified this racist view; for example, Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry Steele Commager, in their 1930 book The Growth of the American Republic, included the following remarks about slavery:

Sambo, whose wrongs moved the abolitionists to wrath and tears… suffered less than any other class in the South from its “peculiar institution.” The majority of the slaves were apparently happy…. There was much to be said for slavery as a transition from barbarism to civilization….¹¹

The majority of the slaves were adequately fed, well cared for…. Although brought to America by force, the incurably optimistic negro soon became attached to the country and devoted to his “white folks.”¹²

We characterize these collective writings as defining the White Supremacist School of historical interpretation. The three major points of this school’s view are as follows: 1) slavery was a positive development for Blacks; 2) the Civil War was a glorious and honorable event concerning “states’ rights” and was not about slavery; 3) Reconstruction, defined in Claude Bowers’ 1929 book The Tragic Era, was a god-forsaken attempt to humiliate the civilized White South by putting it under the heels of a barbarous Black South. To prevent this ridiculous folly, the Ku Klux Klan appeared and “Redeemed” the South and therefore created the “Birth of a [racist and new American] Nation.”¹³

This denigration of the Black experience was aggressively challenged by W.E.B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson. Refuting the White supremacists’ views of Africa, Du Bois, in 1915, published The Negro and Woodson published The African Background Outlined.¹⁴ These early works conveyed an inspirational view of the African past. With these two Black titans of scholarship, there developed under Woodson’s leadership what we call the Negro History School of historical interpretation. This school emphasizes the “contributions” that Blacks have made to the “westward movement” of the American saga. However, Woodson strongly felt that the “struggle for the hearts and minds of Black folk” and, incidentally, of White folk, depended on the ability to scientifically reject racist history by challenging its falsehoods via objective, scholarly, and informative writing about Blacks and their contributions. His definitive 1933 work, The Mis-Education of the Negro,¹⁵ was published with this object in mind. Over the next sixty years, there appeared two other “schools” to challenge the White supremacist historians. One was the Black History School which, driven by its criticism of America, called for indicting its racist icons for “crimes against Black humanity.”¹⁶ Within this school, we will examine the Black Women’s History School. Last, we analyze the Marxist History School which uses dialectical materialism to clarify the trajectory of racism and class oppression in American history. The glue that held these “schools” together was the understanding, in the words of Herbert Aptheker, that “History’s potency is mighty. The oppressed need it for identity and inspiration; [and the] oppressor for justification, rationalization, and legitimacy. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the history writing on the American Negro people.”¹⁷

We will examine these three schools which we have termed the Black Intellectual Resistance Movement (BIRM) by focusing on 1) the historical philosophy of Carter G. Woodson, father of Negro History School (who became prominent and accepted the challenge put forth by Langston Hughes’s “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”); 2) the Black History School and its sub-fields, Black Women’s History School and the Afro-Centrist School – the latter of which became prominent with its responses to Stanley’s Elkins’ Sambo Thesis, produced the book The Secret Relations Between Blacks and Jews,¹⁸ and criticized William Styron’s racist novel The Confessions of Nat Turner;¹⁹ and 3) the Marxist History School with its critique of U.B. Phillips, its re-interpretation of Elkins’ Sambo Thesis, and its criticism of the Afrocentrists. In conclusion, we will explain how the development of Black Studies within the “academy” helped to institutionalize the Black Intellectual Resistance Movement.

The Negro History School

Dr. Carter G. Woodson (Harvard Ph.D.) initiated his assault on the White supremacist school with his 1916 launching of the Journal of Negro History and the Negro History Bulletin. The Journal was meant for scholars and the Bulletin for lay people, including high school and undergraduate students. Woodson had set up an institutional base for these periodicals in 1915 by founding the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. In 1926 he initiated the national campaign to celebrate Black history through annual Negro History Week observances. He purposely chose the second week in February between the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. He explained that the Association’s aim in publicizing the records, contributions, and accomplishments of Black people “is not spectacular propaganda or fire-eating agitation. Nothing can be accomplished in such fashion …. The aim of this organization is to set forth facts in scientific form; facts properly set forth will tell their own story.”²⁰

However, Woodson did depart from this approach in 1933 with his book, The Mis-Education of the Negro, which was a diatribe against the college-educated strata of the Black bourgeoisie institutionalized in “Negro” colleges and universities. Woodson accused this select social class of almost embracing the White higher education curriculum instead of curricula consonant with his “Negro History School” approach. By doing this, the Black bourgeoisie was not preparing the younger educated generation for “race leadership.” Woodson strongly felt that White historiography, even when taught in most Black educational institutions,

further assured [the white man] of his superiority and if the Negro could be made to feel that he had always been a failure and that the subjection of his will to some other race is necessary, the freedman, then, would still be a slave. If you can control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his action…. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one. ²¹

W.E.B Du Bois supported Woodson on this issue and opened up the pages of the Crisis for Woodson’s platform.²² A companion group of scholars who helped popularize the contribution approach to Negro History was the “organic intellectuals” known as “street scholars.”²³ These street scholars did not work in colleges or universities and were un-credentialed, but they wrote and published their own history of Black contributions. First and foremost among them was J.A. Rogers. His work, From Superman to Man and 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro, ²⁴ is still being quoted and used today.

Essentially, Woodson’s “Negro” history approach emphasized Black contributions to the American saga embodied in Langston Hughes’ poem “I, Too, Sing America” or Benjamin Quarles’ observation that Negro history “should be a bridge to intergroup harmony,”²⁵

The Black History School

In contrast to Woodson, W.E.B. Du Bois, the “Father of Black History,” became a career critic of America and leaned in the direction of indicting its leaders for high crimes against Black humanity, as when he signed the U.N. petition, “We Charge Genocide: The Crimes of Government Against the Negro People.”²⁶ Vincent Harding noted of Du Bois’s criticism: “Du Bois said that Blacks were like [train] passengers who had spent all of their time and energies protesting while trying to prove to their fellow passengers and to the conductor that they had a right to be on the American train. Indeed, he said that we had given so much of our attention to this task that we had never bothered to ask about the train’s destination.”²⁷ Finally, said Du Bois, after a few protesters had been seated and some of the immediate attacks had died down, some Black passengers began to ask, “Where, by the way, is this train going?” Harding answers Du Bois’s query by stating that no one really knew the train’s destination and that the protestors “wondered if we really wanted to go, especially if our destination would always be determined by the people who had fought for centuries to keep us off, or confined to the Negro car.”²⁸

The Black History approach is always questioning which direction America is heading and whether Black folk should follow. Du Bois, a Black titan of BIRM, was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, received his B.A. from Fisk University, and became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University. Du Bois understood the class question within African American social relations and the political economy of racism. His dissertation at Harvard was on the “Suppression of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade,” and his first major work after this dissertation was his book The Philadelphia Negro. This 1899 work established Du Bois as having great empathy for the Black proletariat in the urban crucible. Soon after this publication, Du Bois established and defined the idea of Black History “engaged scholars” as “public activist scholars” by his involvement in the Niagara Movement and the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1908. Both organizations fought racism and political oppression by public displays of unity against racist acts and against Jim Crow laws. The Black Intellectual Resistance Movement took on the important cultural dimension when the NAACP appointed Du Bois as editor of its magazine, The Crisis.

As editor, Du Bois used the power of the third estate to harangue racist politicians and their unjust laws, but he also created a literary section which printed the “gifts of Black folk” in song, poetry, art, and music. Du Bois’s aim was to create visibility for the works of young Black intellectuals as outlined in his 1903 work Souls of Black Folk.²⁹ However, his masterpiece of BIRM was his 1935 book, Black Reconstruction. Du Bois used a quasi-class analysis for the failure of Reconstruction and in the book’s final chapter, “The Propaganda of History,” leveled a scathing attack on the historiography of the White Supremacist School. Du Bois was a close friend and, at one time, office-mate of the Marxist historian, Herbert Aptheker. Out of this relationship Du Bois solidified his thinking on the class question for Black America and the political usage of history. The contemporary scholar of Black historians, Professor Earl R. Thorp, observed that Du Bois “shifted to a position where he felt it advisable consciously to forge propaganda himself out of historical and sociological facts … [,arguing that] ‘history is too often what we want it to be and what we are determined men shall believe rather than a grim record of what has taken place in the past.’”³⁰

In his 1965 book, The World and Africa,³¹ Du Bois argued that the degradation of Black labor began with the discovery of the New World:

With this new world came fatally the African slave trade and Negro slavery in the Americas. There were new cruelties, new hatreds of human beings, and new degradations of human labor. The temptation to degrade human labor was made vaster and deeper by the incredible accumulation of wealth based on slave labor, by the boundless growth of greed…. ³²

Du Bois became one of the first scholars to tie race to class because of the social relations of colonial imperialism. White colonial imperialism defined “The word ‘Negro’… used [it] for the first time in the world’s history to tie color to race and Blackness to slavery and degradation. The white race was pictured as ‘pure’ and superior; the black race as dirty, stupid, and inevitably, inferior…”³³ Du Bois’s activism led to a collision with the more conservative NAACP over school integration in 1933. Du Bois argued that the NAACP should put more time and money into upgrading Black schools, Black curriculum, and Black teachers. This clash would lead to Du Bois being dismissed from the NAACP.

Du Bois had a long and distinguished career. He organized the first and subsequent meetings of the Pan African Congress which was important as a spark for African liberation (many of Africa’s young leaders attended the Fifth PAC in Manchester, England in 1944).³⁴ Because he was both a race man and a class man, Du Bois can also be placed in the Marxist history school. In the fading years of his life, Du Bois declared himself a Communist. His career went from being a Negro historian and integrationist, to being a Pan Africanist activist, to being a Black historian, to becoming a Marxist intellectual. His concern for race and class became the dialectics of his intellectual journey.

The Black History School’s scholarship exploded in the 1960s with the publication of Julius Lester’s Look Out Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama!³⁵ The book was both a Black history lesson on racist America and a contemporary analysis and condemnation of the doomed federal effort to support and protect the Civil Rights Movement and its leaders. The critical condemnation in the book addressed the inability of the FBI to protect civil rights workers from Klan brutalities. The FBI claimed that federalism prevented them from usurping the authority of racist state officials. Following Lester’s book, a number of later scholars used the word “Black” to denote their “school’s” perspective, e.g. Quintard Taylor, Black Seattle; Joe Trotter, Black Milwaukee; John Blassingame, Black New Orleans; and Mary Frances Berry, Black Resistance/White Law.³⁶

The Black Women’s History School

Even though Black women were in the vanguard of the Civil Rights Movement, from the Montgomery Bus Boycott (Rosa Parks and Jo Ann Robinson) to Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Lester did not emphasize their importance. This lacuna had to await the arrival of Black Women historians, including both memoirists and academics.³⁷ The density and breath of their historical writings justify placing them in a completely singular Black Women’s Historical School (BWHS). Because these Black women historians and writers focus on the triple oppression of race, class, and gender, their historiography cuts across the perspectives of the other “schools.”

Over the last half century, Black women historians have called attention to the neglect and mistreatment of Black women in both Black Studies and Women’s Studies. As scholars have repeatedly demonstrated, African American women faced barriers that prevented them from living as freely or as fully as they may have wanted. These constraints included the “double burden” of racism and sexism as Black women have shouldered the private responsibilities of home along with the public needs of their community. This burden also included the disabling factor of class which systematically impacted their life choices, especially in work and education.

The study of black women has not only shattered the consensus vision that dominated historical writing, but has also generated a reappraisal of the enduring struggle by African Americans for human rights. From the 1890s though the first half of the 20th century, only a handful of Black women engaged in the writing of history. These self-taught “historians without portfolio” published historical scholarship and conducted rigorous historical research despite a lack of formal training.³⁸ Among them was Drusilla Dunjee Houston (1876-1941), the first African American to author a multi-volume study of ancient Africa. Though not a college graduate, “street scholar” Houston’s keen intellect encouraged a life-long passion for the study of African culture. Prior to the Civil Rights Movement, Black women historians were compelled to provide “evidence” of their credentials in order to prove their legitimacy among both Black and White American scholars. The effort to gain these credentials was a monumental task for Black women who had even less access to degree-granting institutions than African American men or white women. The 20th century was well underway before Black female historians entered the historical profession. This was in part due to professionalization standards that since inception were white and overwhelmingly concerned with issues important to men. Black women’s intimate understanding of a history that had misrepresented and discriminated against them also made it difficult for even the most educated among them to escape the prevailing race- and gender-based assumptions that dominated the profession.³⁹

Nevertheless, several Black women earned doctoral degrees prior to the Civil Rights Movement. In 1925, Anna Julia Cooper earned a doctorate in Latin at the Sorbonne in Paris. During World War II, three African American women earned doctorates. In 1940, Marion Thompson Wright earned a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University. Having written and published extensively on early 20^th-century efforts at disarmament, Merze Tate earned a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University and became a History professor at Howard University. In 1946, Helen Edmonds earned a doctorate in History from Ohio State University. While focusing on the Black experience in her dissertation, The Negro and Fusion Politics in North Carolina, Edmonds chose not to specialize in Black history, but to include it as an integral part of American history.⁴⁰

The choice to pursue research on non-Black topics did not prevent Black female historians from confronting a different set of barriers in earning their degrees, securing jobs, receiving promotions, and gaining respect in academe. However, the formal educational success of this group demonstrates how a few Black women circumvented these limitations.⁴¹ The inaccessibility of the historical profession was strongly tied to the concept of objectivity, which Blacks were thought incapable of achieving. With writings on women so dominated by scientific racism and sexism during the early 20th century, race women who dared set the record straight about the lives of Black women were judged as partisan, subjective, and intuitive – all qualities antithetical to writing “real” history.⁴² In turn, the dilemma before many black women in this early period was what to do with a professional training in which sexism and racism defined their career options. Nearly a half-century would pass before a new generation of black women would prove themselves willing to take on these challenges.

As Pero Dagbovie notes, the 1980s were a fruitful decade in the maturation of African American women’s historiography. The presence of Black female historians at predominantly White institutions as professors and program directors is testimony to the change within academe over the last half-century. During these years African American women’s history built upon key historical studies and developed a professional network with the founding of the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH) in 1979. The ABWH was inspired by Carter G. Woodson’s Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (today called Association for the Study of African American Life and History). As Woodson’s association underwent a name change during the civil rights era,⁴³ a generation of black women scholars emerged from the civil rights movement to re-envision a history that challenged prevailing assumptions about black women’s place in American society and culture while including race and gender in theoretical discussions of power and difference. Among this group were Toni Cade Bambara, Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, Barbara Smith, Sharon Harley, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Darlene Clark Hine, and Debra Gray White. The first generation of Black women since the Civil Rights movement to enter predominantly White colleges, they were also the first to teach and receive tenure from these institutions. Here they established a tradition for conceptualizing the racial and sexual politics that defined the lives of Black women in America for over a century and blazed a trail which has broadened our understanding of Black women beyond the fringes of American history. With emphasis on reinterpreting the American past to include a perspective that is both feminist and anti-racist, this group is part of the Black Women’s History School (BWHS), which critically analyzes the dominant cultural definitions of womanhood and their impact on the lives of black women.

In 1970, Toni Cade Bambara wrote the groundbreaking feminist compilation The Black Woman. Although not a professional historian, Bambara was a prominent voice within Black literature. Her writing and activism situated her among celebrated writers such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Gayl Jones, who depicted the world through the consciousness of Black women in new and arresting ways.⁴⁴ A product of the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Women’s movements, The Black Woman was a response to the growing disillusionment of Black women with these movements and their inability to address their concerns. For Bambara, these concerns were represented by the dearth of Black female magazines and by the feminist movement’s almost exclusive focus on the lives of white, middle-class women. Skeptical of the consideration given Black women within academe, Bambara wrote:

I don’t know that literature enlightens us too much. The “experts” are still men, Black or white. And the images of the woman are still derived from their needs, their fantasies, their second-hand knowledge, their agreement with the other “experts.” But of course there have been women who have been able to think better than they’ve been trained and have produced the canon of literature fondly referred to as “feminist literature.” …And the question arises: how relevant are the truths, the experiences, the findings of white women to Black women?… I don’t know that our priorities are the same, that our concerns and methods are the same, or even similar enough so that we can afford to depend on this new field of experts ( white, female).⁴⁵

The Black Woman was among the books that initiated a formal dialogue about the separate and distinct issues facing Black women. This dialogue produced new and innovative scholarship on the Black woman’s experience.

Published materials on Black women were scarce throughout the 1970s, but one work was critical in shaping the evolution of Black women’s history, Sharon Harley and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn’s path-breaking collection, The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images (1978).⁴⁶ As the first book of historical essays on Black women, it encouraged an overdue revision of our understanding of the American experience. Its editors have been at the forefront of exploring black women’s experience in the areas of suffrage, women’s rights, and labor.

Harley is an Associate Professor and Chair of African American Studies at the University of Maryland. Her work focuses on Black women’s labor, racial, and gender politics. In her essay on “Northern Black Female Workers: Jacksonian Era,” she explores the limits of Andrew Jackson’s egalitarianism, which excluded White women and African Americans. In her discussion of the economic and social attitudes which kept Northern Black women in menial positions, Harley shows how the racial hostility of northern Whites offered few blacks any opportunity for social or economic advancement.⁴⁷ In her second essay, on Anna Julia Cooper, Harley reveals that Cooper was an unusual woman for her time not because she was highly educated but because, unlike most Black women, she had the opportunity to cultivate her intellectual abilities.⁴⁸ Having spent a lifetime struggling for Black access to education, Cooper affirmed the importance of women in the struggle for equality in her most noted work, A Voice from the South, By a Black Woman of the South.⁴⁹

Professor of history and director of the history Ph.D. program at Morgan State University, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn earned a Ph.D. in Afro-American History from Howard University. A founding member of the Association of Black Women Historians, Penn has had a profound influence on the interpretive frameworks that have shaped the study of African American women. In The Afro-American Woman, she likewise has two essays. The first examines the discrimination faced by African American women in the women’s rights movement by both reformers and historians. The second essay argues that Black men viewed the “woman question” from several perspectives. While Black male leaders tended to be more sympathetic to women’s rights than White male leaders, some Black men tended to perceive racism as a more pressing problem than sexism.⁵⁰ While known for her definitive work, African American Women and the Struggle for the Vote (1998),⁵¹ Terborg-Penn’s writings were shaped by the initial questions raised in The Afro-American Woman, particularly the political status of African American women and their activist leadership. Her other co-edited works include Women in Africa and the African Diaspora, Black Women’s History: An Encyclopedia, and A Special Mission: The Story of the Freedmen’s Hospital.⁵²

In 1982, a second collection of essays would significantly influence the conceptualization of Black Women’s Studies. The product of years of teaching and research, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave⁵³ was part of a new interpretation of Black women’s and social history. As evident by its title, the book spoke to the place Black women have traditionally held within academic circles. Winner of the Outstanding Women of Color Award and the Women Educator’s Curriculum Material Award, But Some of Us Are Brave was among the first anthologies to offer materials for developing courses on Black women. It also initiated a discussion of the ways in which Black women began to think, research, write, and teach about themselves. Known for their activist scholarship, editors Gloria Akasha Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, while not formally trained historians, all played a tremendous role in granting visibility to the study of Black women before it became a recognized field. Within Women’s Studies, each earned a place among the most serious thinkers on issues of race, gender and power.

Poet, writer, historian, critic, and editor, Gloria Akasha Hull is a Professor of Women’s Studies and Literature and the author of numerous works on influential Black women writers. Feminist literary critic Patricia Bell Scott is a Professor of Women’s Studies and Child and Family Development, the founding editor of SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Women, a contributing editor to Ms. Magazine, and author of several books on contemporary Black women writers. The author of one of the anthology’s best-known essays and a defining document of the era, “A Black Feminist Statement,” Barbara Smith is a co-founder of the Combahee River Collective, a Black feminist consciousness-raising group based in Boston.⁵⁴ This Collective called for destruction of the twin evils of capitalism and patriarchy and for the establishment of a feminist socialist society. With the Collective, Smith became an assertive voice on the writing and distribution of Black feminist literature. In 1980, she co-founded with Audre Lorde the Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, the first publishing house for Black, Asian, Latina, and Native American women.

According to the anthology’s editors, Black women’s studies required an intellectual intensity and courage for which a subjective, motivational analysis was appropriate. History had shown that the principle of objectivity, with its emphasis on detachment and neutrality, was not inclusive of people of color. Instead, “objectivity” was an example of the reification of White male thought as the standard for all that is “knowledge.”⁵⁵ However, Black Women’s Studies promoted knowledge reflective of both collective and individual experience – a necessity for Black women’s liberation and survival.

We should mention two outstanding books by Black female scholars in the 1980s. Winner of Columbia University’s Bancroft Prize, Jacqueline Jones’s Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work and the Family: From Slavery to the Present⁵⁶ is a stunning analysis of not only the work that Black women did, but also what they desired for themselves and their families. The general lack of understanding about women’s work and family roles is especially significant given the disastrous consequences of federal social policies. As Jones points out, legislators and scholars alike have misrepresented Black women’s place in the paid workforce as one which stripped males of their role as breadwinner, destroyed Black masculinity, and gave women an “all-encompassing power” over spouses and children. Though black women exerted an informal control over their community in the church and family, they remained overwhelmingly tied to wage-earning and child-rearing responsibilities.⁵⁷ While Jones does not use a Marxist paradigm, she sees the gender dimensions of work as an aspect of proletarian social existence.

Among the earliest and most influential works to set the stage for scholarly inquiry on African American women was Paula Giddings’ When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (1984).⁵⁸ Giddings has received numerous awards, including fellowships from the Guggenhiem Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and two Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degrees. With a focus on the late 19th century, When and Where I Enter is a narrative history of the race and gender issues that impacted Black women’s struggle for equality. Through skillful demonstration of Black women’s indomitable spirit to demand justice, defend their name, and address the needs of the community, Giddings provides a context for understanding how the political consciousness of Black women helped to inform their activism. The book also helped to chart the direction of other works devoted to Black women’s struggle from “slavery to freedom.”

Within the last thirty years, the field of African American women’s history has received greater attention and legitimacy because of Darlene Clark Hine. A Board of Trustees Professor of African American Studies and Professor of History at Northwestern University, Hine was inspired in her scholarship by the pioneering work of John Hope Franklin, William A. Williams, and Lerone Bennett.⁵⁹ Having set out to write a history that would bridge our understanding of the racial chasm between Blacks and Whites, Hine admits that it was not until 1980 that her work began to address the imbalanced focus on race and gender. However, her decision to write the history of African American women was not immediate. Only at the insistence of public school teacher Shirley Herd did Hine consent to write her first history of Black women in Indiana.⁶⁰ Hine’s work is grounded in the belief, defined early on by Carter G. Woodson, that history should be both accurate and transformative. It includes dozens of articles, two monographs, resource guides, and several edited works including Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia and the 16-volume series, Black Women in United States History.⁶¹ In 1986, Hine edited The State of Afro-American History: Past, Present, and Future. The product of a conference on Afro-American History at Purdue University in 1983, the volume suggested new ways of interpreting the Black experience for both historians and teachers. Hine wrote the volume’s only essay on African American women’s history, examining the sex roles, female networks, family work, religion, social reform, and creative expressions of African American women–stories she says must be told in all their “complexity, pain, and beauty.”⁶² In 1989, Hine wrote Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890-1950, the first book to address how race, class, and gender impacted the professionalization of nursing.⁶³ Hine emphasizes how racism among White nurses, elite White leaders, and the larger culture led to the establishment of separate schools and hospitals for Black nurses. These segregated institutions were funded by community resources, particularly women’s clubs. Through an impressive analysis of Black women’s lives in nursing, Hine demonstrates the similarities between their struggles for equality and those of the larger Black community.

This larger Black community had its origins during the period of slavery, and Deborah Gray White is prominent among Black women historians who have focused on the slave community. Board of Governors Professor of History, White has taught at Rutgers University for over twenty-five years. During her tenure, she has served as Chair of the History Department, director of the Rutgers Institute for Research on Women, and co-director of “The Black Atlantic: Race, Nation and Gender” Project at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis. Her prolific scholarship includes numerous articles, books, and her first edited work, Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower (2008). In 1985, White’s Ar’n’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South became the first post-civil rights book on enslaved Black women. As White recalls, so unique was this volume that upon its arrival at the Library of Congress, it had no place to go.⁶⁴ Twenty-five years later, it remains the single best treatment of its subject. As White demonstrates, the female networks and close-knit kin relationships that defined the slave community had a great deal in common with those of their African foremothers, who in many pre-colonial West African societies held positions complementary to those of men.⁶⁵ Challenging the Elkins theory of slavery which excluded or trivialized the place of women, White’s insightful analysis of antebellum southern culture explains the myths and stereotypes that persist about the nature of Black women.

As exemplified in this study, Black women scholars were beginning to use their full professional influence to document the experience of African American women. This scholarship would serve as a corrective to earlier interpretations which assume Black women’s politics and interests were indistinct from those of Black men and White women. Following this new trend, Nell Irvin Painter took the Black history school’s criticism and indictment in a new direction by using Elkins but in a different manner. In her article, “The Shoah and Southern History,” Painter argues that because of White supremacist writers, America has never come to grips with what the German call Vergangenheitsbewaltigung (understanding the past). The Shoah or Holocaust forced Germans to “come to terms with the past.” Because Germany lost World War II, they had to “face up to their ugly racial past….”⁶⁶ Wilma King’s Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in 19^th Century America describes the “perpetual war zone of slavery.”⁶⁷ Painter clearly stressed the pitfalls of Elkins who “made uncritical use of the Sambo stereotype and disregarded black people’s own strengths and coping mechanisms.”⁶⁸ For Painter, slavery was the Black American “Shoah,” as described by Elkins, but posed the serious question of why there are so many monuments to the fallen soldiers of the old Confederacy and so few to the many thousand gone from lynching, castration, rape, and child molestation.

Her criticism is an indictment and places her and other Black female scholars in the Black Women’s History School. These Black women historians decisively refuted the Hollywood stereotype of Black women as “mulattoes, mammies, aunties, and sapphires.”⁶⁹ Black women’s critique of Black gender stereotypes parallels H. Viscount Nelson’s effort to level his own critique at the Uncle Tom stereotype. Nelson’s The Rise and Fall of Modern Black Leadership differs from the classical criticism and indictment of White America but agrees that American history “… reveal[s] how Whites and the larger society determined the direction and behavior of Blacks who would lead their race.”⁷⁰ In this context Nelson “measures” the commitment of black leaders to eliminating the abject conditions cemented by racism and class oppression. One could say that Nelson’s effort is to “out” the “Uncle Toms” within the black experience.⁷¹

The Afrocentrist School

However, a number Black History School writers, female and male, leaned very close to what we consider a sub-field within it which we call the Afro-Centered or Afrocentrist School of historical interpretation.⁷² Like the Black History School, Afrocentrists place Black people at center stage of world history, America’s national history, and local or community history, but they tend to use much harsher language of indictment and condemnation of White America. They completely reject Carter G. Woodson’s hands-off such luminaries as Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. Woodson had stated that “In writing our own particular history we should not dim one bit the luster of any star in our firmament…. George Washington [was and should be remembered as] First in War, First in Peace, and First in the hearts of his Countrymen.”⁷³ Afrocentrist writers attacked Washington as a slaveholder, attacked Jefferson as a rapist of pre-adolescent Black female slave children, and attacked Lincoln as a racist hypocrite. Destruction of White racist historiography before construction of their own Black history ideology became their mantra. A recent instance of this school’s rejection of objective scholarship was Afrocentrist adherents producing the widely Internet-circulated “Willie Lynch Speech.” With no provenance and with clearly 20^th-century word phrasing, the speech, attributed to a 1712 slave master, purported to explain how White racists kept and keep Black men and Black women in an antagonistic relationship which therefore spells the doom of the race.⁷⁴ Because White racist historiography attacked and buried the beauty and greatness of African civilization, Afrocentrist scholarship resurrected, from the dustbin of history, Egypt’s grand Black Pharaohs and their Queens. Ironically, it would be a Jewish scholar, Martin Bernal in his work, Black Athena: The Afro-Asiatic Origins of Greek Civilization,⁷⁵ who would legitimize decades of Black scholars’ research on the same topic.

All Afrocentrists recognize the shoulders of Black scholars on which Bernal stood and stands. These earlier Black scholars are best represented by John G. Jackson, George G.M. James, William Leo Hansberry, Chancellor Williams, Cheikh Anta Diop, and Yosef Ben Yochannan, whose books are quoted widely.⁷⁶ Interestingly, it was not a historian, trained or self-trained, that attempted to put a theoretical paradigm to Afrocentrism, but a little-known mass communications professor, Molefi K. Asante, in his Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change (first published in 1980).⁷⁷ In the academy, however, it is Maulana Karenga and his work Introduction to Black Studies that have solidified Afrocentrism within Africana or Black Studies programs. Afrocentrism is connected to the political ideas of Black Nationalism and Pan Africanism; it favors literature that says that Black is beautiful, White people are the devil incarnate, and without the destruction of African civilization, Black people would still be rulers of the world. This is why Gerald Early, a conservative Black critic of Afrocentrism describes it merely as a “nightmare” of Black folks’ own choosing when they try to fantasize a world without White people.⁷⁸

The Marxist History School

Black pride and solidarity lie deep within the psyche of most Black folk, based on their understanding of what White racism has done to destroy their lives and culture. Popular culture Black magazines like Emerge, Upscale, Ebony, and Essence use these emotions in marketing. These and other Black bourgeois periodicals confirm and deny simultaneously Karl Marx’s observation that “men make their own history but not in circumstances of their own choosing.” Born into a racist society and racist social relations of production, American slaves and their descendants have developed an acute racial identity and racial consciousness. However, there were always dialectical contradictions in these historical circumstances. During the slave period, not every Black was a slave. Therein lies the class question and a confirmation of C.L.R. James’s definitive observation that “The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous but to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.”⁷⁹

This perceptive understanding of race and class is the clarion of the Marxist History School. The rise of quasi-free Blacks in both South and North before the Civil War created a bifurcated or dual social existence: they were free and yet they could be arbitrarily re-enslaved at any moment. This led to a bonding or grounding with their Black slave brethren who were in a different class and social relations, only one step or one moment from a precarious free status with the few quasi-free Blacks in the social class right above them. The existence of quasi-free Blacks, some of whom owned slaves themselves, shows the importance of the race/class dilemma described by James. The dangerous dialectics of slavery and freedom – or what could be termed after Civil War “a certain kind of freedom” – led to the solidification of race consciousness in Black America, no matter what class the individual belonged to. The Black bourgeoisie lived in a fantasy world of immediate gratification and ostentation, with an attitude of “here today, gone tomorrow.” This fantasy world negated consciousness, much as occurred with the Black lumpen, leading both strata to an existentially precarious life on the edge, in which they had to constantly try not to lose their heads.⁸⁰

In the Age of Segregation or Jim Crow, White supremacy had a suffocating effect on all Black individuals irrespective of social or class position. The fantasy world of the Black bourgeoisie and the destructive world of the lumpenproletariat existed alongside the dreams of proletarian Black families. The post-Jim Crow Era saw the rapid rise of the Black petite bourgeoisie via Hollywood, affirmative action hiring, or as workers in high-salaried sport industry. Race thinking remained, but class became newly evident. Because of the race/class dialectic, Black culture and the marketing of it cuts across class lines. Even though the Black bourgeois, Black proletariat, and Black lumpen live geographically apart (less so for the last two segments), the marketing of material things has a distinct capitalist rationality and continuity within the fabled “Black community.” Black pop culture magazines help mold a contradictory Black race consciousness by hyping the allure of wealth (the American Dream) while paying lip service, within the same magazine issue, to the travail of those left behind in the proverbial “ghetto.”

The Marxist History School recognizes the dilemmas of race and class within the Black Bourgeoisie and Black America. The leading authorities in this school cite Karl Marx’s theories of dialectical materialism and the class struggle as the basis for explicating the history of Black Americans.⁸¹ The most recognizable scholar in this school is the late Herbert Aptheker. In his 1943 book, American Negro Slave Revolts,⁸² he took dead aim at the distortions of the leading white supremacist book on slavery which was U.B. Phillips’ American Negro Slavery. The ideological “war” between pro-Phillips and pro-Aptheker scholars epitomizes the contested aspect of Black History. Of course, Aptheker, as a Marxist historian, looked at the inherent race and class antagonism within master/slave production relations. Ergo, class struggle in the guise of race struggle, i.e. numerous slave revolts. The happy, devoted, childish “Sambo” of Stanley Elkins’ innovative but quasi-racist scholarship was finally buried in the minds of Black scholars because of Herbert Aptheker’s scholarly contributions.

Of the few Marxist History School scholars, a significant number have been of Afro-Caribbean background. Even though not a Marxist, Marcus Garvey had a trade union background, and most members of the socialist African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) were of Jamaican or Caribbean heritage.⁸³ The idea of one’s social existence determining one’s consciousness enabled C.L.R. James to grasp the dialectic of class and race. His understanding of the relationship between social existence and consciousness was based on what he could see of race/class contradictions in the Black Antilles. The same understanding has led a plethora of Blacks to embrace Marxism, from the post-Civil War era socialist Peter Clark, to the anarchist Afro-Latina, Lucia Gonzalez Parsons, to Black Baptist socialist ministers, Reverends George Washington Woodbey and George W. Slater, to ABB’s Hubert H. Harrison, to the Harlem Renaissance socialists A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, to the 1952 Progressive Party vice-presidential candidate and accused communist Carlotta Bass, to the 1960s’ Angela Davis among others.⁸⁴ The leading “Black” Marxist thinker, John H. McClendon III, has written extensively on C.L.R. James and provided solid scholarship on the viability of using Marx to explicate the Black experience.⁸⁵

Afrocentric rebuke and criticism came early from Jake Carruthers whose work “Marx and the Negro” became standard. Carruthers quoted Harold Cruse calling Marx a “honkey,” but yet proceeded to accept Marxist materialism, while blackening it and connecting it to the Black struggle and to the dialectics of the non-white Third World struggle against white imperialism.⁸⁶ In another attempt at rejecting the validity of Marx, Clarence Walker provocatively titled a book-chapter “How Many Niggers Did Karl Marx Know?”⁸⁷ The title was aimed at shocking readers into seeing race as the driving force of the struggle between haves and have-nots. Walker’s blind Black Nationalism was regrettably tarnished, however, when he savagely rebuked Black female historian Barbara Field and her scholarship.⁸⁸

Black Marxist writings, though few in number, have maintained a dialogue on how the Marxist paradigm can help clarify the dialectics of historical continuity and discontinuity. Clarence J. Munford’s Production Relations, Class and Black: A Marxist Perspective in Afro-American Studies is an exceptional work, and Manning Marable’s How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America has densely cited data to prove his point. Wilfred D. Samuels’s Five Afro-Caribbean Voices in American Culture, 1917-1920 clearly shows how Marxism was embraced by many Black intellectual activists. Malik Simba’s recent work, Black Marxism and American Constitutionalism, is a rare effort at using Marxist legal theory to explicate law, race, class, and society.⁸⁹

The Contending “Schools”

The struggle between the different schools is ultimately an ideological struggle for the hearts and minds of Black Folk. What has been the outcome of their interaction? Let us take for example the controversy over the 1991 book published by the Nation of Islam (NOI), The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews. The book’s thesis is that Sephardic Jews were heavily involved in the Atlantic Slave Trade. This thesis has more to do with present history than with the past. It confirms the dictum that “all history of the past is selected, contoured, and defined by the ideological needs of the present generation.” The NOI used history to explain the continuity of Black/Jewish relationship as slave and master, manifested today in the ghetto as Jewish exploitative merchant and Black poor consumer. Interestingly, the foremost Negro School scholar, John Hope Franklin, feigned ignorance when asked about the relationship of Jews to the trans-Atlantic slave trade while speaking at the Hillel House at the University of Chicago.⁹⁰ Franklin knew the extant literature of this relationship, but kept within Woodson’s earlier hands-off paradigm. The book took on national recognition when Tony Martin of Wellesley College’s Africana Studies department used it in his classes and Leonard Jefferies, chair of Black Studies at City University of New York (CUNY), gave a speech at the Empire State Black Arts and Cultural Festival in support of the book’s veracity. Jewish students and organizations attacked Martin and Jefferies; Martin was censured at Wellesley and Jefferies was fired as chair, but later won his lawsuit and was reinstated.

Martin chronicled this intellectual struggle over the hearts and minds of Black folk in his book, The Jewish Onslaught: Dispatches from the Wellesley Battlefront.⁹¹ NOI leaders Minister Farrakhan and his underling, Khalid Abdul Muhammad both gave inflammatory speeches in support of the book’s thesis. Leading Jewish scholars waded in and Harold Brackman, with support from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, published Farrakhan’s Reign of Historical Error: the Truth Behind “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews”.⁹² Ironically, it would be Martin’s chair of Africana Studies at Wellesley, Selwyn R. Cudjoe, who would give this controversy a certain clarity from the Marxist History School perspective. Cudjoe argues that the book is clearly antisemitic and devoid of intellectual objectivity. He notes that all historical facts speak as the authors want them to speak. He also explains that Jews controlled “less than one percent of the slaves exported from Africa in the 17^th and 18^th centuries and Jews owned only a small share of the Dutch West Indian Company, which traded in slaves.”⁹³ Cudjoe posed the obvious question, if “Gentiles, Europeans, Muslims, and even Africans (tribal traitors according to the NOI)” were slave traders, why does the NOI argue, in a singular and select fashion, that Jews’ involvement was due to their being Jews and not, like that of the other participants, to their social existence as capitalists. Cudjoe argued that those few Jews who were involved were motivated, like the other slave-traders, by capitalist greed. He understood C.L.R. James’s perception of race and class, citing Black Marxist scholar Oliver Cromwell Cox’s 1943 work Race Relations: Its Meaning, Beginning, and Progress:⁹⁴

Sometimes because of its very obviousness, it is not realized that the slave trade was simply a way of recruiting labor for the purpose of exploiting the great natural resources of America. The trade did not develop because Indians and Blacks were red and black … but simply because they were the best workers to be found for the heavy labor in the mines and plantations across the Atlantic.⁹⁵

No matter how clear this fact should be to the average intelligent person, the ideology of antisemitism, Biblically based, still led many “Christian” Black Folk, in their hearts and minds, to think like “Christian” White antisemites. But the battle over Black Folks’ hearts and minds really exploded earlier with the publication of William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner. The 1968 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, written in first person by Styron, created another battlefront over historical facts and images. The struggle for the social consciousness of Black Folk would be intensely waged over Styron’s racist appropriation of a Black heroic figure. This battle took on a new dimension when ten black scholars wrote a book-length response entitled William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond.⁹⁶ In the ten articles, edited by leading Black History scholar John Henrik Clarke, each writer – from fields of history, psychiatry, literature, and sociology – takes turns savaging Styron’s ahistorical view of Nat Turner. Styron’s Nat Turner is quasi-homosexual, lustful after white women (Margaret Whitehead); hates Black Folk (“my black shit-eating people … God’s mindless outcasts”); hates the Sambo-like Hark, who is an example of “sniveling servility”; comes from a “welfare family” with an absentee father; becomes a privileged “house nigger,” but has a fantasy that he could become “white as clabber cheese, white, stark white…. What a wicked joy…. I was no longer the grinning black boy….”⁹⁷ Most of the ten writers can be placed either in the Negro History School or the Black History School, but Ernest Kaiser belongs in the Marxist History School. Kaiser’s response is complex. He addressed Styron’s background, his knowledge of slavery, other literary works that parallel the Confessions, and the popular image of slavery. Finally, Kaiser used Aptheker’s American Negro Slave Revolts to completely reject the personality, behavior, and motivation of Styron’s Turner as a basis for waging class and race war against the Virginia plantocracy.

All these debates play out in the conflicts over Black Studies programs. Although our main concern here is with higher education, we note that the battleground over the hearts and minds of Black Folk is even more “bloody” at the elementary and secondary school levels. The battles over Afrocentric curriculum have been intense. We acknowledge that US schools have, in general and very recently, accepted curricula of the Negro History School approach for elementary and secondary students. School boards tend to support activities during Black History Month while spinning the message of a multicultural fabric of contributions by all groups to the glorious American saga. Afrocentrism, however, has been fought and rejected by numerous school boards as racist and divisive.  Interestingly, no school curriculum at the  pre-college level has attempted to embrace a Marxist History School approach. The curriculum battleground has been exclusionary.

In higher education, Black Studies became a focus of intellectual debate toward the end of the civil rights stage of the 1960s movement. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)⁹⁸ was composed of the brightest and the best Black college student leaders. These leaders began to use historical analysis in their speeches to the masses. Influenced by Malcolm X and his use of history as propaganda, they returned to their respective colleges and universities, after “freedom summers,” and demanded the inclusion of “their” history into the curriculum of higher education. Black students first climbed the ramparts of the “ivory tower” on this issue in 1968 at San Francisco State. They demanded a department of Black Studies with Professor Nathan Hare as its chair. Like a “spark” the Black Studies movement spread across the academic “prairie” hitting hundreds of public as well as private colleges and universities. Between 1968 and 1973 over two hundred Black Studies academic units were created. Leaders of SNCC regularly spoke on campuses throughout the country, as did Eldridge Cleaver and other Black Panther Party leaders. The intellectual exclusivity of the “ivory tower” was alluded to in a Ford Foundation Letter of December 1, 1970. While establishing lucrative research fellowships in “ethnic studies,” the letter noted that “Conspicuous absentees from the college and university curriculum include not only the Black experience in America, but also the history and culture of other ethnic minorities as well.”⁹⁹ At Cornell University, the establishment of Africana Studies came on the heels of racist attacks on Black students, especially Black females, to which the students responded by arming themselves and taking over Willard Straight Hall. One leader yelled that Cornell University has “24 hours to live”¹⁰⁰ if their demands were not met. Consequently, an Africana Studies Department was established, with James Turner as chairperson. This department and its curriculum followed closely the Afrocentrism philosophy of John Henrik Clarke. Clarke used the term Pan Africanism; therefore, Cornell’s Africana Studies Department should be placed in the Black History School.

In Chicago, Ron Bailey and Abdul Alkalimat worked within the Peoples College system and developed a curriculum reader that would place them on the political left.¹⁰¹ This reader was not Marxist but it conveyed history within C.L.R. James’s race/class paradigm. Those involved at Peoples College would lead the struggle over changing the name of Black History Month to Black Liberation Month – a recognition that worldwide capitalism oppresses Black folk inter-continentally. Peoples College and those involved early on would be comfortable seeing themselves in the Marxist History School. We place them here because of their hiring and work with leading Black Marxist thinker and writer John McClendon III.¹⁰² Last, the Afrocentric School asserted autonomy from the Black History School model by establishing a doctoral program in Afrocentrism at Temple University under the leadership of Molefi Asante and an undergraduate program at California State University-Long Beach with Maulana Karenga.¹⁰³

White scholars attacked this movement very aggressively. Allan Bloom wrote The Closing of the American Mind,¹⁰⁴ which he argued was a synonym for Black Studies, and Arthur Schlesinger also became a vocal critic. Bloom and Schlesinger spearheaded the publishing of hundreds of books and articles attacking this BIRM. At California State University-Fresno, Victor D. Hanson and Bruce Thornton have led the conservative attack on ethnic, women’s, Chicano, Asian, and Africana Studies as not being viable academic units. Hanson, Thornton, and their colleague John Heath explicate their criticism of such programs in Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age.¹⁰⁵ This book contains a chapter, “Who Killed Homer? The Prequel,” which refers to “schools” that condemn and criticize “Western society” as disseminating “false knowledge.” They do make an excellent point when they reveal a fundamental contradiction in the Afrocentrist school, noting, “The paradox is unmistakable; Western culture is racist, sexist, patriarchal, but we nevertheless now are to claim [Afrocentrism] that it all started in black Africa…. These new critics cannot have it both ways…. The Greeks cannot both be deplorable and yet proof positive of a glorious lost African or Semitic legacy.”¹⁰⁶ Hanson, Thornton, and Heath have been recognized as national spokespersons for their position. However, on the national level the criticism is encapsulated in the observation by the late quasi-Jewish scholar, Tony Judt who stated that ethnic studies programs “study themselves thereby negating the goals of a liberal education and reinforcing the sectarian and ghetto mentalities they purport to undermine.”¹⁰⁷

In conclusion, whether the “American mind” is closing or opening depends on one’s social position. That is why Black women’s historiography embraces the dialectics of race, class, and gender as interlocking dynamics. Few of the other “schools” do this. Black women’s history and social existence are decidedly different from those of Black men.¹⁰⁸ One needs only to read the separate slave narratives of sister and brother, Harriet Jacobs (aka Linda Brent) and John S. Jacobs. Whereas Harriet writes about her sexual dilemma and exploitation, her brother nowhere mentions “her sexual history … [and] threats of concubinage.”¹⁰⁹ The guilt that John Jacobs felt about his inability to protect his sister from rape led to his historic silence on this topic. It is this history, revealed by a White woman historian, that we argue is making the Black Women’s History School a driving force in how American historiography develops in the near future. Gender issues have challenged the Black Intellectual Resistance Movement (BIRM) to use the variable of gender in its defense of and retort to White scholars who still try to propagandize America’s past. Tony Judt and other White scholars seem hard pressed to understand that history moves in a dialectic of opposing forces and material realities. Scholars of the African American experience “study Black folk” to better understand the forces which impact, contour, and direct their hearts and minds. The mis-education within American education has been ameliorated, to a large extent, by the Black titans of the BIRM who never have been intellectually monolithic but write from “schools” of thought that we define as Negro History, Black History, Marxist History, and last but never least, Black Women’s History. A Luta Continua!

Notes

1. Thomas Bailey, “The Mythmakers of American History,” Journal of American History, 55, (1968), 15.

Africana Studies is an academic extension of what Cedric Robinson has called “The Black Radical Tradition.”² This tradition is notable for emerging out of a preexisting constellation of African intellectual work, shaped by millennia of migration, adaptation and improvisation. Through the central acts of translation and recovery,³ Africana Studies seeks to theorize on the basis of long-view genealogies of African intellectual work.

This process has been captured by only a handful of thinkers over the arc of existence of the field, largely because of the difficulty of acquiring the requisite linguistic skills. There have been, however, a handful of scholars who have taken up this challenge, including Cheikh Anta Diop, Theophile J. Obenga, Aboubacry Moussa Lam, Babocar Sall, and the writer and translator Ayi Kwei Armah (both in his fictional texts – Two Thousand Seasons, KMT: In the House of Life, Osiris Rising – and in his memoir/historiography The Eloquence of the Scribes).⁴ Armah and the others have set themselves the task of intentionally linking that series of migrations, adaptations and improvisations from the origins of humanity to the present, integrating wave after wave of challenges and solutions to the problems of African human existence as a series of interlinked episodes, of which the period of enslavement and colonialism is a very recent and very temporary set of moments.

The key factor in assuming both this task and the intellectual posture that grounds it, is the deliberate embrace of “long-view” memory: the same type of broad envisioning of the human experience that has long informed the intellectual posture of other societies (including the West) as an ideational construct. In fact, the truncation of the time/space coordinates of memory—the amputation of memory as a consequence of the failure of educational institutions whose task it was to re-inscribe those memories as a critical element of equipping Africans to negotiate their futures—precedes the crisis that informs the great confusion over the nature and intellectual thrust of Africana Studies.⁵

The Crisis and a Question

Shorn of the idea that contemporary Black life is but the most immediate iteration of a long-view historical genealogy and tethered to the idea of linking Black life with the experience of enslavement, we have, predictably, reached a stage in our intellectual life where our resistance has been dissolved. We have arrived. Thinkers identifying with “African American,” “African Diaspora” or “Africana” Studies are pundits, commentators, teachers and researchers helping to address the challenges facing the American and global body politic.

Increasingly, the field and idea of Africana Studies is reduced—and expanded—to a subject-matter field (“the study of Black stuff”) rather than a field of disciplinary contestation and the generation of normative theoretical space (the African study of phenomena and experience). This raises the unavoidable question: is our intellectual work in the field being put to the best uses? Are we asking the right questions, or even the same questions our ancestors and those not oriented to our privileged elite class status asked? Are our contemporary questions still deeply relevant, and, as the environmental and experiential conditions that caused us to ask our initial human questions continue to exist, has the circumstance that interrupted and tethered that arc of human inquiry to the problematic of survival so altered it that liberation as a collective practice is no longer conceivable?

The challenge for African intellectual work and workers remains the same as that for all knowledge work and workers: to ask and answer the fundamental questions of human existence and to leverage answers by drawing first on the most familiar, richest and most accessible deep well of human experience, namely the one native to the cultural arc out of which one emerges as a human being and as a custodian to the received inscriptions of the group, as a “representative thinker.”

On the Question of Intellectual Genealogy: Linking Africans to African Ideas and the Deep Well of African Thought

Many texts have purported to outline the trajectory and genealogy of African intellectual work. While the full range of thinkers and historical eras is increasingly incorporated in these narratives, the placement and attention they receive and the links established between them are inescapably informed by the vantage-points of the authors. Several types of intellectual approach are being applied to the study of African life and experience:

The Black Radical Tradition Approach links ideas of “African cultural unity” to the material contexts and circumstances of Western racialization and racial hierarchy. These various contexts are seen as informing the meaning-making and social movements of African people as they emerge from a relatively common, long-view (meaning pre-European encounter) set and range of epistemological and axiological assumptions. Key thinkers adopting variations of this approach include the aforementioned Robinson, Armah, Diop and Zeleza as well as Michael A. Gomez, Marimba Ani, and Gerald Horne.

The Emic/Etic Approach takes the examination of language, cultural contact, and localized meaning-making as the basis for understanding historical and contemporary African life. This approach does not privilege—and in many instances, overtly rejects—the idea of long-view genealogies of Africana historical and cultural meaning-making. Thinkers adopting variations of this approach include Lorand Matory, Farah Griffin, Bernice Johnson Reagon, and Yvonne Daniel.

The Alternative Epistemology Approach shares the attitude of the Black Radical Tradition approach toward long-view genealogies of meaning-making among African people, but seeks to generate the theories, methods, and reliability-standards necessary to establish academic legitimacy for their study of African people. Key thinkers who can be grouped in this effort include Molefi Asante, Maulana Karenga, Abdul Alkalimat, and Lucius T. Outlaw.

The Unbroken Genealogy Approach, taking elements from all of the afore-mentioned approaches, emphasizes the idea that modalities of African meaning-making are central to the study of contemporary African social, political and cultural life. Unlike the Black Radical Tradition approach, this approach de-centers the impact of Western racialization as a formative factor for contemporary African-descended communities. Like the Emic/Etic Approach, this approach emphasizes the centrality of linguistic and cultural exchange, but traces those changes along an unbroken arc linking classical African practices to subsequent forms of African cultural and social organization, in all the variety reflecting the migrations and adaptations of African people. Several of the thinkers included in the Black Radical Tradition category could be grouped here (e.g. Armah and Obenga), along with scholars such as Jacob H. Carruthers, Mario Beatty, and Anderson Thompson.

The Sui Generis Approach takes the “modern era” (that of the construction of “The West” as an organizing set of cultural logics) as the point of departure for theorizing large-scale African identity and organizes itself around the principle of perpetual improvisation, poly-centered contestation and the idea of Blackness as a social construct drawing upon an indefinable range of characteristics, identities and/or experiences. Prominent among those who could be grouped in this category are Stuart Hall, Eddie Glaude, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Hortense Spillers, Paul Gilroy, Adolph Reed, Orlando Patterson Paul Gilroy, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Kenneth Warren.

The contemporary struggle to define the discipline of Africana Studies is essentially a contestation over methodologies emanating from these various approaches to knowledge production. The intellectual genealogy of Africana Studies must be established as a first order of business before going on to articulate what it is not.⁶

Categories of Contemporary African Intellectual Work: The Black Intellectual as Social Commentator

As a matter of the political thrust that attended its birth as an academic field in the late 1960s, Africana Studies did not function as what Chris Hedges has called “a safety valve for the traditional form of American democracy.”⁷ Certainly, Africana Studies scholars have played such a role in the past, but it has been, for those most deeply committed to the work, a secondary and peripheral, though important, aspect. Perhaps the best-known of these thinkers was W.E.B. Du Bois, who posited in his 1960 commencement address to Johnson C. Smith College, Whither Now and Why, a vision of African contributions to an American, even post-American state. This vision characterizes the US as a contested site of cultural authority and social reality, one that must be experienced and engaged by African people as group-oriented actors seeking to contribute to a poly-centered society with basic, legally-guaranteed rights. This is the Du Bois evoked by Nikhil Pal Singh in Black is a Country and by Eric Porter in The Problem of the Future World: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Race Concept at Midcentury. Du Bois and Robeson had arrived at the place finally recognized as missing by Edward Franklin Frazier in his “Failure of the Negro Intellectual” and later called for by Harold Cruse in both The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual and Plural But Equal.⁸

The problem is that the Du Boises (W.E.B. and Shirley Graham), the Robesons (Paul and Essie) and others similarly situated as political actors for the advance of African people in the US have given way – in the face of what Derrick Bell called “the permanence of Racism” and what Ron Walters termed “White Nationalism” – to what Hedges characterizes as a “courtier or mandarin” impulse among the African-US intellectual elite. The American state had from its inception set itself against the full measure of African life on its own terms. This racist posture, characterized by Michael A. Gomez as “the rejection of Africa as equal,”⁹ set the stage for what Cedric Robinson describes as “two alternative Black political cultures”: The first, a set of elite cultural practices, orients Blacks’ aspirations for liberation toward the pursuit of the rights and privileges jealously guarded by whites. The second, emerging from the lives of plantation laborers, reflects a Maroon sensibility, and forms what Robinson calls a creative rather than imitative, democratic rather than republican, Afro-Christian rather than secular and materialist political culture.¹⁰ The two strains converge at moments of mutual interest, but those moments increasingly are increasingly defined by elite interests.

Black Studies is born out of a moment when what Mark Chiang has labeled “cultural capital” of the masses of African people¹¹ was leveraged for access to the institutional spaces for training and replicating the managerial class of intellectual workers. As this oppositional perspective is slowly incorporated into the German/Anglo-Saxon model for intellectual training,¹² Black Studies scholars are produced whose interests and perspectives are increasingly similar to and aligned with the corporate power elites who use the academy for their purposes.

These circumstances encouraged and promoted institutionalized Black Studies programs, departments and centers that could enable the production of entrepreneurial-minded vulgar careerists and academic individualists of the type bemoaned by Houston A. Baker in his 2008 text Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Movement.¹³ This transition from resistance to incorporation is a common trait in the relationship of insurgent traditions to hegemonic power structures.  The movement of Black elite intellectual workers toward an accommodating stance is not entirely a “betrayal,” considering the contradictory make-up of the bundle of interests that marked the first of Robinson’s two political cultures. Hedges’ remarks are suggestive of what then follows:

the assault by the corporate class on the democratic state has claimed the liberal class as one of its victims…. [But] reducing the liberal class to courtiers or mandarins, who have nothing to offer but empty rhetoric, shuts off this safety valve and forces discontent to find other outlets that often end in violence. The inability of the liberal class to acknowledge that corporations have wrested power from the hands of citizens, that the Constitution and its guarantees of personal liberty have become irrelevant, and that the phrase consent of the governed is meaningless, has left it speaking and acting in ways that no longer correspond to reality.¹⁴

Thus, while Black/African/African-American/Africana Studies is highly susceptible to producing Hedges’ “courtiers or mandarins,” the field also presents the best possible safe space for replicating the liberatory potential implicit in its founding – which demands a self-determining intellectual space and methodology.

This requires, in turn, an attempt to categorize the political impulses of thinkers doing work in the name of “Black Studies.” The following are broad categories – subject to reworking, debate and clarification – describing the political allegiances of scholars who purport to do Black Studies. Individuals are included as “representative thinkers” in each category, not because their work belongs exclusively in that category but because the category fits the overall arc of their work. The work of most of these thinkers, in fact, often spills across categories, underlining the preliminary nature of this attempt at classification.

Defenders of the African Way: Unapologetic intellectual advocates for African people, across the ideological and methodological range, emphasizing the maintenance of self-determining political spaces, e.g., Marimba Ani, Edward W. Blyden, Jacob Carruthers, Alexander Crummell, Cheikh Anta Diop, Marcus Garvey, Vivian Gordon, William Leo Hansberry, Hubert Henry Harrison, Aboubacry Moussa Lam, Theophile Obenga, Babacar Sall, Anderson Thompson, David Walker, Malcolm X.

Grand Theorists: Theorists who advance an overall explanation of phenomena and/or experience as part of a political act of Pan-African struggle and liberation, e.g., Molefi Asante, Oliver C. Cox, Martin Delany, Cheikh Anta Diop, W.E.B. DuBois, Hosea Easton, E. Franklin Frazier, Paul Gilroy, Asa Hilliard, Gerald Horne, Maulana Karenga, Alain Locke, Ama Mazama, Oyeronke Oyewumi, Kwesi Otabil, Paul Robeson, William Santiago-Valles, James Stewart, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Kwame Ture, James Turner, Ron Walters, Paul Zeleza.

Progressives: Thinkers who see the principal and first emphasis of Black Studies to be for the securing of a more equal, humane and just American society, including an American state radically transformed as a consequence of extra-national political and social movements, e.g., Algernon Austin, Houston A. Baker, Derrick Bell, Rod Bush, Kimberle Crenshaw, Harold Cruse, Michael A. Gomez, Lewis R. Gordon, Nathan Hare, Jesse Jackson, C.L.R. James, Robin D.G. Kelley, Terry Kershaw, Martin Luther King, Jr., Julianne Malveaux, Lorand Matory, Toni Morrison, Lucius T. Outlaw, Adolph Reed, Jr., William C. Rhoden, Robert Smith, Cornel West, Armond White, Carter G. Woodson

Liberals: Scholars who emphasize the position and responsibility of the individual – as distinct from government – as social actor for change or status-quo relations, e.g., Kwame Anthony Appiah, Ralph J. Bunche, Michael Eric Dyson, Gerald Early, John Hope Franklin, Eddie S. Glaude, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Bob Herbert, bell hooks, Peniel Joseph, Albert Murray, Mark Anthony Neal, Alvin Poussaint, Benjamin Quarles, Charles H. Wesley.

Neo-Liberals: Proponents of a market-driven approach to African intellectual work and its contribution to the state polity, stressing the efficiency of markets, free and open trade, and maximization of the corporate sector in orienting both citizenry and the mechanisms of governance; “academic entrepreneurs,” e.g., Todd Boyd, Stanley Crouch, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Clarence Page, Ali Mazrui, Booker T. Washington.

Conservatives: Proponents of traditional and/or cautious intellectual approaches to social change, oriented in an individualistic relationship to pre-existing traditional institutions, habits, and/or conditions, e.g., T.D. Jakes, Tyler Perry, Juan Williams.

Neo-Conservatives: Displaying moderate to deep political and/or intellectual conservativism, often as formerly liberal thinkers, e.g., Tunde Adeleke, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Jacobus Capetein, Michael Steele, Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Clarence Walker.

What Africana Studies is Not: Points of Discursive Departure

The following theses are designed to be provocative. Each was formed in response to the declaration of an “Africana Studies” space, either internally or externally, and reflects my own intellectual posture, which spans the “Black Radical Tradition” and “Defender of the African Way” approaches described above.

1. Africana Studies is not a de-linking of intellectual work from Pan-African political movements and social policy informed by the objectives of these movements. The analysis of the US state in White Nationalism/Black Interests and the Pan-African Method introduced by Ron Walters in his 1995 work Pan Africanism and the African Diaspora marks the political thrust that intentionally informs the intellectual contours of the field and discipline of Africana Studies. Similarly, Gerald Horne’s important essay published in Socialism and Democracy [no. 33, 2003] entitled “The Crisis of White Supremacy” outlines how to engage in this transnational work, emphasizing the permanent race-based orientation of what Charles Mills has called “The Racial State.” Africana Studies work must place the analysis of African life and experience in larger global geopolitical, economic and cultural contexts, with scholarship seeking to excavate, interrogate and extend political organization and movement oriented toward the liberation of African people.

2. Africana Studies is not (only) mediation of the meaning of “Black” identity in the social and cultural context of and responses to “whiteness.” A recent edition of National Public Radio’s “Studio 360” turned its attention to the anniversary of the publication of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. This program used “Black Studies” scholars such as Eddie Glaude and Gerald Early to orient the discussion on the meaning of the text to non-whites, evoking conciliatory language that saw the resolution of Africana into the mainstream of American cultural thought and history. This arc is similar to that of the powerful narratives created by documentarian Ken Burns (e.g. Jazz, Baseball, The Civil War, Jack Johnson), who relies on a set of African-American “translators” to re-inscribe his own liberal-to-progressive narration of American exceptionalism and triumphalism. The intellectual energy of Africana is far too expansive to shoehorn into this tired, failed paradigm, or to resolve into mediations about the triumphalism of American democracy, etc.

3. Africana Studies is not an attempt to suppress, ignore or otherwise manage the narration of long-view genealogies of African deep thought in order to avoid the responsibility of engaging the world on Africa’s own complicated but nevertheless real and vibrant, self-determining and collective terms. The artificial truncations that attend histories and genealogies of African thought (e.g. the politics of selecting pieces for anthologies or conferences ostensibly on “Black Studies”) reveals the seeming arbitrariness of those charged with training scholars in Africana Studies; however, the clear evasion of long-view genealogy is apparent in the choices made by this managerial class. Scholarship that links the study of African diasporic subjects to long arcs of history that extend as far back as classical Africa (e.g. Kemet, Kush, Axum, Meroe) are summarily dismissed, in spite of the undeniably rigorous scholarship published during the last two generations by African Egyptologists and linguists demonstrating the relevance of such normative interventions to the study of global African life and culture.

4. Africana Studies is not the reinforcement of Black (Negro) American exceptionalism. Instead, Africana Studies is a reminder of the obligation to contribute to human society and, through it, to human meaning from the vast deep well of African experience and reflection. Without this dimension, what could the contours of Africana Studies be save the imaginings of the thoughts and deeds of that group categorized as African from without – a practice of othering and spectacle and erasure?

5. Africana Studies is not a surrender of the idea that scholarly research methodologies should use unbroken, long-view (e.g. pre-modern) narratives of the African experience. In fact, it is the opposite. It is an embrace of the fundamental principle that African ideas and experiences, beginning with the origins of humanity, can and, for this particular field and discipline, must by definition produce an intellectual framework that orients research inquiry.  While these experiences include the very recent ones of enslavement and colonialism, Africana Studies scholarship must also (and firstly) include the search for more enduring, elemental experiences that mark African intellectual work ordering human learning, awareness, knowledge and sharing information about the nature, purpose and meaning of reality. These experiences were encoded in many of the first inscription systems created by and known to humans and continued, through migration and adaptation, to inform African ideas about science, human social organization and creative expression in an unbroken fashion extending through the contemporary era. The scholarly act of recovering these acts of “inscribing meaning” lie almost completely unexplored, prohibited by the enduring illness of a viral amnesia, a virulent, pervasive and seemingly impenetrable malaise marked by the orientation of the body of African memory and knowledge to the trauma of enslavement. Unerringly—and falsely—acts of recovery of Africana epistemologies are truncated by time/space coordinates that defend a first-order premise: that creating bodies of knowledge and methods of inquiry that represent unbroken improvisational extensions of African corpuses of knowledge that connect over thousands of years is at best, an unnecessary or impractical alternate form of academic inquiry or, at worst, a useless, near-useless or counter-productive waste of time.

6. Africana Studies is not writing that re-inscribes existing knowledge orders. Africana Studies pedagogy and scholarship is teaching, learning, researching and writing that consistently states the intellectual ground on which it stands as a matter of road mapping and blueprinting. While this work follows the methodology that befits the academic site in which it is carried out, it nonetheless demonstrates the necessity of creating and testing the assumptions of normative theories and methods derived from African-derived linguistic, cultural and/or historical sources. Several major attempts in this regard remain virtually uncommented-upon (and certainly not used as orienting texts for methodological training), such as Robinson’s Black Marxism, Clyde R. Taylor’s The Mask of Art, Obenga’s African Philosophy: The Pharaonic Period, Kimbwandende Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau’s African Cosmology of the Bantu-Kongo.

7. Africana Studies is not a surrender of the difficult work of recovering and connecting African historical memories to the idea that such work amounts to “romanticizing” or “mythologizing” the past. Walters writes in Pan Africanism in the African Diaspora that it is often this perceived difficulty of recovery that drives thinkers to recede to the false alternative of focusing exclusively on contemporary problem-solving (as if contemporary problems can even be apprehended – let alone solved – without a command of the relevant historical experiences, circumstances and structures). Constructivists and radical postmodernists reject anything foundationalist and normative as essentialist. Africana Studies rejects this discounting of foundational moments by stating the essential first-order requirement of translation and recovery. This requirement has been modeled by the handful of scholars currently equipped with the requisite skills to undertake comparative analysis of African life, language and culture over the arc of long-view genealogies. Among these scholars are the aforementioned Obenga, Lam and Sall as well as Mario Beatty and Andreas Woods. Scholars of contemporary African language systems such as John Baugh, John Rickford and Lisa Green in African American English have provided invaluable scholarship to link African languages across time and space as the grounding element of Africana Studies.

8. Africana Studies is not a sieve or drain on the resources of the university in service to an “anti-academic” intellectual enterprise (except where practiced as research scholarship by a small contingent of research faculty). To the contrary, and especially at Historically Black Colleges and Universities, the attraction of the field—and the discipline—must be to the general student body, and must lie in teaching and learning committed to the mastery of language and research methodology and the recovery of intellectual genealogies and representative techniques. This requires both the practice and recovery of Africana perspectives toward intellectual mastery across modal forms. The written form of inscription, reconciled with the associated movement, sound, visual and conceptual forms, provides an organic representation of literacy that makes possible the integral recovery of historical and contemporary African attitudes toward intellectual work,¹⁵ forever displacing the idea of “black culture as pathological,” especially with regard to teaching, learning and the sebayt (education). This is not only a reasonable route to intellectual rehabilitation in African communities; it is historically accurate, pedagogically sound, and practically achievable. Africana studies is not, in other words, an attempt to fit the unbroken, organic and vibrantly improvisational exercise of Africana modes of inscription, coding and decoding to race-anchored validation systems that neither recognize nor honor those earlier practices. Africana Studies distinguishes its scholarship from that of other disciplines precisely by its elevation of this range of practices to a self-conscious corpus of historically connected techniques and content.

9. Africana Studies is not an evasion of the essential questions raised by previous generations of scholars determined to address first-order questions of documentation, translation, recovery and improvisation. The discipline embraces Du Bois’s 1897 call to “conserve races” and his penultimate charge in 1960 to take up the special history and thought of Africans as the conduit for contributing time-honored and unique solutions to problems facing humanity. It is the chastened extension of the efforts of Institute of the Black World, of Bernice Johnson Reagon, of the African Heritage Studies Association and the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilization and other organizations established to ask the right questions regarding the sources, normative assumptions, translation and recovery priorities and policy implications of Africana Studies. It is, because of the self-conscious exclusion of the other disciplines as distorting conceptual spaces, the only self-constructed space in which to ask and attempt to continue to provide answers to these questions, unencumbered.

Conclusion

Having clear ideas of what Africana Studies is, and what it is not, we can now address the challenge of planning future directions – a challenge to be taken up by the students present today and their colleagues around the world. W.E.B. Du Bois, in “Whither Now and Why,” observed that “what I have been fighting for and am still fighting for is the possibility of black folk and their cultural patterns existing in America without discrimination; and on terms of equality… What we must do is accomplish two things: the utter destruction of color discrimination in American life, and the preservation of African history and culture as a valuable contribution to modern civilization as it was to medieval and ancient civilization.”¹⁶

In order to achieve this objective, Africana Studies, as the first academic field and discipline created out of the masses-oriented protest and struggle tradition, must reject the easy call to produce academics trained in inferior approaches and aspiring to courtesanship and mandarin status. Rather, it must leverage the social, political and cultural capital that commanded its birth into the level of intellectual engagement necessary to widen the tributaries flowing from the African experience to human knowledge and advancement.

In his seminal essay entitled “The Field and Function of the Negro College,” DuBois suggests that this may be the most salient and relevant purpose of what are now referred to as “Historically Black Colleges and Universities.”¹⁷ When tethered to  approaches to inquiry based on translation and recovery, that is certainly the most useful and essential work that can be performed by Departments of Africana Studies at such institutions, an intriguing possibility that would mark an intellectual Weheme Mesu (Ancient Egyptian for “repetition of the birth” or “renaissance”) in the field and discipline, helping the academy finally mark what Black Studies is—and is not.

Notes

1. This essay is adapted from my remarks as the 15^th Annual Donald K. Smith Distinguished Lecturer, Baruch College, New York, December 6, 2010.

The current period of global capitalist crisis presents daunting challenges for struggles against transnational capital, white supremacy, and global heteropatriarchy.¹ A complex theoretical and practice-oriented understanding of Black Women’s Studies is needed. The call for Black Women’s Studies was first articulated by Anna Julia Cooper in the early 20^th century. The “Combahee River Collective Statement” of 1977² was a major landmark, and For Some of Us Are Brave (Hull et al. 1982) became the leading conceptual volume in the field. But too little has been added to this in the new century. A recent volume, Still Brave (James et al. 2009), makes an initial attempt, but leaves unanswered a number of questions around social transformation.

The current crisis has produced some of the most vicious attacks on Black women – our lives, our children. The Katrina travesty publicly exposed the disposability of poor African Americans. The move to the right in the US and the public attack on all working people have been especially hard. The dismantling of a social wage not only forces exploitative labor and poverty onto millions of women in the US, but takes away basic rights – to food, shelter, housing, education. This is a world where universal healthcare does not exist and where an increasing number of children, men and women, live in the streets. The burning issue for Black Women’s Studies is not only why this situation exists, but what’s to be done.

Given these realities, some difficult questions are certainly in order: How much, in fact, has the still developing field of Black Women’s Studies touched the lives of everyday women? Has the field extended its reach from thinking through the theoretical positioning of African-descent women to engaging in movement-building for social change within the US and across Africa and the African diaspora? Have its insights been deployed in transforming the lives of working-class and poor women? To what extent is its theoretical framework relevant to everyday life? Is the multiplicative/intersecting and relational lens of gender, race, sexuality, and class being deployed meaningfully? What is the relationship between Black feminist intellectuals and women on the ground? Are connections being made to grassroots women who often confront and resist the harshest expressions of racist, capitalist, heteropatriarchal systems?

These questions, I contend, are key to crafting a complex 21^st-century agenda for Black Women’s Studies. While I cannot here go into detail about possible answers, I ruminate on the idea of a praxis for moving the field forward. Although too little has been done in applying Black Women’s Studies to organizing for social change, there are some instances in which this is occurring. Across the African diaspora and within Africa, theory and practice have come together in organizing against sex trafficking of Black women and girls. Within the US, there has been organizing for the rights of women working in domestic labor as well as for those in catfish and chicken farms, and in nursing homes.

The theory of intersectionality can be a guiding frame for this organizing work, but is that happening? One promising example is Ella’s Daughters (2010), an organization of women of color (heavily Black) operating in the tradition of Ella Baker. They take seriously Baker’s insight into “the extraordinary potential of ordinary people.” The related research of Assata Zerai and Zakia Salime (2006) is also worth highlighting. They examine on-the-ground efforts to use the race/class/gender frame as an organizing approach, giving several examples of its successful application.

While not all Black women’s studies deploy a revolutionary Black feminist frame, I embrace this frame because it places capitalist exploitation at the center of a 21^st-century agenda. This is crucial to radical social transformation, which is imperative for addressing our problems. We must not only give visibility and voice to the experiences of African-descent women, but must also take on thornier questions such as: Whose interests are served by Black Women’s Studies? Who is at the center of organizing and struggle? How do we engage these issues? I suggest that the field’s radical roots developed outside of the academy. How can the connection between academy and society be infused with new life today? We need to look back at the early history of the field, its activist roots, its move into the academy, and the challenges facing its scholars. Where are the connect and the disconnect?

The 20^th-Century History of Black Women’s Studies

Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Patricia Bell-Scott in “Black Women’s Studies: A View from the Margin” (1985) articulate Black Women’s Studies as a new field that filled in the vacuum left in Black Studies and Women’s Studies. They assert that neither field dealt with the experiences of Black women. They note:

Black women’s studies is the scholarly investigation of the history, cultures and experiences of Black women. This new field confronts the problem of gender bias in Black studies and racial bias in women’s studies and analyzes the ways in which gender/race form an “otherness” both in relationship to Black men and in relationship to non-black women. All three of these movements call into question the philosophical frameworks and values of the American college curriculum. (1985: 205)

They go on to discuss the curriculum at Spelman University, pointing out:

A thorough examination of the Spelman curriculum revealed that despite the presence of women’s studies courses (which far exceed such offerings in other Atlanta colleges and in most Black colleges), the curriculum was still not “gender-balanced” or sufficiently sensitive to Black women’s studies. Furthermore, most of these courses were electives in the major or minor. Relegating attention to women, and Black women specifically, to a set of elective offerings at the margin of the curriculum had not provided our students with a comprehensive understanding of the diverse experiences and contributions of women generally or an appreciation of the roles of Black women in society as a subject of scholarly inquiry. (212)

Spelman subsequently received a Ford Foundation grant for its Curriculum Development Project, and a viable women’s studies program was developed. The curriculum is now conceptualized in terms of Africa and the African diaspora. Thus, work on Black women globally as well as domestically is at the heart of the major and research at Spelman. But it took vision and struggle to make this happen.

Patricia Hill Collins articulated “the emerging theory and pedagogy of Black Women’s Studies,” arguing

that the crux of the new work was a holistic, theoretical foundation for Black women’s studies that deals with the simultaneous effects of race, gender, and class in shaping the reality of Black women’s lives… [and] that the second [aspect] centers on methodology, the search for a process that will be the transformer of consciousness essential for social action. (1986: 50)

This Collins piece established the field’s major analytical frame – an intersectional analysis of race, class, and gender – and was also a call for action. It challenged the tendency to perceive the Black struggle in purely racial terms. It disrupted the comfort of the singular trope of racism and white supremacy, viewing an intersectional approach as essential for fully understanding Black communities.

But what are the obstacles to establishing the university/community link? Here I take a brief look at Black women in the academy, with a focus on those occupying spaces within white institutions. Of course not all Black women’s studies emanate from Black women in the white academy, but a number of the field’s major theoreticians are located in these often problematic spaces.³

Locked in the Walls of the White Academy: Constraints to the Emergence of a Revolutionary Black Women’s Studies

Any discussion of the challenges facing a revolutionary 21^st-century Black Women’s Studies involves looking at the social context of academic training and theorizing, so as to understand how racism and sexism are inscribed in academe. A number of African American women scholars are situated today within the white academy. This is not an easy space. Black women’s place within the academy in general, within Black studies in particular, and as an independent Black women’s studies tendency reflects: l) the larger economic, social and political forces at play historically and in the current political moment, 2) the interlocking oppressions of race, gender and class in the training and socialization of Black women scholars, and 3) the interplay between biography and oppression in a particular juncture of the transnational capitalist system.

The political impetus for Black women’s placement in white academe grows out of the racial struggles of the Civil Rights/Black Power Movement, Black Studies, and the push for women’s studies. The struggles for Black Studies and Women’s Studies owe a great deal to struggles on the ground. Theoretically core here is the idea of intersecting oppressions of (a) gender/patriarchy, (b) sexuality/heteronormativity, (c) class/economic exploitation, and (d) race/white supremacy/imperialism, operating in multiplicative and relational dynamic. These are conceptualized as dialectical, not additive processes.

Most tellingly it was outside the academy that these ideas first took root. Two examples stand out: The Combahee River Collective and the Third World Women’s Alliance that emerged out of SNCC. The radical Black women of these formations understood quite clearly the import of intersectionality in theorizing and taking action.⁴

A related move within the academy was to place Black women at the center of the analyses of Black Studies. As Elizabeth Minnich (a non-Black scholar) points out, the disciplinary canons in Western knowledge production systematically and intentionally exclude women. Minnich argues (2004) that women should be at the center of knowledge production. This articulation informed the argument made in the field of Black Women’s Studies, producing a powerful analytic shift. Our understanding of Black life in Africa, the US, and the African diaspora would change substantially.

To some degree this perspective reflects the standpoint approach formulated by Collins (1990). In this frame, the space Black women occupy opens up a particular way of seeing. The margins are the sites in which Black women’s knowledge is produced. And, so contends Collins, Black women who are not normally represented as intellectuals have been able to rearticulate the organic knowledge of everyday Black women as Black intellectuals. A large number of scholars from working-class or poor Black communities entered the academy during the period of social upheaval of the 60s and 70s. A political space opened up in graduate schools through struggle, and traditionally white departments in the social sciences and the humanities expanded admissions. Thus, African-descent women entered white universities in relatively greater numbers during this period and into the current period (Hamilton 2001).

The growth in numbers, along with a shifting consciousness around race and gender, positioned Black women thinkers to challenge their historic erasure in knowledge production and university teaching (Hull et al. 1982; Carty 1991). Nonetheless, their numbers remained low. And while more attention is paid to the gender dimension of Black women’s lives, still too few Black studies programs have developed well articulated gender analyses; nor has Women’s Studies substantially incorporated race. Black women remain exceedingly under-represented in the academy, even as the absolute numbers rise for women. Independent programs of Black women’s studies remain virtually nonexistent. The program at Spelman is exceptional. Too many faculty who do this work are located in part-time positions, or as instructors or lecturers (Hamilton 2001).

Financial cutbacks have reduced the number of African Americans able to pursue higher education. Equally significant has been the attack on affirmative action, which has closed off programs in institutions such as UC Berkeley, Texas, and Michigan. The downturn in graduate enrollment by African Americans (especially male) foreshadows even fewer Black faculty in the future.

Nonetheless, despite these hurdles, a number of Black women scholars have committed to developing Black Women’s Studies (Aldridge & Young 2003), subverting traditional notions of what counts as knowledge (hooks 1990; see also Lorde 1984, White 2001). We continue to press key questions such as: Where are the Black Women? How might we shift the center of Black Studies from its focus on racialized men to embodying the nexus of race, class and gender? How do we render visible the history of lived experiences of Black women? (Butler & Walker 1991) And yes, African and feminist centered knowledge(s) underpin a good deal of current thinking in Black Women’s Studies for analysts such as Oyeronke (2004). She locates the centrality of Africa in knowledge reconstitution; others are more concerned with the African diaspora, as well as “New World” Africans (Boyce-Davis 2003). Yet, I believe too few have made a commitment to building beyond the academy and persuading emancipatory movements to link gender and class with race (Brewer 2010).

Black women intellectuals must make common cause with women in struggle on the ground. What a powerful connection if the women of LIFFT, poor black women fighting for rights in Liberty City, Florida were to be joined in struggle by Black women in the academy committed to social transformation (Miami Workers’ Center 2010). This would return Black women’s studies to its activist roots.

A long-standing tradition of oppositional cultural representation of Black women (pioneered by Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells Barnett) is central to the work of many Black feminist intellectuals (Collins 1990). The resistance to historic and contemporary stereotypes of African American women is core to this intellectual work. A number of the current Black scholars grew up in the midst of the social change during the 60s and 70s. The African American community as a rich fabric of life and culture is remembered, lifted up and rearticulated in scholarly work. These scholars attempt to overturn the pathology/problem paradigm which is still central to much of the social science investigation of Black life.

Theorizing Black Women’s Studies

Not all Black women who do Black Women’s Studies are feminist, but many are sensitive to gender and race as interlocking realities. It is arguable, however, that a number of critical Black thinkers are changing the face of research, teaching and knowledge production in the academy. Although Black women’s activism and everyday lived experiences have been the spawning ground of Black feminist thought, what is notable today is the more systematic incorporation of this knowledge into disciplines and fields largely disconnected from struggles on the ground. The arts, humanities, history, the social sciences, Black Studies, and health among other fields have been affected by Black feminist frames. Unfortunately, the key trope of Black women’s studies, intersectionality, is often superficially incorporated into the fields, even as canonic representation of intellectuals such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, bell hooks, and Patricia Hill Collins is occurring. What is too often missing is taking these frameworks back to the streets of African America. This is the fundamental building assumption of Black Women’s Studies: Black women as actors and agents in the world, yet the disconnect from these self-same community actors is palpable. We definitely need a field that carefully articulates the relationships between structure and agency – activists and scholars – and which offers a radical vision for social transformation.

The potential of an insider analysis and research agenda must give way to a discussion of who benefits from this same insiderism. Professional and collegial relationships may become difficult if research and connections move beyond the academy. The expectation is not too much engagement “with community” (Brewer 2010). Black women scholars often lack power in major universities and are under-represented in the higher professorial ranks. This under-representation is ultimately reflected in the kind of research questions that will be explored and the kind of commitments the scholar will make. Rather than crafting a research agenda deeply connected to community issues, Black women scholars are pressed to focus narrowly on disciplinary notions of appropriate research (Benjamin 1997).

In short, the current hard realities of introducing Black Women’s Studies in established university and research settings are centered in issues of power and inequality. The challenge is to reconnect to Black radical perspectives that understand a complicated political economy and cultural terrain, working closely with community struggles. Crucial to this agenda is the fight for a history of African American women’s experiences and for remaking the educational and struggle terrain to reflect these experiences. True naming and speaking becomes an act of resistance, a political gesture that challenges the politics of domination in a world that quite often would render Black women nameless and voiceless. How this naming occurs has been a source of debate among analysts of Black women’s studies.

Next Steps: Out of the Academy into the World

It is clear that sectors of the Black population throughout the world are confronting social and economic catastrophe. A recently released study found that the average wealth-holding of a black single woman in the US is $5 (Huffington Post 2010). In the starkest of terms this figure reminds us how little wealth has ever flowed into the hands of African American women in particular and the Black population in general. It captures how in advanced capitalist societies wealth expropriation began early and continues into the present. Currently it is exacerbated by the dismantling of the social wage, deep levels of unemployment, and destruction of affordable housing. In the global south, the legacies of colonialism and neocolonialism and the contemporary realities of global capital are strikingly evident, with devastating consequences for the people of those societies. This poses a challenge for Black Women’s Studies. It must connect to an emancipatory commitment that understands a complicated global economy framed by empire.

Black women of the academy must struggle around the constraints of careerism and the imperative of social responsibility. This issue is central to the relationship between academic insiders and the communities we profess to represent. The founding vision of Black Women’s Studies is again relevant here. In the early years there was a deep call for decolonizing social research and seizing research channels to further the cause of Black life in this country (Hull et al. 1982). The call continues in the scholarship of analysts such as Carole Boyce-Davies (2003). Today, Black Women’s Studies is drawn into the circle of domination simply by existing within and attempting to negotiate the rules of the academy. This reality is not peculiar to Black Women’s Studies; it is shared by Chicano/Latino, Asian and Native American Women’s Studies. Yet because the stakes are so high for scholars coming from an oppressed people, it has profound consequences for the field.

The colonization of Black women’s and other Third World women’s intellectual lives along race, class, and gender lines continues unabated within the academy (Mohanty 2003). Our interests are by definition connected to those on the ground—the women most exploited under racist capitalist patriarchy. Fighting back requires not only our scholarship but movement-building for social change. This means connecting deeply with women organizing to create a different social order. Yet, the requisite emancipatory political core of a race/class/gender analysis is too often missing. We cannot simply think our way out of this. Theory and action cannot be delinked. We must commit to building beyond the academy (James 1997).

Black feminist thought now centrally articulates the multiplicity of oppressions. Its intellectual agenda challenges existing frameworks in all academic fields (Black Studies, women’s studies, ethnic studies, and a range of other disciplines), imagining from the bottom up and creatively drawing on a rich African tradition of polyrhythmics and improvisation. This contextualizing spawns at once (a) the transformation of knowledge

And (b) a decentering and restructuring of the education process.

The tradition of radical Black thinking and practice has been nearly erased from current academic discourse (Kelley 2002). To overcome this situation, we must move away from the text and from the almost two-decade dominance of discourse analyses delinked from structural understandings and systemic critiques. The previously mentioned article by Zerai and Salime (2006) raises the question of how “black feminism [can contribute] to methods of organizing to end oppression and specifically [to end] war, racism and repression.” The authors respond by asserting two principles:

Black feminist organizing is built from women’s use of alternative resources, often necessitated by their marginal social locations. The process of embracing alternative strategies developed by women emerging out of their experiences at the margins leads to new solutions….

Black feminist organizers self-consciously employ integrated analysis in their organizational strategies and political discussions. (2006: 503, 505)

Zerai and Salime interrogated several cases to make their point. These included the Black Radical Congress Anti-War Campaign, the work of the Women of Color Resource Center, INCITE! and other groups such as SISTER RISE UP! They discovered that we have a good deal to learn about how these principles can be applied on the ground. How we might work closely with grassroots women requires deeper study. We must connect the theory of Black Women’s Studies to the practice of movement-building. Indeed, this task must define the next phase of Black Women’s Studies. The Black woman’s presence in the academy and the changed curriculum is only the first phase of a longer term, difficult struggle, tied to the goals of liberation for all women and all people.

References

Aldridge, Delores and Carlene Young. 2003. Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies. Lanham: MD: Lexington Books.

Benjamin, Lois. 1997. Black Women in the Academy: Promises and Perils. Gainesville: University of Press of Florida.

Boyce-Davies, Carole. 2003. Decolonizing the Academy: Africa Diaspora Studies. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.

Brewer, Rose M. 2010. “The Social Forum Process and the Praxis of Race, Class, Gender and Sexualities.” in Social Change, Resistances and Social Practices. Richard A. Dello Buono and David Fasenfest, eds. Leiden: Brill, 57-72.

Burnham, Linda. 2001. “The Wellspring of Black Feminist Theory.” Southern University Law Review 28:3, 265-270.

Butler, Johnella and John Walker, eds. 1991. Transforming the Curriculum: Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Carty, Linda. 1991. “Black Women in Academia: A Statement from the Periphery.” in Unsettling Relations: The University of a Site of Feminist Struggles. Himani Bannerji ed. Boston: South End Press, 13-44.

Collins, Patricia Hill. 1986. “The Emerging theory and pedagogy of Black Women’s Studies. Feminist Issues, 6:1.

Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Back Feminist Thought. Boston: Unwin Hyman.

Combahee River Collective Statement. 1977.
http://historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/combrivercoll.html

Cooper, Anna Julia. 1988. A Voice from the South. New York: Oxford University Press.

Ella’s Daughters. 2010.  “Support Ella Baker Day” (December 17).
http://www.ellasdaughters.org.

Guy-Sheftall, Beverly and Patricia Bell Scott. 1985. “Black Women’s Studies: A View from the Margin.” in Educating the Majority: Women Challenge Tradition in Higher Education.

Hamilton, Kendra. 2001. “Doctoral Dilemma,” Black Issues in Higher Education, vol. 18, 34-38.

Hooks, Bell. Yearning. 1990. Boston: South End Press.

Huffington Post. 2010. “Women of Color Have Media” (March 11).
www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/11/women-of-color-have-media_n_495238.html

Hull, Gloria T., Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds. 1982. But Some of Us Are Brave. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press.

James, Joy. 1997. Transcending the Talented Tenth. New York: Routledge.

James, Stanlie, Frances Smith Foster, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. 2009. Still Brave: The Evolution of Black Women’s Studies. New York: Feminist Press.

Kelley, Robin D.G. 2002. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press.

Lorde, Audre, 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press.

Miami Workers Center. 2010. “Liberty City: A People’s History” (December 4).
www.miamiworkerscenter.org.

Minnich, Elizabeth. 2004. Transforming Knowledge, 2^nd ed. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Mohanty, Chandra. 2003. Feminism Without Borders. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

Oyeronke, Oyewummi. 1997. The Invention of Women. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

White, E. Frances. 2001. Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black Feminism and the Politics of Respectability. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Zerai, Assata and Zakia Salime. 2006. “A Black Feminist Analysis of Responses to War, Racism, and Repression.” Critical Sociology 32:501-524.

Notes

1. Patriarchy locates oppression in male domination and control. Heteropatriarchy articulates itself as the hegemonic norm infused as it is with practices of male domination and the suppression and exclusion of the homosexual.

Intelligent idealism is closer to intelligent materialism than vulgar materialism.
– V.I. Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks

Certain distortions make Marxism, not a revolutionary instrument, but, rather, a conservative instrument. Among these distortions is the so-called academic Marxism, which is mechanistic and vulgar, which has no revolutionary sense, and is often of use just to show off learning.
– Moacir Gadotti, Pedagogy of Praxis: A Dialectical Philosophy of Education

What Is African American Studies, Its Focus, and Future?

It is fitting that a volume of essays on African American Studies should employ in its very title the black vernacular tradition of “signifyin” or “call and response” which informs the black literary tradition. This literary tradition, as Henry Louis Gates states in his seminal work,¹ is double-voiced: texts speak to other texts, and are thus “Talking Books.”  The credit for this “signifyin” title goes to my co-editor. Initially the title did not resonate with me until I realized that it “spoke to” a profusion of recent literature about Africana Studies which addresses and/or calls into question the field’s nomenclature, substance, scope, methodology, theory, curriculum and pedagogy.

It is important to note the context of this literature. In the past few years, there were many commissioned volumes and conferences on the state of Black Studies as part of the commemoration of its 40^th anniversary (1968-2008), i.e., the anniversary of first victories of the student movement and community struggle to establish Black Studies programs and departments in the American academy. This history of Black Studies – including its antecedents in the rich 200-year-old black activist intellectual or black radical tradition, its modern origin in the student movement and black power movement of the sixties, and its various stages of development from protest movement to institutionalization – is well-documented in: the introductory chapters of Abdul Alkalimat’s Introduction to Afro-American Studies and Maulana Karenga’s Introduction to Black Studies; Delores Aldridge and Carlene Young’s edited volume, Out of the  Revolution: The Development of Black Studies; Fabio Rojas’ From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline, and Noliwe Rooks’s White Money/Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies. Here we will focus on the current trends of Black Studies as articulated in 40^th anniversary literature.

Those familiar with this literature will recognize our interrogative title’s allusions to it. This volume is engaged in an ongoing intertextual conversation; it is in dialogue and debate with several texts, but most notably with three volumes: 1) the September 2009 special issue of the Journal of Black Studies, entitled Defining Ourselves: One Name, One Discipline? which includes articles such as Shirley Weber’s “What is in a Name? Addressing the Issues of Program and Curriculum Clarification in Black Studies,” Molefi Asante’s “Africology and the Puzzle of Nomenclature,” and Maulana Karenga’s “Names and Notions of Black Studies: Issues of Roots, Range, and Relevance”; 2) The Handbook of Black Studies (2006), which includes articles such as Ama Mazama’s “Interdisciplinary, Transdisciplinary, or Unidisciplinary? Africana Studies and the Vexing Question of Definition,” and Maulana Karenga’s  “The Field, Function and Future of Africana Studies: Critical Reflection, on Its Mission, Meaning, and Methodology,” as well as an Appendix entitled “The Naming of the Discipline: The Unsettled Discourse,” which listed “representative names of departments and programs dealing with some study of African people,” e.g., Africana Studies, African and African Diaspora Studies, Black Studies, Pan African Studies, Africology, Africa and New World Studies, African and African American Studies, Afro-American Studies, etc.; and 3) The African American Studies Reader (2007), which includes contemporary articles as well as reprints of articles from earlier decades which deal with the same issues, e.g., James B. Stewart’s “The Field and Function of Black Studies,” Philip Daniels’ “Black Studies: Discipline or Field of Study” and Donald Henderson’s “What Direction Black Studies?”

In terms of the scope of Africana Studies, there are five major models or configurations, although others do exist: 1) national (i.e., blacks in the United States); 2) hemispheric (the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean); 3) continental and hemispheric (Continental Africans as well as the African Diaspora in the Western Hemisphere); 4) global (Continental Africans and the worldwide African Diaspora including blacks in Europe and Asia); and (5) African Diasporan Studies (the global Diaspora minus the continent).

There are also issues of focus. For example, in the case of the third configuration above, there is debate over whether equal emphasis should be devoted to each of the three locations and its peoples (the United States, the Western Hemisphere, and continental Africa), or whether the US should be the principal focus as the field is “rooted” in this country. In the fourth model, the peoples of African descent in southern India, Papua New Guinea, and even Australia may be included. Proponents of the first four models, however, are concerned that the increasing rise of the fifth configuration, which omits the African continent, reflects a concerted effort by postmodernists to focus on the dissimilarities of Diasporan communities, their “unstable and floating” identities, and their disconnect with Africa, all of which serve to eviscerate the political objectives of Pan Africanist unity or solidarity.

My own predilections are towards the third model, which, while rooted in the struggles of African peoples in the United States, recognizes the increasing presence among them of people of African Caribbean descent (as reflected in the ethnically diverse student bodies of urban universities). The reach of this model is Pan African, as it draws upon rich African continental origins (history and cultures). I call the field Africana Studies and will use this term throughout my paper.²

Beyond issues of scope and focus is the effort by some to establish a single hegemonic theoretical framework. This effort is waged by Afrocentrists or, as some have chosen to label themselves, Africologists. While the effort to re-label both the field and its corresponding paradigm as “Africology” has remained marginal (with the significant exception of the University of Wisconsin), efforts to establish a single dominant African-centered paradigm are more widespread. One of the arguments in favor of such a paradigm is that many of the academicians in Africana Studies (especially the older cohort) were trained in outside disciplines such as sociology, political science, English literature, history, etc., whose approach was Eurocentric, i.e., reflecting mainstream white bourgeois social science or humanities orientations (or, for that matter, “standard” white Marxist orientations). Hence these black academicians utilize the same types of paradigms – in which black communities and/or behaviors are presumed to be subcultural, abnormal, exotic, hypersexual, pathological, deficient, based on deficits, underprivileged, deviant, criminal, etc. – that white scholars have utilized for decades when writing about black people.

Thus it is not sufficient that Africana Studies is a field of research and scholarship about black people, or even a field by and about black people; it must be a field of research and scholarship for black people, i.e., it must advance their interests and, in order to do so, must be grounded or centered in African experience, perspectives, worldviews, values, norms, etc.; i.e., Africa must be the measure of all things. To that extent, proletarian social science or humanities paradigms do not pass muster either. If African worldviews, cosmologies, ontological outlooks are spiritual, then a materialistic outlook is non-African, not grounded in African culture, and therefore not in the interests of African people.

The theoretical perspectives of the Afrocentricists/Africologists and their formidable attempts to attain hegemony over Africana Studies are, in my perspective, the primary concern of this volume. Secondary concerns revolve around the rise of a rival paradigm in Africana Studies, which McClendon has identified as cultural criticism/postmodernism and which other commentators, notably Greg Thomas, have identified as liberal multiculturalism.³ Perhaps neither label alone will suffice, as some of McClendon’s “cultural critics” are adherents to various schools of postmodernism, poststructuralism and  postcolonialism, while others are better described by Thomas’s term multiculturalists. Unlike the Afrocentrists/ Africologists who are concerned with the cultural nationalist principle of kujichagulia or self-determination – “to define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves and speak for ourselves rather than being defined, named, created and spoken for by others”⁴ – this rival camp of postmodernists and liberal multiculturalists has exhibited little or no concern about a establishing a definitive nomenclature. The most celebrated members of the camp have been identified as “public intellectuals,” yet prominent Afrocentrists function as public intellectuals also, albeit in a black counterpublic rather than in the bourgeois public sphere.⁵ While McClendon makes a clever bifurcation between “cultural nationalists” (e.g., Afrocentrists) and “cultural critics” (e.g., public intellectuals), this distinction does not capture the ideological differences between the two camps. I suggest that the distinction might be better phrased as a polarity between “cultural nationalists” and “cosmopolitan pluralists.”⁶

Where the cultural nationalists/Afrocentrists pose a cultural grounding or centering in African experience, worldviews and values, the cosmopolitan pluralists emphasize their hybridity as products of a confluence of cultural sources emanating from Europe, Africa and the Americas. Not parochially grounded in Africa, eschewing patriotism or nationalism, they embrace the ideals of membership in both a cosmopolitan or global community and a pluralistic or multicultural American society.

A shorthand nomenclature for the two rival camps or schools of thought has been “the Temple school” and “the Harvard school,” as the black studies departments at these two universities have been the rival centers of influence. The original center of the cultural nationalist/Afrocentric paradigm was Temple University where Molefi Asante, the grand doyen – or rather “the paramount chief” – of Afrocentricity initiated the first Ph.D. program in Africana Studies. The center of the cosmopolitan pluralist paradigm was Harvard’s African and African American Studies Department, especially in the heyday of its Dream Team faculty: Henry Louis Gates, Cornel West, Anthony Appiah, et al.⁷
Subsequently, however, there has been a dispersion of both Afrocentrists and cosmopolitan pluralists to a number of universities, resulting in a decentering of influence – such that formal and informal academic networks have greater influence than singular academic institutions. Two formal networks among the Afrocentrists are the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations (ASCAC) and the National Council on Black Studies (NCBS). ASCAC is devoted to Kemetic (Ancient Egyptian) Studies; the NCBS is the professional organization for academics in the field, yet Afrocentrists wield much influence and cosmopolitan pluralists rarely participate.⁸

Indeed, the cosmopolitan pluralists have utilized a very different strategy than that of the Afrocentrists in carving out their own very influential niche in Africana Studies. Afrocentrists have dominated the discourse in the major journals of Africana Studies (e.g., The Journal of Black Studies, the Western Journal of Black Studies), with the exception of The Black Scholar which in its present incarnation maintains a leftist slant.  The public intellectuals and scholars associated with the cosmopolitan pluralist school of thought have access to mainstream intellectual magazines such as Harper’s and Atlantic Monthly and have created a network of black journals such as Transition and Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire. The discourse in these publications consists of cultural criticism/cultural studies and cultural (artistic/literary) expression rather than prosaic scholarship. Although the cosmopolitan pluralists have on occasion made strong and definitive statements about the nature and scope of Africana Studies, they have not – except possibly in the case of AfroDiasporic Studies – mounted a concerted effort like that of the Afrocentrists to define, determine and defend the territory of Africana Studies.

As co-editor of this volume on leftist perspectives in Africana Studies, I would emphasize that while the volume contributes significantly to an ongoing conversation, it does not represent a definitive statement about the field. I come to Africana Studies with a certain sense of humility, thankfulness and personal fulfillment, a reverence for its mission and tradition, and a profound respect for its pioneers and current practitioners who, in many instances, have blazed a path in academia against heavy odds. It would be hubris of the worst sort to be dismissive of the tradition.

Nevertheless, my reverence does not make me an uncritical participant, nor does it mute my criticism. I share with my co-editor, John McClendon, the following concerns: (1) that the field today is dominated by two opposing tendencies, paradigms or discourses, cultural nationalism and cosmopolitan pluralism; (2) that the centrality of these two warring camps has placed constraints or limitations on the domain of discourse within the field because other tendencies and paradigms have been effectively marginalized; and (3) that this volume of essays represents a concerted struggle by editors and contributors alike to make a radical intervention in the discourse and the field, i.e., to shift the discourse to the left and to shift the Left from the margins of Africana Studies to the center.

However, as co-editors, we bring differing orientations and differing sets of assumptions to the table. First of all, we are rooted in dissimilar foundation disciplines: McClendon in philosophy, where materialist ontology can marginalize the concept of culture; myself in social psychology/social anthropology, where the concepts of culture and acculturation are of prime importance.⁹ Secondly, we are grounded in dissimilar political ideologies, McClendon in classical Marxism and myself in the “black left.”¹⁰ Thirdly, we have competing visions for the future of Africana Studies. My own vision involves a synthesis of the radical leftist and African-centered paradigms, and a moving away from either atavistic Afrocentrism or mechanical Marxism.

Although our differences make for great dynamic tension that has resulted in a

formidable collection of widely divergent articles, the somewhat contentious assumptions which we bring to the table have often been a source of great exasperation for me. Why? Because from my perspective, underlying this debate over theoretical paradigms and modes of discourse in Africana Studies, is a veritable tangle of meta-theoretical issues. For the sake of clarity (both my own and that of our readers), I feel compelled to disentangle some of these issues. Yet to delve into them in depth would be inappropriate for the scope either of this particular collection or of Socialism and Democracy in general. Hence I will touch only briefly upon each issue.

“Of the Coming of John”: Tensions between Academic Excellence and Social Responsibility

The penultimate chapter of Du Bois’s oft-quoted and revered classic The Souls of Black Folk is a relatively uncelebrated short story entitled “Of the Coming of John.” Although less renowned or cited than some other chapters of Souls, it is a richly allegorical tragicomic narrative, densely packed with varied meanings and themes.

In this tale, the colored community of a small southern hamlet gives college-bound John a local hometown hero’s send-off at the railroad station, for he is the town’s first and only Negro boy to pursue a college education. The hopes of the community are riding with him; the impoverished and barely literate townspeople imagine all the great things John will accomplish for them when he returns as a college graduate:

And they that stood behind, that morning in Altamaha, and watched the train as it noisily bore playmate and brother and son away to the world, had thereafter one ever-recurring word, – “When John comes.” Then what parties were to be, and what speakings in the churches; what new furniture in the front room, – perhaps even a new front room; and there would be a new schoolhouse, with John as teacher; and then perhaps a big wedding; all this and more – when John comes.¹¹

Seven years later – many more years than originally anticipated –, John, the college graduate, finally returns home:

Down in Altamaha, after seven long years, all the world knew John was coming… and as the day drew near, warm discussions arose on every corner as to the exact extent and nature of John’s accomplishments. It was noontide on a gray and cloudy day when he came.

The meeting of welcome at the Baptist Church was a failure. Rain spoiled the barbecue, and thunder turned the milk in the ice-cream. When the speaking came at night, the house was crowded to overflowing. The three preachers had especially prepared themselves, but somehow John’s manner seemed to throw a blanket over everything, – he seemed so cold and preoccupied, and had so strange an air of restraint…. The people moved uneasily in their seats as John rose…. He spoke slowly and methodically. The age, he said, demanded new ideas…. [H]e deprecated especially religious and denominational bickering…. “What difference does it make whether a man be baptized in river or wash-bowl, or not at all? Let’s leave all that littleness, and look higher.” Then, thinking of nothing else, he slowly sat down. A painful hush seized that crowded mass. Little had they understood of what he said, for he spoke an unknown tongue.¹²

John’s initial gaffe was his transposed demeanor. When he set off for college he was known for his broad smile and bubbling good-nature which “perpetually … set the quiet [college] dining-room into waves of merriment.” In contrast to his former jovial disposition and that of the “happy, jostling, joking crowd” who came to greet him at the railway upon his return, John was “silent, cold” and distant. “He rose gloomily” when disembarking from the train for his thoughts were preoccupied with the indignities of riding in a Jim Crow car. He was “seized” by “an overwhelming sense of sordidness and narrowness” of the impoverished dilapidated shanty-town which he had once called home. He greeted people with “a dry word” here and there, and had no time to linger for handshaking or small talk. The townspeople were “bewildered,” his relatives “astonished.” This was not the John they knew. They wondered, “Where was his smile and hearty hand-grasp?”

His second transgression was his lecture – in a church, no less – on his modern libertine views of religion. This drew the ire of the church’s minister, who launched into an “awful” yet eloquent sermon in condemnation of John’s heresy, as the congregation “moaned and wept, wailed and shouted,” as an Amen response to the preacher.

John never knew clearly what the old man said; he only felt himself held up to scorn and scathing denunciation for trampling on the true Religion, and he realized with amazement that all unknowingly he had put rough, rude hands on something this little world held sacred.¹³

His further encounters with neighbors and townsfolk did not fare any better:

John [was] thoroughly perplexed. What on earth had come over him? Every step he made offended some one. He had come to save his people, and before he left the depot he had hurt them. He sought to teach them at the church, and had outraged their deepest feelings.¹⁴

On one level “The Coming of John” certainly may be read as a cautionary tale about the estrangement of the Talented Tenth from their communities of origin, i.e., a tale of alienated black intellectuals who “can’t go home again” because a classical liberal arts higher education (and its attendant processes of values-reorientation, consciousness-expansion and self-transformation, etc.) has ill-equipped them to meet the simple expectations or serve the simple pedagogical needs of their people.

It is an allegory ripe with cautionary lessons for Africana Studies scholars in particular, since the central “theme” or “mission” of Africana Studies, cited in the

pioneering textbooks and contemporary literature of the field, is “Academic Excellence and Social Responsibility.”¹⁵ Closely allied to the this theme or mission is the objective of “the cultivation, maintenance and continuous expansion of a mutually beneficial relationship between the campus and the community” expressed in the early Black Studies slogan and call to action, “We must bring the campus to the community and the community to the campus”¹⁶

The litany of black community ills is legion and legend. The inner city is plagued by poverty, substandard housing, failing schools, literacy problems, joblessness, drug trafficking, substance abuse, alcoholism, constant  brushes with the criminal justice system including high rates of incarceration and recidivism and teenage pregnancy, absentee fathers, police brutality,  political disenfranchisement, gentrification, low self-esteem, internalized racism, nihilism, PTSS, etc. Social responsibility entails addressing these ills in theory and in practice. In Africana Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Boston where I teach, there is an opportunity for students to concentrate in a Community Development and Public Policy track, which offers practical intervention strategies. This is in addition to two traditional academic tracks: 1) History, Politics and Social Science; and 2) Literature, Arts, and Cultural Studies; both of which offer insight into community issues. In addition there are plans to further enhance links with the community by establishing both a Department Community Advisory Board, composed of alumni, business leaders, and local government officials (which will figuratively “bring the community to the campus”), and a Communiversity program – an urban based facility which offers an 18-month curriculum in Community Development (which will “bring the campus to the community”).

Academic excellence involves theoretical and methodological rigor. Academic excellence and social responsibility are paired as the twin themes or missions of the field, and neither one should be sacrificed to the other. However, when erudite scholars present issues at a level of abstraction such that the theory does not resonate with the very community that it is aimed at, then something appears to be amiss. It strikes me that when people have bread and butter issues which are a sign of impoverishment, and when they have severe psychological issues which are the mark of oppression, an abstract theoretical argument about changing one’s ontological outlook is not the most socially responsible solution.

It seems unlikely that an ethnic community long anchored in the church as its most important community institution, will abandon Christianity for a materialistic atheistic outlook. Other faith communities – Muslims, Hebrew Israelites, practitioners of African traditional religions such as Yoruba, Akan and Kemetic (Ancient Egyptian) traditions – have significant strongholds in the African American and are equally resistant to atheism. So too are the fraternal and sorority orders which are anchors of African American society such as Freemasonry and Eastern Stars. Their rites and rituals recognize the Grand Architect of the Universe as a supreme deity and they shun “irreligious libertines.” Furthermore the question remains, is such an atheistic outlook necessary in order to mount resistance against oppression or to achieve decolonization, liberation or empowerment? One is reminded of Carter G. Woodson’s observation:

One of the most striking evidences of the failure of higher education among Negroes is their estrangement from the masses, the very people upon whom they must eventually count for carrying out a program of progress.¹⁷

And one is also reminded of Manning Marable’s observation:

The Black Intellectual Tradition in the United States has always been anchored around several axioms or basic principles. As an oppressed people we were faced with “a condition not a theory.” In other words, an abstract theoretical interpretation or our social status had little relevance to our actual situation in this country.¹⁸

What Is the Left, Its Focus and Future?

This, no doubt, is a perennial question, in a community – or rather among communities – of radicals, which are at once international and local, and which have been, at both of these levels, characterized by endless sectarianism, splintering, reversals, regroupments, loss of their model societies to capitalist restructuring, and severe and sometimes debilitating debates over theoretical, strategic and tactical issues. The ever-fluctuating state of the left is perhaps grist for the mill of many articles which have appeared over the decades in Socialism and Democracy and other left-wing journals.

I cannot hope to add anything of great measure to the overall debate, with all of its particularities and nuances, but I raise the question because I have experienced a state of gnawing unease over the hard lines drawn in the sand by my co-editor. My question revolves around the issue of inclusion and exclusion: Who is included in the left and who is excluded, and what are the criteria.

In joining the editorial board of Socialism and Democracy about a decade ago, and in joining S&D’s sister institution, the Brecht Forum/New York Marxist School in the mid-1990s, I did so as a left nationalist, with a long history of involvement in organizational struggle for African American national liberation and socialist transformation.¹⁹ This included decades of cadre study and self-directed study of

scientific socialism (i.e., Marxism-Leninism, Trotskyism, and Maoism – drawing liberally from any and all relevant texts and tendencies, since my socialism was non-sectarian). During my involvement with the Brecht Forum I met and formed strong alliances with other black leftists (left nationalists, black socialists and black feminists), alliances which were instrumental in forming national organizations such as the Black Radical Congress and later the Black Left Unity Network, and my study and practice deepened around a platform which was anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, committed to working-class led struggle, international solidarity with other working class and oppressed peoples, and the elimination of all forms of oppression including patriarchy and homophobia.

As a member of the editorial board of S&D, my intent was to broaden the scope of the journal, i.e., to make it more expansive and inclusive of the theory and the struggles of left tendencies which were heretofore considered marginal or outside of the scope of interest of the traditional white left. As a representative of the organized black left forces, I saw our involvement and solidarity (with both the Brecht Forum and S&D) as grounded in an understanding that, given the specificity of our struggle (which was not merely against class exploitation but also against racial domination /national oppression), we would maintain a level of organizational autonomy. We would not be merely an appendage of the traditional left, but would retain self-determination over our theory and practice.

The Black left is not, however, unique in this regard. Contrary to the analysis offered by Marxist scholar Bertell Ollman in a lecture at the Brecht Forum earlier this decade, in which he stated that the logical path of ideological growth and development is from radicalism to Marxism, the empirical evidence demonstrates that the movement is in the opposite direction. The caveat here is that Ollman was speaking about intra-generational ideological growth and development – the growth and development of some individuals within one generation, specifically the Baby Boomer generation who started out in their youth as members of New Left formations such as SDS and gravitated toward a more serious study of Marxism in their mature years. Certainly this was the case with many African Americans who started out in conventional black nationalist organizations and moved to the study of scientific socialism. But it may not be the case for all generations; certainly, many of the prominent radicals of the 30s and 40s (the New York Intellectuals) moved from radicalism to neo-conservatism – although Stalinism and McCarthyism were unusually pressing external influences on their political trajectory. Furthermore, if we examine the intergenerational trend – the trend across generations rather than within a single Baby Boomer generation – we can see a different trajectory: a movement from the old left or CPUSA of the 1930s/40s to the New Left of the 60s/70s to the New Social Movements, i.e., a movement away from rigid, dogmatic Marxism to a more free form radicalism embracing many tendencies and causes including environmental rights, disability rights, food security, ethnic solidarity, anarchism and various feminisms. The masses of people involved in these New Social Movements have been manifested in the attendance at World Social Forums and US Social Forums.

In celebrating the diversity of the New Social Movements, one is not dismissing the tremendous insights afforded by a serious study of Marx, but one is defending against the very restrictive dogmatic formulations which demand that our struggles for human emancipation must hinge upon ontological materialism.

In some ways however the Left may be coming full circle. According to Leslie Fishbein, author of Rebels in Bohemia, “pre-World War I American radicalism was eclectic and seldom doctrinaire.”20 Fishbein’s book is a study of a free-spirited leftist circle of the 1910s that published the radical journal, The Masses. Described as “bearing more kinship to Bloomsbury than to Petrograd,” they “considered themselves Marxists, but few had thoroughly studied Marx and Engels, and even fewer were willing to accept the ideological restraints or personal discipline of Marxist revolutionaries.”²¹

The approach of these early radicals to “idealism,” spirituality, or religion is very instructive. In a chapter entitled “The Road to Religion,” Fishbein documents that

“many American socialists took the unorthodox position of embracing Christianity while rejecting its institutional embodiment, the church.”²² As pragmatists rather than ideologists, the Socialist party “departed from the Marxist view that all religion was an opiate to repress workers” and instead sought to both attract churchgoers to the party and “tap religion as a vital source in American life.”²³ These free-thinking radicals did not hesitate to attack the hypocrisy of institutionalized religion – including the bigotry, false piety, self-righteousness, wealth and corruption of the church. Yet they praised Christian ideals and viewed the church as a betrayer of Christ, who had denounced the very evils which the church perpetuated in his name. They saw Christianity as a religion of brotherly love. While some sought to transform the image of Jesus into that of a revolutionary, the “first Socialist” and a worker/carpenter, others had a genuine religious sensibility. Religion deepened the “sense of purpose of those who had found personal meaning in rebellion.”²⁴

Apart from the sympathies of the bohemian left for Christianity, the first half of the twentieth century was witness to a long-forgotten movement or tendency known as Christian Socialism, which according to Paul Buhle played a vital role in both the American Left and US life and culture in general.²⁴ Buhle notes that “several of the most popular and widely read theologians of the first half of the [twentieth] century were outspoken Christian Socialists,” including Reinhold Niebuhr. Christian Socialists were successful in “connect[ing] radical ideas with sections of the working class – especially the poor minorities – and with a wide stratum of intellectuals.” They also “had a special appeal to women reformers repelled by the class struggle doctrines of the generally patriarchal immigrant socialist milieu.”²⁶ As individuals, Christian Socialists played important roles during the 1960s in the civil rights and antiwar movements, during the 1970s in campaigns around the United Farmworkers’ boycott, the empowerment of women clergy, the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), and the liberation theology movements in Latin America and the rest of the Third World.

Christians were not the only religious socialists; there is a long and rich history of socialism and Jewish communities, abroad as well as in the US. However, in addition to religion, the complexities of language, ethnicity and culture also come into play, when discussing experiences such as that of the Yiddish Left, so a short discussion would be inadequate and a long one prohibitive. Furthermore, my purpose here is not to give an inventory or survey of all religious socialist communities, but to demonstrate that religious belief and leftist praxis are indeed compatible and that one does not have to start with the assumption of a materialist ontology in order to engage in left politics. This is perhaps well exemplified in Cuba, which in recent decades, after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the introduction of capitalism in China, has been the hope and beacon of the socialist world. In Cuba, the practice of the African-based religion of Santeria, a derivative of West African Yoruba belief and practice, is not merely “tolerated” but extolled as a genuine aspect of the country’s heritage. Moreover, it is neither uncommon nor considered contradictory for members of Cuba’s Communist Party to also be practicing Yoruba priests (Santeros) and priestesses (Santeras).

Marxism versus Afrocentricity: A Satirical View

Although Left discourse may be noticeably marginalized in the present ideological wars between Afrocentricists and cosmopolitan pluralists, such discourse once had a commanding presence in African American Studies. Examples can be found in Abdul Alkalimat’s collection Paradigms in Black Studies, Manning Marable’s review essay in The Left Academy, and the early issues of The Black Scholar (circa 1970s), where a fierce debate between Marxists and nationalists was waged.²⁷ Such debates, which also took place in Black Studies textbooks and in the “Which Way Forward?” debates of the Black Liberation Movement, were riveting, and yet so sharp and intense that they had a debilitating effect on the movement, sapping its vitality. One perhaps has to step back and take a humorous look at these fierce struggles in order to gain perspective. The literary genre of Afrofuturism provides such a venue.

In a special edition of Socialism and Democracy entitled Socialism and Social Critique in Science Fiction, Lisa Yaszek, discusses this genre of black speculative fiction in her article, “Afrofuturism, Science Fiction and the History of the Future.” I was a co-editor and contributor to this collection, but I must now confess to more than just a fan’s, reader’s or critic’s interest in the genre. I also have long experimented as a writer – using pseudonyms until now – in the genre of science fantasy/Afrofuturism. Below is a very short excerpt from a larger work-in-progress. This excerpt allows us to take a humorous look²⁸ at the debilitating debate between Marxists and nationalists/ Marxists and Afrocentrists. My disclaimer is that this is only fiction – a scenario which takes place in an alternate universe – and that no resemblance to any living person is intended.

“I’m writing a novel” said Abu Sunni. It’s about Brooklyn but it’s written like a western. It’s about a shoot-out between the cultural nationalists and the scientific socialists. It’s the Marxist Kid and his posse of hard-drinking, fast shooting dialectical materialists versus the Kwanzaa Kowboy and his ankh-totin’, gun-slingin’ pardners, the Kemetic Konsciousness Krew. Let me read a couple of pages to you:

This here town isn’t big enough for the two of us,” said the Kwanzaa Kowboy. “People don’t need your kind around here, no ways, Stranger. Why, you don’t even speak Swahili! You had your heads in those German and Russian textbooks too long. If you’re not Holistic and African-centered, then you’re just a square.”

“I’m a hard-working proletarian – I don’t need to talk Swahili. I talk in a language that the masses understand: basic economics: who’s doing the work and who’s getting paid. The capitalist ruling class is getting rich off of our sweat and labor, pardner. Running around in Dashikis, chanting ‘Habari Gani’ ain’t gonna change that!

The Kwanzaa Kowboy retorts: “The masses don’t understand a word that you’re saying: absolute and relative surplus value, the fetishism of commodities, the negation of the negation, the Asiatic mode of production, species-being, The Grundisse, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, left Hegelians, bolsheviks, mensheviks, Troskyists, Maoists, Plekhanov’s Monist View of History, Raya Dunayevskaya’s Marxist-Humanism, the Johnson-Forrest Tendency, the Spartacist League, the negative dialectics of the Frankfurt School, Lukacs’s reification, Althusser’s over-determination, Gramsci’s war of manuever and war of position. Why this rhetoric is incomprehensible to the masses, it’s all mumbo jumbo.”

“Nah, ya got that wrong pardner! Your literary analogy broke down! Right author, wrong book. It’s Loop Garoo and Bo Shmo all the way. But what can I expect from a yellow-bellied coward! I come armed with scientific theory, and I can put it into praxis. Let’s see you do the same. You think that you can get away with a lot of metaphysical voodoo with your ancient and medieval texts. You can translate all of the African divination texts from the time of antiquity, but it’s still a cultural sham. Folks need a materialist ideology. We need bread and butter on our tables, shoes on our feet, decent housing to live in. Proverbs from Ancient African feudal societies won’t fill our bellies. We don’t have a cultural crisis; we have structural crisis. A crisis in the economic structure, where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It’s the economy, stupid!” said the Marxist Kid.

“We’ll let the masses decide that. My textbook on Black Studies outsells your Afro-American Studies text ten to one. Plus mine is printed on quality paper not recycled news-sheet like yours. I give the people Seven African Principles to live by – a minimum code of moral values based on tradition and reason. We have to return to the African tradition; we gotta go back to the source. Besides my philosophy is an on-going synthesis of the best of nationalist, pan-Afrikanist AND SOCIALIST thought and practice – and one of my principles is cooperative economics, so I ‘m already hip to the economic aspect of our oppression. As for calling me a yella-bellied coward, if I were you I’d be careful who I’m talking to, pardner, I’ve already taken out some Marxist punks like you … and they were part of the armed-to-the-teeth Black Beret Party,” replied the Kwanzaa Kowboy.

“Cooperative economics!… Organizing people into food coops and other consumer cooperatives works fine on a limited basis at a very local level, but it’s only a tiny part of the solution. We are talking about global capitalism here, neo-imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism. We’re talking about multinational corporations who rape and pillage Third World countries for precious minerals and other raw materials, who conscript a labor force to work under sweatshop conditions for pennies a day, and who then market their products around the world at exorbitant prices raking in billions of dollars in profit. We’re talking about corporations whose assets are greater than the gross national product of most countries – corporations who are the world’s new super-powers. They move capital across borders in an instant. They used to depend on scabs and migrant labor – a work force of undocumented aliens – to break a strike. Instead of migrant labor now they depend on migrant capital: if there is a labor strike in Newark they can pick up stakes and move the capital goods – the entire factory operation – from Newark to Mexico City or Nairobi … and within just a couple of months have the whole thing up and running, and those workers in Nairobi or Mexico City will be paid only one-tenth of the Newark salary…. Then the banks and the real estate moguls foreclose on the mortgages of the unemployed Newark workers and grab up their property which they sell on the market at a higher price. Everybody makes off like a bandit…. The capitalists don’t care about people’s lives, all they care about is maximizing profit. Greed is their only creed…. The only way people can fight back against international capitalists is through the international solidarity of the working class…. Color and race is irrelevant when it comes to the larger picture. Peoples of all races, colors and ethnicities are being screwed by the global system of monopoly capitalism. The masses of the working-class people in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas have the same enemy: the international capitalist class, the fat cat financiers, the big bankers, and the owners and controllers of the multi-national corporations – the so-called ‘Fortune 500 companies.’ As for your threats against my life, everyone knows that you went to war with the Black Beret Party.  The masses had a great respect for the Black Beret Party. The masses understood that they were courageous revolutionaries. It seems to me that anyone who violently opposed the Black Beret Party would have to be part of a counter-revolutionary conspiracy. Lots of folks think that you were paid off by police. You might even be an undercover cop!”

“Paid off by the police! Infiltrated by the police is more like it. And so was the Black Beret Party. Didn’t you read Johnnie Williams’ novel, The Man Who Wept and Ran? J.Edgar Hoover had a King Adolf Plan to prevent the rise of a black Messiah, to turn all black organizations against one another in an all-out fratricidal war, and to herd up the remaining scared and confused masses of black folks into concentration camps to be exterminated like the Jews in Nazi Germany. In Phase One of the plan, all radical black organizations were infiltrated by COINTELPRO, the counter-intelligence program operated by the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency in cooperation with state and municipal police agencies. Both the Black Beret Party and the Kwanzaa Kollective were infiltrated by agent provocateurs. Me and Huey were vying with one another to see who would be the greatest black radical intellectual of the post-Malcolm era. I manifested my kuumba, my brilliant creativity, by creating Kwanzaa, a non-heroic holiday celebrated by 20 million people all around the world. Huey came forth with a neo-Marxist platform of inter-communalism rather than internationalism, and attempted to put Fanon’s theory about the Lumpen into praxis. We were neck and neck competing for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation ‘genius award.’ I wanted to be recognized by the establishment as the greatest black activist genius of my era and so did Huey. The agent provocateurs exploited our rivalries, heightening the antagonisms between our two groups until it erupted into open warfare. As for your comments about globalism: You miss the boat if you think that it’s merely global capitalism which is the enemy. There is a global apartheid system, a worldwide system of racism, which must be defeated. Throughout the globe, wherever you travel – Australia  India, the islands of the Pacific and the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, North America, Europe – you will see the same problem: people of light complexions oppressing people of dark complexions…. We dark-skinned people are the wretched of the earth. As Du Bois said: ‘The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.’ And the solution is the Seven Principles of Darkness, which we celebrate every Kwanzaa as we’ve done for the past thirty years. The Nguzo Saba – the minimum moral value system that dark-skinned people have to practice – if we would only practice SOME of the principles SOME of the time, then we could once again take our place on the human stage of history as a free, proud and productive people. Now raise up your fists in a sixties Black Power Salute and pull them down hard, as we chant seven times in unison, ‘Harambee’ which means that we must all pull together:

Harambee…Harambee…Harambee…Harambee…HARAMBEE…HARAMBEE… HARAMBEE. Now see how cultural that feels, better than singing some old corny ‘Internationale.’ The masses don’t want no abstract theory, they want to feel good. They’ve been beaten down by the European’s racist system and they want to feel good about their blackness, their African identity and their African culture. I know how to rouse up the masses like a Baptist minister.  You just don’t understand the psychology of our people.”

“Well that just shows that you are a behind-the-times Negro. This is the twenty-first century that we’re living in. You’ve got the wrong century, the wrong problem, and definitely the wrong solution. Your feel-good Swahili Shouts will not free us from the yoke of global capitalism. Swahili slogans can’t save us. The only way that the masses will be free is when they read The Collected Works of Marx and Engels – all 48 volumes – and then read the Lenin Library – all 45 volumes. You can’t substitute slogans for study. If the masses come home from work every night and read Marx, Engels and Lenin instead of watching TV, then we would have a revolution.”

“Yeah, trying to read that boring incomprehensible shit would make them angry, irritated and boiling mad enough to want to fight anybody. I told you man, you really are alienated in your own little intellectual world, divorced from the pulse of the people, you know nothing about the psychology of masses.”

“Oh yeah … well I know that you’re trying to use psychology – or should I say Swahili Tricknology – to become the king of the masses. You just want to be The Great Big African Chief.”

“Them is fighting words, pardner. We gonna have to duel this out…. Get ready to draw and get ready to die. You about to meet your Maker – if your dialectical materialist ass believes in a Maker. Draw, mutha fatha…

Synthesis

Pity the poor synthesizer! Once hailed, now reviled! Long believed to be one of the lateralized functions of the right hemisphere of the brain, synthesis – the combining of different ideas, influences, elements or components into a new unified whole – has been recognized by psychologists as one of the cognitive sub-processes crucial to creative thinking. Indeed Marx, a towering creative genius of the modern era, was a grand synthesizer. According to Mandel, Marxism emerged as a quadruple synthesis of 1) the main social sciences, 2) these social sciences and the project of emancipating humanity, 3) the project of human emancipation and the real self-organization and self-emancipation of the modern proletariat, and 4) the real workers’ movement and revolutionary political organization and action.²⁹

It therefore was disconcerting to learn that my co-editor uses the phrase “He’s a synthesist [sic]” as a slur or a pejorative for someone who dares sully Marxism by combining it with non-Marxist concepts – especially those concepts which privilege or give salience to race.³⁰ But my dismay withstanding, let me confess my guilt at the onset, so that there will be no doubt about where I stand on one of the key debates posed in this collection of essays – the issue of Marxism versus Afrocentricity. I am indeed a transgressor, a shameless and unrepentant synthesizer. No, I am not seeking the easy way out by being non-committal, and neither am I, as some might infer, “confused.”  Indeed I do have analytical clarity about the committed political position which I have staked out – a very precarious position perhaps – as I have major problems with the “purists,” “extremists” and doctrinaire dogmatists of both camps. Mine is no middle-of-the-road position designed to enamor or ingratiate myself to the partisans on either side of the fence. On the contrary, I am more likely to infuriate those on both sides of the fence – for I am neither attempting to mend fences nor for that matter am I a fence-sitter who can be swayed or pulled one way or another.

“The Rough-Riders – they sound like a bunch of scum-bags!” said Sapphire.

“Very funny!” retorted Abu Sunni. “Actually they are called the Rough Riders because they can they can ride across any theoretical terrain including the jagged mountain cliffs and the desert valleys of dialectical materialism as well as the savannah plains, jungle-thickets and swamplands of Afrocentricity. But listen to my plot! Homeboy Nationalist and the Rough Riders are a local jazz-funk fusion band and they play at the bar and brothel where both the Marxist Kid and the Kwanzaa Kowboy do their drinking and screwing around. They intervene in the duel and bring the Marxist Kid and the Kwanzaa Kowboy to the bar and brothel to have drinks and pussy on the house – and be entertained by the band. You know that music has charms to soothe the savage beast, so it certainly should calm down these guys. Homeboy Nationalist and the Rough-Riders they play fusion music, they’ve played with Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James, Amilcar Cabral, Walter Rodney, James Boggs, and Robert Allen. They’ve played with George Padmore, Harold Cruse, John Henrik Clarke, Dr. Ben, Jacob Carruthers and Chancellor Williams. They know all the riffs. They know that 6th PAC didn’t refer to tight abs, Heineken or Bud, it was that infamous Sixth Pan African Congress when the band couldn’t decide how to play ‘Which Way Forward?’ Some wanted to start off and end it with strong African Rhythms, others wanted more of an ‘Internationale’ harmony. But Homeboy Nationalist and the Rough Riders know exactly how to play ‘Which Way Forward?’ – blending the sounds of national liberation and class struggle, all the way: ‘Free the land and redistribute the wealth.’ They know how to use their moog synthesizers to deal with discordant elements of thesis and antithesis, and they are masters at improvisation. So they are able to throw down with some serious Afroleftist spiritual dialectics – starting off with a Yin Yang interpenetration of opposites, and jumping back into scientific Sankofism and proletarian Garveyism mode, and then soaring off into some counter-hegemonic Nguzo Saba with expressions of umoja – solidarity and recognition of our non-antagonistic contradictions – with the national bourgeoisie, then expanding the nationalist note into its highest octave which is the Pan Africanist chord, from there traveling into Third World harmony or should I say First World Afro-Asian-Latino alliance, and then flying upwards on the scale till they hit those sweet sounds of revolutionary internationalism with all progressive peoples of the human family on the planet earth. That way they achieve universality without ever giving up their unique cultural identity and heritage, as they struggle against racism, capitalism and imperialism.”

“What about the struggle against sexism?” asked Sapphire.

“Oh, that’s the pistol packing, hard-on riding Homegirl’s specialty! She takes care of that department by herself.”

“That’s crap. Fighting sexism is not just a woman’s struggle. Men need to confront their own sexism, just like white people need to confront their own racism,” Sapphire replied angrily.

“Yeah, if you’re gonna join the universal struggle for human emancipation, then you’re going to have to confront the issues of sexism and homophobia,” said Sappho.

Philosophical Inquiry and Africana Studies Redux

To teach one must know the student; to know the student one must know the student’s symbolism. — Ancient Egyptian Proverb

Several volumes devoted to African American, African Caribbean, African and Africana philosophy have appeared within the past two decades. Of special interest to students of Afrocentric literature who reject the Eurocentric claim that philosophy is a product of Western civilization which emerged in Ancient Greece, are the volumes on African philosophy. Our appetites for books on African philosophy and discourses on the origin of philosophy have been piqued by Yosef ben Jochanaan’s Africa: Mother of Western Civilization, which included documentation of the several pre-Socratic philosophers who studied in the Mystery Schools of Ancient Egypt; George G.M. James’s infamous Stolen Legacy: Greek Philosophy is Stolen Egyptian Philosophy; and Martin Bernal’s equally well-known 3-volume work, Black Athena: The AfroAsiatic Roots of Classical Civilization.

The anthologies edited by Lee Brown, Emmanuael Eze, Tsenay Serequeberhan, and a book authored by Paulin Hountondji, all of which are entitled African Philosophy (with various subtitles ) and the anthology edited by Kwasi Wiredu entitled A Companion to African Philosophy address some of the issues raised by McClendon. Two works by Théophile Obenga, the recent book African Philosophy:The Pharaonic Period: 2780- 330 BC, and an earlier monograph A Lost History: African Philosophy in World History, are of interest also, as they continue the line of research and inquiry about Ancient Egyptian philosophy by ben Jochanaan, James, and Bernal as well as by Maulana Karenga and Jacob Carruthers.³¹

Serequeberhan, in the lead article of his edited volume African Philosophy: The Essential Readings, cites the work of Henry Odera Oruka who identified four trends in African philosophy: 1) ethnophilosophy, 2) philosophic sagacity, 3) national-ideological philosophy and 4) professional philosophy.³² While there are other typologies, such as O. Nkombe and Alphonse Smets fourfold typology: traditional, ideological, critical and synthetic,³³ or Omoregbe’s bifurcation of traditional and contemporary,³⁴ these are simply different mappings of the same terrain. For our present purposes, the Oruka typology will suffice.

Ethnophilosophy, also referred to as traditional philosophy, is philosophy derived from the ethnological study of African ethnic groups, a documentation of the modes of thought which inform traditional values and cultural expression; i.e., the thought-systems, worldviews, cosmologies, mythoreligious conceptions, esoteric knowledge and lived ritual practices of Africans. The self-proclaimed school of African professional philosophers, i.e., academic or Western-trained philosophers, such as Hountondji (who coined the term “ethnophilosophy”) and Wiredu are critical of the notion that ethnophilosophy has any legitimate standing, relevance or validity in the proper field of philosophy. Professional philosophers have sought bridge the gulf with ethnophilosophy by conducting dialogues and interviews with indigenous sages or wise men. The professional philosophers choose the sages who are known to critically reflect upon their ethnic traditions rather than simply be preservers of it, and they direct the questioning so as to uncover “authentic” wisdom.

National-Ideological philosophy is the political response to European imperialism, enslavement, and colonialism. It seeks to redress the oppressed situation of African people and is articulated in formulations such as African socialism, Negritude, Pan-Africanism, Nkrumah’s Consciencism, and scientific socialism. Unlike the oral sources of ethnophilosophy or sagacity, these national-ideological philosophies exist as written texts – books, pamphlets and manifestos. African Americans, too, have produced a black intellectual tradition or black radical tradition which is the response to enslavement, segregation and oppression, and this has been labeled “philosophy born of struggle.” While some would recognize a fluid continuum from ethnophilosophy to professional philosophy, others within professional philosophy are hard put to identify anything but their own school, which they view as an agent of science and modernization for Africa, as legitimate philosophy.

Innocent Onyewuenyi, a contributor to Serequeberhan’s edited volume, turns this criticism around and questions the relevance to African peoples of the professional or Western academic school of philosophy, in the following argument, which summarizes and extends the criticisms of Western philosophy made by Gabriel Marcel, a Western philosopher:

[Marcel] criticized any philosophy which aims at constructing a conceptual system with propositions rigidly connected by dialectical relations – evidenced in the post-Kantian systems. He regards as absurd the presumption that the universe could be encapsulated in a more or less related set of formulas….

What he is criticizing here is what I call Western philosophy as an academic and dehumanized philosophy. It was a disease that divorced thought from life. Philosophy became highly abstract, lifeless and artificial, emptied of real content. Human beings no longer knew what it meant to exist. Thinking overshadowed existence. ³⁵

This is the first major point that I wish to make regarding the analysis utilized by McClendon in his present article, “Materialist Philosophical Inquiry and African American Studies.” I quote Onyewuenyi, because as an African philosopher, he articulates what I urgently and intuitively felt – that the philosophical exposition on materialism was rather cold, abstract and lifeless. This seemed patently evident, yet as an outsider without any grounding in the discipline of philosophy I was reluctant to articulate it. Indeed, with my grounding in psychological literature I find a corroborating argument in Joel Kovel’s White Racism: A Psychohistory. In a chapter entitled “Radix Malorum” (“The Root of Evil”), Kovel states that the symbol of whiteness to which Western Civilization lays claim, represents a negation, a removal of color. The achievements of the West depend on “the application of a pure form of thought – rational; scientific, ‘whitened’ – to the diverse problems of civilization.”³⁶ Kovel adds that this highly abstract thought and purified will, élan, restless zeal or fanaticism are guarantors of the power of the West. Here I simply wish to rephrase Kovel’s concept of “whitened” thought. Basic social psychological research on attitude formation and attitude change has shown that all attitudes have cognitive (thought), affective (feeling) and conative (action) dimensions. I would argue that the Western rationalist mode of thought has denuded attitudes of their affective component. Cold and purely logical abstract thought (“Spock-like” if we may use a metaphor from popular culture) is unacceptable in cultural contexts where the affective dimension of attitudes, beliefs, and opinions is highly regarded and respected. Attitudes and beliefs about religion and cultural traditions, for example, have a strong affective dimension. Abstract materialist arguments against religion or culture hold very little weight. Instead, they are deemed as offensive or as a cultural affront.

My second point builds on the first. Kwame Gyekye, utilizing the ethnophilosophical approach, states that “African ontology appears to be essentially spitirtualistic, although this does not imply a denial of the reality of the non-empirical, non-spiritual world.”³⁷ Citing John Mbiti’s assertion that in African conceptions “the spiritual and the physical are but two dimensions of one and the same universe,” Gyekye goes on to argue that “African ontology. . . is neither idealistic – maintaining that what is real is only the spirit, nor materialistic (naturalistic) – maintaining that what is real is only matter, but possesses attributes of both.”³⁸ Gyekye’s position would be subsumed by materialist philosophers under the particular category of idealism which doesn’t deny material reality but renders the material dimension of life as subordinate to spiritual affairs.³⁹ Nevertheless, Gyekye’s statement about African ontology is in agreement with anthropologist Marimba Ani’s statement that the “essence of the African cosmos is spiritual reality.” However, he does not delve into murky waters as Ani does, according to McClendon, by making misplaced assertions about Plato or conflating materialism with rationalism. Gyekye states that while Western epistemology has acknowledged reason (rationalism) and sense experience (empiricism) as the two main sources of knowledge, paranormal cognition or extrasensory perception has not been recognized by Western philosophy as a valid source of knowledge. However clairvoyance, telepathy, precognition, etc. are considered important ways of knowing in African epistemology. Western parapsychology, of course, is a long established field, but Western philosophy does not accept its findings, and Western academic psychology has been slow to do so as well.⁴⁰

Returning to McClendon’s criticism of Ani, he pejoratively ascribes to Ani a construct of bifurcated modes of thought: “Western rationality and African irrationality.” This probably can be rephrased with more neutrality. Ani makes a distinction between African cultures and Western cultures based on the relative emphasis which these cultures place on the dominant modes of thought ascribed to the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Western culture tends to overemphasize the importance of the left hemisphere modalities of logic, analysis and reason and de-emphasize the significance of the right hemispheric modalities of synthesis and intuition and – according to the parapsychologists – extrasensory perception. African cultures in contrast prioritize these right hemispheric modalities.

Lived experience becomes the final arbiter here. Materialist philosophical inquiry or analysis cannot refute what people have personally experienced. Experience is after all the best teacher. Were this another venue, perhaps abundant anecdotes would be appropriate, but one’s exposition and arguments are restricted in form and content here. However, let us simply say that while there is certainly no shortage of charlatans claiming to be seers, tea readers, psychics, or numerological advisors (dispensing advice about lucky numbers to play in various Lotto games), etc., who are ever ready to prey upon the gullible and fleece the pockets of the forlorn, the African American community nevertheless is richly laden with grandmothers, aunts, fathers, wives, etc., who are in the African American idiom “open” – i.e. receptive to psychic intuition and other forms of paranormal cognition – and who give unexpected, unsolicited, unpaid for and uncanny advice. The recipients of such advice, more often than not, give it precedence over any contrary inclinations based purely on logic or reason. Psychic dreams, premonitions, visions – these are all part of the fabric of our lives. The same may be said about spirituality. Regardless of the exoteric or exterior forms which religions may take, there is a common thread running through them all, which speaks of cosmic consciousness, a communication with the unseen, a tuning in to the vibrations of a Higher Universal Force or Energy, i.e., a recognition of The Most High. This esoteric wisdom is woven into the fabric of the African American community. The collection of philosophical sagacity could be conducted amongst the wise men and women in Afro-America just as it is conducted in Africa: and it would yield many conversations centered on esoteric spirituality and the knowledge apprehended by the “sixth sense” or the “Third Eye.” To run counter to this with a materialistic/atheistic philosophy is to run counter to “the cosmological sensibilities” which McClendon denies exist. This does not suggest that spirituality, mysticism or extrasensory perception are the exclusive province of any race; it is simply to state that materialist philosophy is antithetical to African American culture.  Neither does this suggest that African American culture is hopelessly mired in the nebulous world of spirituality, mysticism and metaphysics. African American philosophical sages would say that we live in a multi-layered universe, where metaphysical laws apply to certain layers of reality, and the laws of economics apply to other layers.

Finally, McClendon states, in the second paragraph of his article:

The tradition of teaching philosophy in the United States has been (and continues to be) focused mainly on European/Western/Euro-American/white philosophers and the cultural landscape and experiences that form the social and intellectual context for professional philosophical work in general.

One fails to see how the analysis provided by McClendon departs in any way from this tradition. I would argue that one cannot simply apply Eurocentric theory and methodology to the analysis of the African or African American experience. On the other hand, Africana philosophy has much to offer to the discipline of Africana Studies – and to socialist thought.⁴¹ There is a rich legacy of African philosophy as well as a rich legacy of African American and African Caribbean intellectual tradition – the Diasporic counterpart of Oruka’s national-ideological philosophy – encompassing the work of thinkers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Walter Rodney, which has been variously labeled as “speaking truth to power,” “philosophy born of struggle,” “Africana critical theory,” and “Caliban’s reason.”⁴² While much of this intellectual tradition is radical, it is not necessarily Marxist. Instead it is an indigenous tradition which is often interwoven with Marxism. Indeed, Cedric Robinson opens his book Black Marxism with a query concerning whether Marxism and Black Radicalism, “two programmes for revolutionary change… may be so distinct as to be incommensurable.”⁴³ Robinson states that Marxism is a conceptualization of human affairs and historical development which is emergent from the historical experiences of European peoples, mediated, in turn, through their civilization, their social orders and their cultures. Certainly its philosophical origins are indisputably Western. But the same must be said of its analytical presumptions, its historical perspectives, its points of view.⁴⁴

Robinson argues that the Black Radical Tradition has been obscured by whites, as the West has suppressed Europe’s previous knowledge of the African past.⁴⁵ The denial of black history by Europeans, the enslavement of Africans and creation of “the Negro,” the historical, organic and integral relationship of the slave trade and slave labor to modern world capitalist economy not only at the “primitive accumulation” pre-capitalist stage of history but for the next three centuries of capitalist development, in Robinson’s estimation, rendered the Marxist interpretation of history and theory of revolution, with its preoccupation with proletarian class struggle in the industrial and manufacturing centers of capitalism, inadequate and insufficient. Out of this more complex capitalist world system, revolutionary forces emerged initially in the African Diaspora and then in colonized Africa, informed by their own historical experiences and developing movements and theories that were only “vaguely anticipated in the radical traditions of the West.”

The indigenous thought of African peoples – ranging from the Ma’atian ethics of classical African antiquity to the contemporary unfolding of the Black Radical Tradition – is the paramount contribution that the discipline of philosophy can offer to the field of Africana Studies.

Groundings with My Sisters

Layli Phillips, editor of The Womanist Reader, states that

Womanism is a social change perspective rooted in Black women’s and other women of color’s everyday experiences and everyday methods of problem-solving in everyday spaces, extended to the problem of ending all forms of oppression for all people, restoring the balance between people and the environment/nature and , and reconciling life with the spiritual dimension… [W]omanism is not feminism. Its relationships to feminism (including Black feminism) are important but its relationships to other critical theories and social justice movements are equally important…. Unlike feminism and despite its name, womanism does not emphasize or privilege gender or sexism, rather it elevates all sites and forms of oppression [e.g.] race, gender and class….⁴⁶

Phillips and her pioneering cohorts such as Clenora Hudson-Weemshave created an independent model of radicalism which acts as a beacon for those in the Black Left who are caught in a quandary between Marxism and Black Liberation ideologies. Indeed, and I say this entirely “tongue in cheek,” they have exhibited more “testicularity” than many brothers, by their clear decision to make a clean break from Western or Eurocentric forms of radicalism, and to articulate a vision of their own.

A couple of decades ago, more in jest than in earnest, I coined the term “Afroleftist” (in punning contrast not to the “African-centeredness” of Afrocentrism, but to its centrist and even center-right political stance) to define my own space on the political map. This captured my dual African-grounded orientation and radical left leanings as well as any other previously worn moniker – e.g. revolutionary nationalist, left nationalist, etc. – and with more self-explanatory efficiency and fewer burdens or repercussions than these other cumbersome and value-laden (e.g. negatively connoted) terms.

However, labels fall short, even though there is a profusion of them – e.g. Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism which embraces a Marxism informed and shaped by an autonomous Black Radical Tradition (and contrasted with McClendon’s Marxism in Ebony, i.e., Eurocentric Marxism in blackface), Rod Bush’s Black Internationalism, and the Black Left (a united front concept which opts to minimize ideological definition in order to maximize membership).

One is compelled to define one’s stance by distancing oneself from what one is not. I am not an Asanteist (an Afrocentrist as defined by Molefi Asante), and if McClendon’s philosophical materialism defines Marxism, then I must say as Marx himself did, “What is certain is that I myself am not a Marxist.”⁴⁷ Clenora Hudson-Weems states that “Rather than create their own paradigm and name and define themselves, some Africana women, scholars in particular, have been persuaded by White feminists to adopt or to adapt to the White concept and terminology of feminism.”⁴⁸ Guided by the our Womanist sisters, black men and women on the left should become engaged in the struggle to create our own paradigm and name, and to define ourselves, rather than being persuaded by the Eurocentric left to adopt or adapt to the Eurocentric concept and terminology of Marxism.

One may also look back to our roots in the movements which arose organically in our inner city communities in the late 60s and early 70s. Those who embraced leftist thought eschewed the term “Marxism,” preferring to refer to our philosophy as “scientific socialism.” This was not only a movement away from glorifying the canon of thought produced by DWEMs (dead white European males) but more importantly it made a distinction between Marxism – which as articulated by some is little more than a stagnant or moribund dogma – and scientific socialism, a methodology of struggle and an ever-evolving vibrant, dynamic and open system of critical analysis.

The Future of Africana Studies

Michael Dawson notes that “radically different visions of the road to freedom” have both shaped and divided the black community.⁴⁹ “Black ideological visions have structured black political discourse, invigorated oppositional black protest movements and caused bitter internal conflicts throughout African American history.”⁵⁰ As an academic field rooted in social movement and struggle, Africana Studies draws into its ranks many scholars who are energetic and passionate about the freedom of African peoples – and who hold competing visions of freedom. The energy and passion for liberation is usually translated or manifested as an energy and passion for dismantling oppression.

When this energy and passion fall short of their desired goal, they are turned inward and we begin dismantling each other.⁵¹ Indeed the bitter vituperative infighting which plagues our inner city communities and results in social implosion – the violent inward collapsing and destruction of community life⁵² – is mirrored in the devastating  ideological wars endemic to black academia. While the early slogan and call to action of Black Studies was “We must bring the campus to the community and the community to the campus,” we may have unwittingly brought some of the worst community ills to the campus, reproducing gangsta and thug life on an intellectual level. We participate in academic drive-by shootings, gang wars and turf battles with paradigms and theories as our guns and bullets.⁵³

To their credit, Afrocentrist scholars identifying the roots of our antagonisms – whether on the street corner or in academia – as Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome (i.e., internalized colonialism), have stressed the need for communal healing.⁵⁴ Healing –making whole again that which has been rent asunder.

Leftist and African-centered discourses, poised so often as polar opposites, actually have a unifying common denominator, a counter-hegemonic focus. One stresses the ravages of capitalism; the other stresses the ravages of white supremacy. Yet there are many interpretations and iterations of Leftist praxis and African-centered praxis, i.e., many Marxisms and many Afrocentricities; neither paradigm is monolithic. In the future and for the future of Africana Studies, we hope to create anthologies which veer away from destructive debilitating debate between the rigid, closed, dogmatic articulations of Marxism and Asanteism, and veer instead towards harmonious healing dialogue between the flexible, open, permeable, and progressive renditions of scientific socialism and African-centered thought (counter-hegemonic positions which are not mutually exclusive).  In doing so, we hope to shape a comprehensive ideological vision. A decolonizing vision which takes into account both global capitalism and global apartheid. A synthesis. Indeed such a synthesis will be a “return to the source,” a return to the great tradition of Cheik Anta Diop, the Senegalese Marxist scholar who pioneered the African-centered study of Nile Valley Classical Civilizations.

As a community of scholars working towards the goal of Africana liberation we need this dialogue, synthesis, and return. We need the healing. We don’t need the drive-bys.

Sankofa! A luta continua!

Notes

1. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey; A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). See pages xxv-xxvi for Gates’s initial discussion of the Talking Book. For a discussion of “call and response,” see John F. Callahan, In the African-American Grain: Call and Response in Twentieth Century Black Fiction, 2^nd ed. (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 14-17.

The Du Boisian Epistemic Rupture

In its fullest sense, Du Bois’s work constitutes an epistemic rupture. Standing against the egoistic and universalizing project of Western civilization and scientific practices, Du Bois proposed an alternative civilizational grounding for thought and scientific inquiry.² The Du Boisian epistemic rupture, therefore, transgressed the philosophical, theoretical, civilizational and practical modalities of European knowing. His was a strategic rupture creating what I consider was a revolution in social science.³ From his self-identified African theoretical and epistemological locations he sought to change the epistemic conditions of knowing and of the black struggle.⁴ He lived and worked on the margins of white academic and intellectual practices, in organic relationships to ordinary black folk and from within what he famously called the Veil;⁵ that is he worked as a black man in Jim Crow and white supremacist America. He confronted the reality that like black people generally he was devalued and his work generally dismissed. He emerged organically from the life worlds of Africans in America. He asserts in the most transgressive civilizational sense, (in a way that subverts the European notion of its universality and superiority) the centrality of Africa to black folks’ self-identity and to humanity’s knowledge of  its history and itself. He viewed himself as an African.⁶ This identity and his organic links to the black masses shaped his worldview and research.

A Revolution in Human and Social Science

Starting with his empirical studies of black folk and race he proceeded to radically rethink the human and social sciences.⁷ This led him to  new ways of engaging the global systems of race, class, national and gender domination and oppression. His rethinking emerged from the African lived world and equally from what he early on saw as the crisis of European democracy and hegemony. The color line, slavery and colonialism were the foundations of Europe and its hegemony, but they were also signifiers and sources of the crisis of Europe. When Du Bois spoke of the problem of the 20^th century being the problem of racial oppression, he was suggesting that the color line produced a deep crisis of Europe and of European civilization (Souls of Black Folk, “Of the Dawn of Freedom” (1903/1986).⁸What he began and than carried out for most of his life, was a decisive break with the European view of humanity. He created new foundations of social knowledge. He invents a new way of scientifically studying Africans and ultimately humanity. His is the first decisive break with the idea that knowledge is essentially a European thing, and that European knowledge was universal. He insists and demonstrates in practice that the study of history and modernity from a European standpoint distorts knowledge.⁹ What comes out of European philosophy and human studies was Eurocentric and prejudiced in favor of humanity’s minority, white folk.

As he conceived things, to scientifically study race in the modern world, new epistemological foundations for the social sciences were necessary. In actuality, this meant superseding conventional sociology, which was white and essentially positivistic. The principal positivists of the 19^th century were August Comte and Herbert Spencer. They viewed sociology as a discipline that could resolve human contradictions through knowledge. For Du Bois social and human science engages complexities in the human world. Social and human science as a species of thought – rather than a means to resolve contradictions and smoothing out complexities – engages them and in so doing generates further complexities, at the levels of thinking and consciousness.

Du Bois viewed transformative and purposeful action as the means to resolving the contradictions of the social world and of thought. He transgresses the epistemic egoism and racial and civilizational arrogance of European and American thinkers. He rethinks European constructions of world history, especially of Africa and Asia. He eschews Europeans notions of progress. He detaches time and being from their Eurocentric groundings. The conventional Eurocentric conception links time and being to European history and European events, begining with ancient Greece and Rome; African time and being, in the Du Boisian construal, is linked to African history and African events and proceeds to ancient Greece and Rome. It starts with humanity’s prehistoric beginnings in Africa. History is, as his work suggests, a measure of human time, not of progress as conceived as an upward linear trajectory culminating in European man. For him, human time did not proceed linearly, but could be both linear and cyclical. He rejected European teleology, with its sense of the inevitability of European domination of humanity. In its place he proposed the idea of historical uncertainty, conceived as irony, and human possibilities, coming out of the human striving for freedom.

Race, the Ever Present Concrete

Race is the ever-present concrete, and the central problematic in modern history  Du Bois’s research project. Race, for him, is not an abstract notion, nor  primarily a subjective reality; it is the over-determining concrete presence in the lives of Africans and the modern world. He studied race as concrete social relationships. He , therefore, sought to deploy philosophy as part of  his efforts to understand race  and race relationships scientifically. His concerns with philosophy were not with abstractions and pure essences, but with practical philosophy, that is, how philosophy could assist research practices in history and sociology. He sought to apply philosophy to history, so as to engage concrete social relationships and social structures.¹⁰ He believed that we could know the  world as it exists and through knowing it change it.

Race is not, in the first instance, a social invention. It is socially and historically constituted concrete relationships between human beings. What he calss race relationships include colonialism, national oppression, racialized slavery and the forms of racial discrimination and oppression in the United States. Hence, race manifested  in history and takes on concrete social structural forms. It is not primarily prejudices or subjective attitudes. He proceeds from the assumption of an objective material world which is independent of  our subjective or conscious recognitions of it. He held that human relationships are concrete and material relations. He therefore believed that they could be understood scientifically, rather than speculatively, as was the case with Herbert Spencer. Furthermore, as he argues in “Sociology Hesitant” (1905), are part of the  production and reproduction of the human order.  In works such as Black Reconstructiuon in America Du Bois’s notion that race relationships are concrete and produce and reproduce modernity parallels Marx’s in the Grundrisse and anticipates what Sartre asserts in Critique of Dialectical Reason.¹¹ Truth for him is not Absolute or final, it is process. It is a movement of the subject – the agent of knowledge – to a fuller recognition of that which is not dependent upon her/his consciousness but which intersects with consciousness and subjectivity.

Du Bois’s idea of applying philosophy to history is his way of arguing that philosophy must be made practical. Philosophy for him was the science of the abstract and the ideal. He looked upon philosophy as the theoretical apparatus for empirical social science. At the same time he viewed history as the critical condition for understanding human relationships. How to make metaphysics practical is the question that engaged him at Harvard. One choice could have been the route of pragmatism as developed by William James. Another might have been modern phenomenology as initially articulated by Edmund Husserl. Each would have led away from the search for truth and understanding the concrete world scientifically and towards, especially in the case of Husserl, abstraction in methodology and an emphasis upon the individual subject in social analysis. A last choice, one he embraced, was to apply philosophy to history to produce a new knowledge field he called sociology. New in that he reimagined the field which since August Comte went under the name sociology. This is not to say he was the first to use the term, but that he re-imagines the field. Certainly he does something vastly different from what American sociologists were doing. He brings both history and philosophy to the table. But he unites them. He makes philosophy practical and he underpins social science with a sense of abstraction and conceptualization. He was, therefore, deeply concerned with the rational conditions of knowing. In this regard he was not a pure empiricist. At the level of thought he believed knowledge was grounded in social relationships. Yet he did not end there. He realized that the scientist must go from the abstract to the concrete and return to the abstract in a continual process, increasingly understanding the world more deeply. This continual tension between the abstract and the concrete is the definition of science as Du Bois argues in “Sociology Hesitant.” To avoid the abstract and the conceptual dimensions of sociology is to impoverish it, leaving it a shell that collects facts, with very little to say about the present or future worlds and without moral or ideological commitments – which were of paramount significance to Du Bois.

He is throughout aware of ontological, existential and epistemological issues – issues of being and knowing – in the discovery of truth and the working up of knowledge. Yet these issues only made sense to the extent that they informed his understanding of and research on the concrete social world. For him, the field of race and human studies is historical, practical and theoretical. Yet, in working through this he was in effect showing how the intellectual process of going from the abstract to the concrete, from the subjective to the objective, from the ideal to the material, could be carried out and what could be produced in terms of knowledge and research. Although he was not aware at this time (the early 20^th century) of Karl Marx’s Grundrisse (notebooks on political economic methodology and theory and their relationships to Hegelian philosophy), his thought parallels Marx’s. Marx called his method “rising from the abstract to the concrete”; he saw this as the “only way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind” (1973: 101). Du Bois’s notion of making philosophy practical is similar. If one takes the entire body of his work, what we see is the constant back and forth between abstraction and concrete studies and returning again to the abstract and the conceptual. The change in his position on race over the course of his life was grounded in this approach. The process was a continual feedback loop. As new knowledge appeared, he would attempt to account for it accordingly.

A Metaphysic of the Concrete

In a 1956 letter to Herbert Aptheker (1956/1978: 394) concerning Aptheker’s recently published book History and Reality, Du Bois once again talks about his philosophy. In this letter he anticipates what he would say in the Autobiography concerning philosophy, history and sociology. He tells Aptheker he went to Harvard seeking Truth, “which I spelled with a capital.” He continues, “For two years I studied under William James while he was developing Pragmatism; under [George] Santayana and his attractive mysticism and under [Josiah] Royce and his Hegelian idealism.” Out of these two years, he tells us, “I then found and adopted a philosophy which has served me since; thereafter I turned to the study of History and what has become Sociology.” He said he wished to express his “philosophy more simply”:

Several times in the past, I have started to formulate it, but met such puzzled looks that it remains only partially set down in scraps of manuscript. I gave up the search of “Absolute” Truth; not from doubt of the existence of reality, but because I believe that our limited knowledge and clumsy methods of research made it impossible now completely to apprehend Truth. I nevertheless firmly believe that gradually the human mind and absolute and provable truth would approach each other and like the “Asymptotes of the Hyperbola” (I learned the phrase in high school and was ever after fascinated by it) would approach each other nearer and nearer and yet never in all eternity meet. I therefore turned to Assumption–scientific Hypothesis. I assumed the existence of Truth, since to assume anything else or not to assume was unthinkable. I assumed that Truth was only partially known but that it was ultimately largely knowable, although perhaps in part forever unknowable.

Because of this partly “forever unknowable” aspect of Truth, Du Bois rejected Herbert Spencer’s search for Eternal Laws of human society and its extreme positivism. He returned in 1897 to the academic philosophy of his Harvard years and William James’s pragmatism. “The Jamesian Pragmatism as I understood it from his lips was not based on the ‘usefulness of a hypothesis, as you put it, but on its workable logic if its truth was assumed.” James was an agnostic in terms of the possibilities of knowing the world, and therefore pessimistic about changing it. He rejected the method of proceeding on the basis of a hypothesis about the world. For James we only know what is in our heads or what is given to our minds through the senses. There are no provable statements about the world that were valid or “useful.” Hence, logic, or games of grammar, manipulating statements about things, is the best we can hope for. Thus James, unlike Du Bois, became one the founders of American psychology rather than sociology. James was concerned with understanding and edifying the individual, Du Bois with uplifting his race; James pursued a science of the mind in isolation, Du Bois a science of social behavior. Du Bois puts history at the center of his intellectual and scholarly efforts; James’s method was a-historical. Each started from philosophy, but they ended up in opposite places.

Du Bois completes this short exegesis through philosophy and science with the following observation, “I assumed Cause and Change. With these admittedly unprovable assumptions, I proposed to make a scientific study of human action, based on the hypotheses of the reality of such actions, of their causal connections and of their continued occurrence and change because of Law and Chance.” And then a remarkable definition of sociology: “I called Sociology the measurement of the element of Chance in Human Action.” This connection of Law and Chance suggests Du Bois’s acute understanding of the possibility of infinite variation (à la quantum mechanics) and the connection of variation to Law or regular patterns. Reality, for Du Bois is complex, variable and changing.¹² There exists a dynamic between variation and regularity, between Chance and Law, or between law and uncertainty. Sociology, therefore, not only studies the given regularities, or Laws in human behavior, but, in Du Bois’s definition, the measurement of Chance (I read possibilities) in Human Action. The social universe in the Du Boisian construal is a dynamic state, much like a quantum physical state or that envisioned by chaotic dynamic principles. The world, however, in spite of its complex dynamism is knowable, at least in part. The social scientist while attempting to know the object of knowledge is constantly developing methods of research that will make it possible to know more and more about a reality that is never absolutely knowable. However, when it comes to human action the realm of chance reveals the possibilities of laws.

Du Bois challenged a fundamental assumption of Eurocentric social thinking, the idea that only Europeans and only European societies were worthy of scientific investigation. Indeed Africans were civilized. In his 1897 paper before the American Academy of Social and Political Sciences, he says that the Negro “is a member of the human race, and as one who, in the light of history and experience, is capable to a degree of improvement and culture, is entitled to have his interests considered according to his numbers in all conclusions as to the common weal.” And he concluded, “The American Negro deserves study for the great end of advancing the cause of science in general.”  Africans, in the European mind, were no more than objects of history, having barely emerged from the state of nature. Social science as a study of human agency could, by definition, not extend to Africans. Biology and physical anthropology, in their 19^th-century racist versions, were considered the appropriate fields for the study of Africans.¹³

History, Structures, Totalities and Time

Hegel’s Science of Logic, despite its centrality to his philosophy, is not sufficient for understanding his historical methodology. The Phenomenology of Spirit is his epistemology, his theory of knowing; the Science of Logic is concerned with time, development, emergence and structures. Hegel’s view of history as a dialectical process is critical to investigating Du Bois’s notion of African Being, especially as it emerges from history, rather than as a static phenomenon.¹⁴

While I embrace Hegel’s dialectical logic and dialectical methodology in understanding history and evolution, I reject his white supremacy and idea that Africans had neither history nor what he called world historic consciousness. Du Bois’s historicism and phenomenology undermine Hegel’s racism, by anchoring history to material and concrete human realities rather than idealism and speculation and by investigating the lived worlds of Africans.

Of Hegel’s work, perhaps his Phenomenology of Spirit was most familiar to Du Bois. However, there is evidence throughout Du Bois’s writing of a familiarity with Hegelian dialectical logic. There is no sense of Hegelian teleology in Du Bois’s work. Du Bois does, however, acknowledge historical possibilities and the inevitability of transcendence. His work treads the fine line between historical contingency and logical necessity. Like Hegel he situated himself in his time.¹⁵ He was part of his moment yet at the same time, a scientific observer and analyst of it. His consciousness was both of the moment, and what was pregnant in it. For instance, Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness reflects a dialectical relationship, a unity and struggle of opposite forces in one dark body. We literally have the worldviews of two civilizations in conflict and struggle within the black mind. This double consciousness is a manifestation of a clash of civilizations, a contradiction that will be resolved by the decline of European hegemony and the transformation of human civilization. The working out of the dialectic within the consciousness of the black individual is a struggle between the hegemon of the modern world, the other (the African past), and the human future. Pregnant within the conflict in each black person is the future beyond European hegemony, an historical movement from the Age of Europe to the Age of Humanity.

Historical Ontology and Civilizational Historicism

This leads us to a discussion of historical ontology. I consider civilizational historicism, Clarence J. Munford’s (2001) methodological and philosophical apparatus, to be a form of historical ontology. The existential philosopher Martin Heidegger (1925) precedes Foucault in attempting to understand the historical conditionality of being and what Hacking (20040 calls the historical ontological. Munford’s historical materialist perspective views historical Being as historically constituted concrete collectivities, such as races, civilizations, classes and nations. Nonetheless, historical ontology is a way of speaking about and understanding social phenomena, as they exist in historical time. Civilizational historicism is a way of understanding African historical Being in African historical time. It seems that Munford’s method works best in this robust relativist manner, attempting to understand the historically unique space occupied by Africans in the epoch beginning with the trans-Atlantic slave trade. However, the historical a priori, i.e. the civilizational dimension, would insist upon pinpointing those beliefs, values, modes of production, culture etc. that precede the African holocaust of slavery and colonialism. Subsequent evolution produced racialized civilizations – not only African and European, but also Chinese, Indian, Arab and South American.

In modern history, European cultures and peoples have congealed as a white civilization which, because of white supremacy, colonialism and imperialism, stands apart from the rest of humanity. This is Frantz Fanon’s argument in Wretched of the Earth. The racialization of civilizations is the decisive outcome of the socio-historical processes associated with modernity, as Du Bois argued in “The Conservation of Races” (1897). Hence, white civilization, and the concomitant predisposition among the majority of the world’s white people to white supremacy, overdetermines historical relations in the modern epoch. In the 21^st century, however, a transition is taking place from the epoch of European civilizational hegemony to a human civilizational grid organized on the basis of civilizational equality. The nexus that defined the relationships between white civilization and the rest of humanity is on its way out.

Understanding this process requires methodological complexity and flexibility. This specific dialectics of African time and Being conditioned by African civilization and its negation – white supremacy and European capitalism – is the historical object to be understood, the concrete universal. Civilizational historicism tries to avoid the pitfalls of essentialism, so often associated with certain forms of Afro-centrism, while preserving the category essentiality as a part of the understanding of reality and the working up of knowledge. More importantly, what Munford seeks to capture in the historical a priori are those conditions that determine the historical moment, or the historical epoch. The historical a priori of white or European civilization for Munford is white supremacy, on the one side, and its opposite Africa without civilization, and Asia of inferior civilizations. The European historical a priori is grounded in this inevitable dialectic.

In Black Skin White Mask (1967: 12), Fanon identifies European or white civilization as a massive psycho-existential complex. Its existence assumes the African, or African civilization, as the objectified racial other of white history. By removing the African from history as subject or agent you distort her/his historical being and consciousness, designating it as false or pathological, or, as with Hegel, outside of history because the African stands outside world consciousness, hence lacking human identity. Munford’s project assumes, with Fanon, the centrality of Black folk to the existence of the white world system and to its eventual replacement. Lewis Gordon in Frantz Fanon and the Crisis of European Man (1996) understands his intellectual project as a disruptive intervention into European consciousness. Gordon believes that investigations of black and white consciousness and bad faith, i.e. denial of racial oppression, expose the functions of anti-black racism and white supremacy. Praxis for Gordon is the philosophico-ideological investigation of white bad faith. Gordon’s perspective is philosophically grounded in Husserl’s phenomenological method; as such, it is ahistorical. The African subject’s identity is realized through her/his relationships with white subjects. Gordon in the end replaces Fanonian and Du Boisian historicism with Husserlian intersubjective investigation. His research focuses on the subject of social reality.¹⁶

Methodological Mutations and Evolutions within Race Research

Theories should be subjected to regular critique and self-criticism; furthermore, the objects of race inquiry themselves are constantly evolving and mutating. Races, as Du Bois understood, are dynamic historically constituted social and cultural groups. Races are subject to mutations, sometimes quite dramatic ones. Just as races mutate, so do racial identities. Methodologies must similarly evolve and mutate to account for this. The idea of absolute and unchanged epistemologies and methodologies goes against the grain of scientific and philosophical inquiry. Thomas Kuhn (1996: chs. IX, X) drew attention to this, capturing the mutability and changeability of paradigms, including at times the emergence of revolutionary and subversive paradigms. Imre Lakatos (1986: 47-62) spoke of the evolutionary processes whereby the research landscape experiences challenges leading to new revolutionary research programs and new possibilities for investigation.

Most historical writing proceeds quite conventionally. It is quite simply a narrative, often without explicitly stated philosophical or ideological commitments. In this respect the historical object is reified, made an abstraction (an abstract identity to be analyzed) rather than being investigated in all of its complex concreteness. In knowledge development, it is the misuse of the abstract, making it a thing in itself. There has recently been a trend toward a more existential historical narrative. This often takes the form of biography. There is also a surrealistic turn, wherein history is a narrative about dreams and visions. Some construct black history and being as encounters with absurdity, as a way of explaining Black consciousness in its encounters with white supremacy. Marxist historiography, historical materialism, in current intellectual and academic discourses, is more often seen in its influence upon conventional and existential narratives than as a full-blown research project. Each of these stances, at its best, suggests a moment in the attempt to capture the historical object/subject, African and African American struggle and liberation. In certain senses each manifests a political moment. As the radical 1960s and 1970s were replaced by conservatism and open political reaction, the boldness of black discourse was replaced with a tempered and more academically acceptable tone.

In current scientific and scholarly efforts to explain race and black oppression, the angles of observation have been multiplied. However, the richness of academic discourse is often limited by the convention of seeking to stand above ideology and political commitments. This is especially the case for black thinkers, who are closely policed by the academic gatekeepers and thought police in the elite white academy. This desire not to appear to be ‘one-sided’ or a race activist lends itself to neutrality on the pressing issues of black oppression and the general systemic crises of US capitalism. A good part of this aloofness goes under the banner of post-structuralism and post-modernism. Each suspends concerns with the object of history and turns to a single-minded engagement with its subject, in ways suggesting that the only verifiable reality is subjective.

C.J. Munford’s materialist historiography – his insistence upon the crucial role of political economy in macro social explanation – is his way of countering this trend. An opposite approach is taken by magical realism, the popular trend in fiction, which constructs characters and events outside of and beyond history. This is a turn to the psychological dimension of black realities. History is suspended for the sake of the novel as the reader is led to focus on the characters’ understandings (or confusions) with their multiple subjective or psychological realities.

Conclusion

The epistemic and ideological crisis of African American Studies occurs at the same time that capitalism is in a historic crisis. If, therefore, African American Studies is to surmount its crisis, it must do so by moving to the political, philosophical and ideological left.  This should occasion a move to a new engagement with black working people.

Du Bois’s body of work was anchored to a radical philosophical and social scientific perspective, which moved his politics progressively to the left. After years of struggle as a radical democrat, fighting for bourgeois democracy for African Americans, he concluded that capitalism had failed as a social economic system for solving race oppression and working-class exploitation and oppression.  His commitments to black and working people and to their liberation were deepened. In the end he joined the Communist Party, declaring that capitalism could not work and had to replaced by socialism.

Finally, I wish to consider the matter of dialectics, the logic and methodology of human and social evolution and transformation. Dialectics is founded upon the idea of the unity and conflict of opposites leading to a new moment and a new synthesis. Herein lies the key to joining history and social structure – in the first instance, structures of oppression and domination – with individual actions, in a holistic explanation. Modern dialectics emerges from Hegel’s science of logic. However, Du Bois’s body of work demonstrates the embedding of dialectics in the explanation of black consciousness, the social structures of black life, and the movement of history. Du Boisian philosophical and ideological stances reject static and essentialist ways of explaining the black situation. By his uses of dialectics he introduces the inevitability of social and historical transformation and change onto the understanding of the African American situation. For him this made manifest a growing anti-capitalism.

African American studies, armed with the logic and methodology of dialectics, especially as applied by Du Bois, becomes a project of social change, leading towards a new social, historical and existential moment. The radical reconstruction of African American studies as a new type of academic and intellectual discipline (invested in social justice and black and working-class liberation) is necessary and possible.

A Du Boisian critical intervention into the discourses of African American Studies is something of a life and death matter for the discipline. A critical center of this discourse must be engaging the philosophical and social theoretical assumptions of the discipline, as well as its relationships to movements for radical social transformation.

References

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Carchedi, Guglielmo. 2008. “Dialectics and Temporality in Marx’s Mathematical Manuscripts.” Science & Society, vol. 72, no.4.

Du Bois, W.E.B. 1897/1986. “The Conservation of Races.” In Nathan Huggins ed. W.E.B. Du Bois: Writing. New York: Library of America.

——1898/2000. “The Study of Negro Problems.” In Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 568, March 2000.

——1899/1995. The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

——1903/1986. The Souls of Black Folk. In Nathan Huggins, ed. W.E.B. Du Bois: Writings. New York: Library of America.

——1904/1996. “On The Souls of Black Folk,” in The Oxford W.E.B. Du Bois Reader, Eric J. Sundquist, ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

——1905/2000. “Sociology Hesitant.” In Sociology Hesitant: Thinking with W.E.B. Du Bois, Ronald Judy ed. Durham: Duke University Press.

——1915/1994. “The African Roots of the War,” in W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader, David Levering Lewis, ed. New York: Henry Holt.

——1920/1986. “The Hands of Ethiopia,” in Nathan Huggins, ed. W.E.B. Du Bois: Writings. New York: The Library of America.

——1935/1992. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. New York: Atheneum.

——1940/1986. Dusk of Dawn: The Autobiography of a Race Concept, in Nathan Huggins, ed, W.E.B. Du Bois: Writings. New York: Library of America.

——1956/1997. “To Herbert Aptheker: Commentary on History and Reality, Du Bois’s own philosophical development.” In The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois: Volume III, Selections, 1944-1963, Hebert Aptheker, ed. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

——1959/2007. “China and Africa.” In The World and Africa. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Gordon, Lewis R. 1995. Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences. New York: Routledge.

——2000. Existentia Africana: Understanding Africana Existential Thought. New York: Routledge.

Hacking, Ian. 2004. Historical Ontology. Cambidge: Harvard University Press

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——1977. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller. Introduction by J.N. Findlay. New York: Oxford University Press.

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——2008. Dialectical Logic: Essays on Its History and Theory, trans. H.Campbell Creighton. Delhi: Aakar Books.

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Lewis, David Levering. 1993. W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919. New York: Henry Holt.

——2000. W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality in the American Century, 1919-1963. New York: Henry Holt.

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Monteiro, Anthony. 1999. “Race, Class and Civilization: On Clarence J. Munford’s Race and Reparations.” Black Scholar. Vol. 29, No.1, Spring

——2000. “Being an African in the World: The Du Boisian Epistemology.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 568 (March).

——2003. “Race and the Racialized State: A Du Boisian Interrogation” in Socialism and Democracy, no. 33 (vol. 17, no. 1).

—— 2006. “Science, History and Phenomenology: Understanding the Multiple Determinations of Polymorphous African Being,” CLR James Journal: A Review of Caribbean Ideas, vol. 12, no. 1.

——2007a. “W.E.B. Du Bois and the Study of Black Humanity: A Rediscovery,” Journal of Black Studies, vol. 38, no 4.

——2007b. “Race, Empire and the World System.” Black Scholar, vol. 37, no. 2.

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——1996. Race and Reparations: A Black Perspective for the 21st Century. Trenton: Africa World Press.

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Notes

1. For me the notion of historical phenomenology is what Sartre in Search for Method refers to as joining historical materialism and existentialism. I do not seek to link Du Bois’s historicism with Hegelian phenomenology, but to propose something more radical, i.e. to link Du Bois’s concerns with the African lived world – and his phenomenological method of investigating that world – to his concerns with African and world histories. Africans are enmeshed in the histories they make, hence as Sartre insists in Critique of Dialectical Reason (2004: 71), “necessity [i.e., history], as the apodictic structure of dialectical investigation, resides neither in the free development of interiority nor in the inert dispersal of exteriority; it asserts itself, as an inevitable and irreducible moment, in the interiorisation of the exterior and in the exteriorization of the interior.” As for dialectical logic, it is the method and logic of investigating phenomena in movement, in time and as totalizing structures. As Sartre suggests, dialectics is the logic and method that investigates concrete realities from the perspective of the developmental unity of single processes (2004: 15). Within the Marxian tradition there are several approaches to dialectics, among them E.V Ilyenkov 1982, 2008). See also Aleksandrov 1980, Oizerman 1979, Schmidt 1982. For a non-Marxist interpretation of Hegelian dialectics, see J.N. Findlay’s foreword to Hegel 1977.

The publication of a paperback edition of Baldwin’s Harlem: A Biography of James Baldwin,² by author and journalist Herb Boyd, whose recent credits include The Harlem Reader,³ brings a fresh interpretation of Baldwin’s life and work to the attention of Baldwin loyalists as well as to potentially larger audiences.

The existence of a number of full biographies of Baldwin deterred Boyd from writing another work in that genre. In an interview appended to Baldwin’s Harlem, Michael Thelwell, an ardent champion of Baldwin’s writing, encourages Boyd, despite his earlier misgivings, to write his own story of Baldwin – one that would trace Baldwin’s life and work from the perspective of the great metropolis of the African-American experience, Harlem (191).

From his birth on August 2, 1924, Baldwin lived with his family in a number of run-down apartments in poorly maintained buildings. The oldest of ten children, Baldwin explains, “As they were born, I took them over with one hand and held a book with the other” (4). Around the corner from their wretched flat was the store-front church, where his stepfather (and later James himself) preached to a small congregation of self-anointed saints determined to fend off the magnetic force of “the streets,” where “sinners” cavorted. Unlike so many other members of the African-American intelligentsia, Baldwin neither arrived in Harlem from afar nor lived in Sugar Hill (or one of the other elegant enclaves) where Harlem’s various elites resided. His Harlem was not a re-imagined or rarified space; it meant a series of miserable flats situated in particularly gritty and narrowly circumscribed corners of “the Hollow,” an area crowded with Harlem’s most down-and-out denizens. This distinctly poorer area of Harlem was bounded by Lenox Avenue on the west, the Harlem River on the east, East 135^th Street on the north, and East 130^th Street on the south. When he reached nineteen, Baldwin left Harlem to live in Greenwich Village; thereafter, he returned to visit family and attend literary and political functions. However, in his writing he never left Harlem. As Boyd argues, Harlem infuses Baldwin’s literary work; it exits there like an unseen-yet-sensed character. In the words of another biographer, “the ghetto never had a more faithful son.”⁴ Though at times his thesis seems strained, Boyd’s Harlem-centric approach illuminates some contested areas of Baldwin’s life. Most consequentially, Baldwin’s Harlem, the Harlem of the poor, provides the key to Baldwin’s multi-racial, class-based politics.

Boyd supplies the best explanation for Baldwin’s deromanticization of Harlem. Baldwin first attracted literary attention with the February 1948 publication (in Commentary) of “The Harlem Ghetto,”⁵ which Boyd characterizes as a “relentless one-note theme of decay and despair.” For Baldwin, Harlem was a “ghetto,” where “the buildings are old and in desperate need of repair, the streets are crowded and dirty; there are too many human beings per square mile…. All of Harlem is a place pervaded by a sense of congestion, rather like the insistent, maddening, claustrophobic pounding in the skull that comes from trying to breathe in a very small room with all the windows shut” (39). During an interview with Julius Lester in 1984, Baldwin explained, “The Black middle class was an abstraction to me…. There were two Harlems. There was a great divide between the people who lived on the Hill and us. I was just a ragged, funny black shoeshine boy, and I was afraid of the people on the Hill, who for their part wanted nothing to do with me” (28, 34). Early on and until his untimely death in 1987, Baldwin internalized the dyad of race and class.

Baldwin’s parents had arrived into this quintessentially urban setting from the rural South. His stepfather was menially employed at a distant job in a Long Island bottling plant. Their material poverty and ecstatic religion conditioned Baldwin’s sensibility and aesthetic. As first seen in his essentially autobiographical Go Tell It on the Mountain, Baldwin carried his viscerally felt experience into his art and into a political perspective which, while never omitting race, explicitly evinced a class perspective and internationalist consciousness. Convincingly, Baldwin’s Harlem sustains the assertion that in Baldwin’s essays and fictional writing he became, “the official transcriber of blues people engaged in daily combats against personal insults, political indignities, and physical violence” (ix). Despite Baldwin’s expatriate status, Boyd presents him, for the most part very convincingly, as having internalized Harlem into his very being.

Langston Hughes’ Harlem contrasted with Baldwin’s Harlem. “I had come to New York to enter Columbia College,” Hughes recalled in a 1963 essay. “But really why I had come to New York was to see Harlem. I was in love with Harlem long before I ever got there and I still am in love with it. Everyone seemed to make me welcome. I spent as much time in Harlem as I possibly could and I am still in love with it.”⁶ For Baldwin, Harlem was never a Mecca, a destination for Black (and more than a few progressive white) pilgrims to visit and be uplifted. Baldwin lived on the wrong side of the class divide within Harlem. Also he had missed the Harlem Renaissance. Baldwin did gain one significant advantage from this incandescent period; his French teacher in Frederick Douglass Junior High School was Countee Cullen, one the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance (who also was gay). Surely Cullen’s couplet

Yet do I marvel at this curious thing;
To make a poet black, and bid him sing.

must have hummed in Baldwin’s head. Cullen also mentored Baldwin’s activity with the student newspaper and the school’s literary club. Baldwin’s encounter with Cullen marks the origins of his connection to France, a country where neither his sexuality nor his race constituted barriers to his full participation in society. Here Boyd’s narrative is stymied, because of Baldwin’s unwillingness to attribute influence to Cullen; a mean-spirited, solipsistic attitude Baldwin similarly visited upon his literary benefactors, Richard Wright and Langston Hughes.⁷ Boyd (wisely) chose not to speculate on how Baldwin’s competitiveness, an endemic trait among writers, was reinforced by his negative relationship with his stepfather.

Boyd’s thematic biography shows that Baldwin’s passionate concern for the Black urban poor transmogrified into a perspective that literary historian Alan Wald has identified as typifying the approach of African-American cultural workers associated with the Communist Party through the 1950s, and which fully applies to Baldwin. Wald sees them as striving in their work to “balance commitments to national liberation and international class solidarity [to achieve] a symbiosis of anti-racism and the class struggle.”⁸ In a recent article, Bill Lyne views Baldwin’s politics as solidly based on the understanding that “authentic blackness” means to be Black and poor.⁹

Baldwin’s disavowal of an African-American all-class politics and his adoption of an outlook that fused race and class originated early. He remembers that at P.S. 24 “some teachers were definitely on the Left. They opposed Franco’s Spain and Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Third Reich.” He further noted that several of these teachers were later “placed on the blacklists and drummed out of the academic community—to the everlasting shame of that community.”¹⁰ While attending the predominantly Jewish DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, Baldwin joined a Communist youth group. Boyd reports that there is controversy about which one this was; unfortunately, he does not dig deeper. In No Name in the Street,¹¹ Baldwin recounts that “At thirteen, I had been a convinced fellow traveler,” who marched in a May Day parade chanting “East Side, West Side all around the town, we want the landlords to tear the slums down.” As a teenager, he recalled adopting a “Trotskyite” identity and risking mortal injury for ridiculing the pro-Soviet wartime classic, Mission to Moscow, which humanized Joseph Stalin. Baldwin’s indignation – an emotion which is apt to reveal one’s most deeply held beliefs – was most strongly expressed against those “liberals” who did not protest “the execution of the Rosenbergs, the crucifixion of Alger Hiss, and the beatification of Whittaker Chambers,” all of which were fixations of Communists and their allies (29f).

Boyd devotes an entire chapter to Baldwin’s association with the campaign to exonerate “The Harlem Six,” six youths accused of murdering a Holocaust survivor during a robbery of a second-hand clothing shop on 125^th Street on April 17, 1964. Boyd deserves credit for highlighting Baldwin’s activism on behalf of the defendants, a cause which most palpably brought him back to the Harlem of his youth. The extent of Baldwin’s involvement in that five-year long campaign is critical to Boyd’s hypothesis that “Harlem” organized Baldwin’s consciousness. Yet, he hangs the entire chapter on Baldwin’s brief essay, “A Report from an Occupied Country,” which he fails to note was published in The Nation.¹²

Had Boyd done some additional research on this grossly underreported campaign to free the Harlem Six, he would have discovered that Baldwin was a sponsor of the Charter Group for a Pledge of Conscience, a small, predominantly white group that for a ten-year period (1963-73) fulfilled its commitment, as encapsulated in its awkward name, to fight against racism in New York City.¹³ In addition to its work on behalf of The Harlem Six, the remarkably effective Charter Group played a major role in campaigns of great interest to the city’s minority populations including support for community control of the public schools and the fight for the humane treatment of prisoners in New York City’s prison system.¹⁴ At the very least, Baldwin’s association with the Charter Group evidences the compatibility of Baldwin’s politics with the multi-racial political culture that emerged from the Communist movement with which most of the Charter Group’s members had, at one time or other, been affiliated. Whatever details are lacking about Baldwin’s ties to the Charter Group, it is clear that throughout his life, Baldwin maintained a disdain for the Black bourgeoisie combined with a willingness to work politically with progressive whites. He consistently engaged in cross-racial movements to fight for racial equality and in causes such as defense of the Cuban Revolution and opposition to the Vietnam War.

In the penultimate chapter of Baldwin’s Harlem, “Cruse’s Crisis,” Boyd rises to the defense of Baldwin from the “relentless, craven assault inflicted on Baldwin and his consorts” (including Paul Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, John Oliver Killens, and Dr. John Henrick Clarke) by Harold Cruse in his Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. While this chapter moves Baldwin’s Harlem away from its central focus, circuitously it exculpates Baldwin from the accusation of anti-Semitism. Cruse became most venomous when discussing Black-Jewish collaboration—political or cultural. His scurrilous characterization of Baldwin as an “innocent and provincial intellectual [who is not] a Jew-lover, inasmuch as Baldwin loves everybody” is breathtaking and reinforces the widespread opinion that this tome is “more divisive than instructive.”¹⁵ Whatever else Baldwin wrote about the Jewish people, the sentence of his that ultimately rings truest was his insistence that he knew a murderer when he saw one, “and the people who were trying to kill me were not Jews” (118).

Cruse corralled Baldwin and his illustrious fellows together in an intellectually shoddy effort to pillory them as race traitors. While acknowledging that more than any other African-American writer Baldwin had “approached the pinnacle of spokesmanship,” he insisted that his leadership was limited by his “lack of an ethnic-cultural philosophy.”¹⁶ Cruse got one thing right: Those he selected for this outrageous treatment had one thing in common. They all had some association with Freedomways, a quarterly published from 1961 to 1985, which maintained close ties to the Communist Party.¹⁷ Freedomways has been described as the brain child of Louis Burnham and Ed Strong, two African-American Communists who had been part of the leadership cadre of the Southern Negro Youth Congress (SNYC).¹⁸ Freedomways initiators included Lorraine Hansberry, who had worked on Freedom, a Harlem-based, Communist party-sponsored newspaper directed by Paul Robeson, which by 1955 had been red-baited out of existence.¹⁹ Freedomways’ editor, Esther Cooper Jackson, who also had been active in the SNYC, was the wife of James Jackson, a major Communist party leader and editor-in-chief of The Worker, the Communist Party’s newspaper.

Not only were Freedomways’ personnel and its organizational antecedents closely aligned with the Communist Party, so were its politics. Freedomways projected itself as a “political-cultural journal” that espoused a radical integrationist stance that demanded full equality for African-Americans and their recognition as a culturally distinct people.²⁰ This complex theorem was joined to a pan-Africanist ethos which avowed that African-American solidarity with the struggles of people of color everywhere was a prerequisite to achieving the fullest degree of political, economic, and cultural independence. Freedomways’ subtitle, “A Quarterly Review of the Freedom Movement,” summed up its underlying political-cultural agenda. In his review of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, published in Freedomways, Ernest Kaiser, an editor of the journal, dismissed Cruse as simplifying and rigidifying the cultural and political tendencies in the African-American community into integrationists and separatists. He noted that throughout their history American Blacks simultaneously “struggled for integration and carried on various economic and cultural self-help activities….”²¹

Baldwin declared his affinity to Freedomways in the short-but-pithy Foreword he wrote for The Freedomways Reader: Afro-America in the Seventies, where he warmly praised the journal as “rather like a friend you have known so long that neither of you can remember exactly where, or when, you met. All is clear now that a friend came along when you needed one.” Baldwin credits Freedomways with “addressing itself to the task of re-interpreting the American reality: which … had global reverberations. No other black American periodical saw this as early, or as clearly, as Freedomways.”²² Over its 25-year lifespan, Freedomways published seven short pieces by Baldwin,²³ but he also connected with that journal in more consequential ways. As a Contributing Editor, his name appeared on the inside cover page of each issue.²⁴ The cover of Freedomways Reader featured a photo of Baldwin with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., taken on February 23, 1968, on the occasion of a Freedomways-sponsored 100^th birthday tribute to W.E.B Du Bois at Carnegie Hall. The photo shows a smiling King with his hand on Baldwin’s shoulder. The subtitle of the volume, “Prophets in Their Own Country,” is printed on top of Baldwin’s suit jacket, thereby leaving the impression that he and King are these prophets. In 1965, Baldwin spoke at a Freedomways-sponsored tribute to Paul Robeson held in New York City’s Hotel America, that attracted such wide support in the African-American community that it was characterized as “mirroring the black Popular Front of previous decades….”²⁵

Cruse’s incessant bashing of Baldwin takes on a homophobic sense when he asserts that his voice is a “timorous” one (162).²⁶ In support of Baldwin generally, and specifically against the notion that he was effete, Boyd’s appended interview with Michael Thelwell includes this glowing tribute: “Slender, gay James Baldwin taught a generation of us how to be black men in this country and he gave us a language in which to engage the struggle” (197).²⁷ Throughout his all-too-brief biography, Boyd burnishes James Baldwin’s luster as a proud paladin of the African-American people and, by extension, of the American Left.

Notes

1. This epigram was Baldwin’s reply to the legendary Communist organizer Jack O’Dell’s query on the opening night of Blues for Mr. Charlie, as to his hopes for the play’s wider impact. Ian Rocksborough-Smith, “‘Filling the Gap’: Intergenerational Black Radicalism and the Popular Front Ideals of Freedomways Magazine’s Early Years (1961-1965),” Afro-Americans in New York Life and Historyvol. 31, no. 1, January 2007.

In contrast, this paper reexamines the evidence and applies a neo-Marxist and Gramscian perspective. That is, it focuses on economic base and superstructure and the role of the dominant class. The base consists primarily of the prevailing mode of production and exploitative economic relations. The superstructure refers to the prevailing culture and political arrangements that maintain the economic base. The dominant class plays a direct and active role as it 1) participates in the formation of exploitative and oppressive economic relations, 2) captures the state and uses it to maintain these relations, and 3) constructs a dominant ideology and culture which legitimizes them.¹

Without engaging in an extensive theoretical defense of Marx, this paper restates the conventional wisdom and reexamines the empirical evidence. We assume that racial oppression in the United States has never been fixed or constant, but has changed as the economic base and racist culture have changed.² We then focus on the how the dominant class has implemented the three above-listed steps. The discussion is organized around four different forms of racism identified in the literature: dominative racism (1700-1885), associated with the institution of slavery; dominative-aversive racism (1885-1965), associated with the Southern Jim Crow system of racial segregation and the sharecropping economic system; aversive racism (1900-1975), associated with racially segregated markets; and meta-racism (1975-current), associated with mobile capital, surplus labor, and the growth of concentrated poverty in urban areas.

Each form of racism is distinguishable by a different set of economic arrangements and a different dominant racist culture. These forms of racism are derived from Joel Kovel, White Racism, A Psychohistory. Of course, Kovel limited his analysis to dominative, aversive and meta racism. Although he focused on the psychological aspects of racist culture, he recognized the need to examine the material base of racism and urged other scholars to do so. ³

The evidence presented here will show that in each of these four forms of racism, the dominant class, rather than the white working class or lower class, played the major role in the construction of exploitative and racially oppressive economic relations. This dominant class also controlled the state and used it to protect oppressive arrangements. Members of this class participated in the formation of a racist culture which operated to legitimize these same arrangements.

Dominative Racism: Slavery

Dominative racism was grounded in the Southern system of plantation slavery. This system was an integral part of the larger emerging capitalist system based on an insatiable and unrestrained drive to accumulate wealth. It was a well integrated, trans-Atlantic economic system including North American finance, trade and industry; West African slave trade; and Southern region agricultural production for world trade – cotton from the Deep South and sugar and rum from the Caribbean. As Marx put it:

As soon as peoples whose production still moves within the lower forms of slave-labour, the corvée, etc., are drawn into a world market dominated by the capitalist mode of production, whereby the sale of their products for export develops into their principal interest, the civilized horrors of over-work are grafted onto the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom, etc. Hence the Negro labour in the southern states of the American Union preserved a moderately patriarchal character as long as production was directed to the satisfaction of immediate local requirements. But in proportion as the export of cotton became of vital interest to these states, the over-working of the Negro, and sometimes the consumption of his life in seven years of labour, became a factor in a calculated and calculating system. It was no longer a question of obtaining from him a certain quantity of useful products, but rather of the production of surplus-value itself.⁴

The planter class of the Deep South in the United States established the plantation system of slavery. While slave owners might have as few as one or two slaves, members of the planter class typically owned more than 100 slaves and more than 1,000 acres of land. This class organized labor on the plantation to maximize the accumulation of wealth. It was a system of forced labor, with total control of the slave person, who was forced to do exhausting work from sun up to sun down for the purpose of maximizing profits. This organization also involved repression severe enough to preempt any possibility of rebellion. The planter class not only controlled labor on the plantation; its members dominated state governments and representation in the US Congress. The maintenance of this system required an intensely controlling, almost sadistic character type and an ideology and culture that depicted the slave as subhuman – biologically inferior, savage cannibals in Africa, needing to be controlled – and the masters as generous, genteel and paternalistic. Thus, dominative racism was based on direct, total and sadistic forms of control and a dominant culture which legitimized the control.

Dominative-Aversive Racism and the Jim Crow System of Segregation: Conventional Wisdom

Conventional wisdom maintains that after the Civil War, the Southern planter class – the former class of slave owners – disappeared and that the white working class and lower class emerged to disenfranchise African Americans and segregate the races. The distinguished historian and sociologist, W.E.B. Du Bois, promotes this thesis in his classic work, Black Reconstruction.5 First, he pronounces the planter class dead:

With the Civil War, the planters died as a class. We still talk as though the dominant social class in the South persisted after the war. But it did not. It disappeared.6

Second, he argues that poor whites constructed the Southern system of segregation. He suggests that working-class whites feared competition from blacks. He insists that this class gained social status by working to restrain the advancement of blacks. He adds:

The poor white was in a quandary with regard to emancipation. He had viewed slavery as the cause of his own degradation, but he now viewed the free Negro as a threat to his very existence.⁷

Du Bois coins the term “wages of whiteness” to explain why poor whites would align themselves with rich white landowners. Poor whites acquired a higher sense of their own worth by defining themselves as white and by oppressing blacks.

Another distinguished historian, C. Vann Woodward, also subscribes to this conventional wisdom. Like Du Bois, he insists that the planter class disappeared after the Civil War and that the white worker was responsible for the segregation and disenfranchisement of blacks. Woodward suggests that as white workers acquired more political power in the South, they used that power against blacks. He states, “It is one of the paradoxes of Southern history that political democracy for the white man and racial discrimination for the black were often products of the same dynamics.”⁸ He adds, “As the Negroes invaded the new mining and industrial towns…, and as the two races were brought into rivalry for subsistence wages in the cotton fields, mines, and wharves, the lower-class white man’s demand for Jim Crow laws became more insistent.”⁹

A similar view is expressed by another progressive scholar, William Julius Wilson, who writes:

White working-class efforts to eliminate black competition generated an elaborate system of Jim Crow segregation that was reinforced by an ideology of biological racism… The white working class was aided not only by its numerical size but also by its increasing accumulation of political resources that accompanied changes in its relations to the means of production; in other words, it was aided by its gradual transformation of increasing labor power into increasing political power.¹⁰

Like Du Bois and Woodward, Wilson argues that the planter class dominated the South before the Civil War but not afterwards, because the war destroyed this class. He insists that the rise of industry stimulated the growth of the white working class, which ascended to dominate southern politics. According to Wilson, it was the white working class that secured the passage of Jim Crow and disenfranchising laws.

Dominative-Aversive Racism and the Jim Crow System of Segregation: The Neo-Marxist School

The problem with the conventional wisdom is that it was based more on speculation than on empirical evidence. Du Bois, Wilson, Woodward and others did not trace planter class families before and after the Civil War. Empirical studies of this class before and after the war contradict their view and support the Gramscian perspective. There had always been some vertical – up and down – class movement in the South, even before the Civil War. Nevertheless, most members of the southern aristocracy or planter class before the Civil War remained members of this class after the war.

In one empirical study, Michael Wayne examines select county data in Louisiana and Mississippi. He demonstrates that the planter class continued to dominate agricultural production in the black belt region after the Civil War. He notes that this class owned over 75% of the land in this region.¹¹

Other studies support this point: the planter class not only survived but emerged to organize labor both on the land and in industries. Dwight Billings’ study of North Carolina county data provides a good demonstration of these two points.¹² He identifies those families owning more than 1,188 acres of land before and after the Civil War. He demonstrates that members of this class, not Northern industrialists, invested heavily in the textile industry. According to his data, seven textile mills operated between 1865 and 1884. Out of the seven, two were owned by planters who owned more than 3,000 acres of land. Two were owned by relatives of planters. One mill was jointly owned by a planter and a non-planter. Billings could not identify the owner of one mill and another one went out of business. Out of all of textile mills that remained in business and whose owners were known, planters or their relatives owned 100% of them completely or jointly.

Another researcher, W. J. Cash, corroborated Billings’ findings. Cash insists that the emergence of industry in the South occurred within the plantation framework.¹³ The planter class not only survived, but dominated both agricultural and industrial production in the South. Through its dominant position, this class organized labor on the land and in the industries.

The planter class survived the Civil War, emerged as the dominant class, and organized labor in the South, exploiting black sharecroppers on the land and white workers in the factories. White workers were unorganized. They did not have the power to exclude blacks from textile industries. Moreover, the dominant class used any means necessary to suppress union organizing. It used both the state militia and direct, illegal violence. It was especially violent toward any effort to organize blacks and whites into the same union.

The violence against the Knights of Labor in the late 19th century illustrates this point. In South Carolina in May 1887, H.F. Hoover, a white union organizer who recruited blacks was assassinated. In the same year, the Knights of Labor attempted to organize sugar workers on plantations in Louisiana. When the workers went on strike the governor sent the militia to suppress the strike. Black and white union leaders were arrested. A white mob lynched the black leaders and a local militia unit massacred over 20 blacks.¹⁴ Violence against union organizers persisted throughout the early 20th century. The dominant class segregated the work force and violently suppressed labor unions, especially those that attempted to organize black and white workers in the same union. It captured state governments and used the state militia to suppress and murder union organizers.

The Planter Class Disenfranchised Blacks and Constructed Jim Crow

The planter class, not poor whites or white workers, disenfranchised blacks and imposed racial segregation on the South. Supporting this point, Morgan Kousner demonstrates that the leaders in state legislatures and the voters who supported disenfranchisement of blacks were not white workers, but members of the wealthy planter class: “almost all of [the leaders] were affluent and well educated, and they often bore striking resemblance to antebellum ‘patricians.’ Indeed, almost every one was the son or grandson of a large planter, and several of the older chiefs had been slaveholders before the war.”¹⁵ Kousner observes this same pattern in his study of voters. He notes a positive correlation between wealth and the vote in favor of disenfranchisement. The more wealthy the voting district, the greater the proportion of voters voting in favor of disenfranchisement.¹⁶

The disenfranchisement movement not only took away the vote from blacks. It took away the vote from poor whites as well. The movement was not a paradox of democracy for whites and disenfranchisement for blacks. There was no movement among the working class. The dominant class used bribery, threats and violence to destroy the Republican and Populist parties in the South, the parties of the common folk. The dominant class seized control of state governments, reinforced its power and legally disenfranchised blacks and poor whites. Democracy was for planters only.

Jack Bloom illustrates the point that the planter class disenfranchised poor whites along with blacks. His data indicated that voter participation in Louisiana declined between 1896 and 1900 from 127,000 registered voters to only 3,300. Almost all blacks lost the right to vote. Most poor whites and white workers lost the right to vote.¹⁷ The planter class dominated southern politics throughout the first half of the 20th century.

This evidence provides strong support for the neo-Marxist/Gramscian perspective. Clearly, the planter class survived the Civil War, re-emerged and disenfranchised blacks and poor whites, constructed the system of racial segregation and developed the post war racist culture.

The Dominant Class and the Construction of Culture

The dominant planter class contributed to the formation of the racist culture, which legitimized racially oppressive arrangements. A good example of how this was accomplished is the case of Thomas Dixon. Dixon, born in 1864, was a member of a prominent North Carolina family. Before the Civil War his parents owned 32 slaves and his maternal grandparents owned a large plantation of over 1,000 acres of land and over 100 slaves. Moreover, his uncle was one of the founders and leaders of the Cleveland County, North Carolina Ku Klux Klan. Dixon was the author of The Clansman.¹⁸ This book was the basis of the movie, The Birth of a Nation. The book and movie produced vivid and powerful images and stories of childlike, ignorant blacks under white tutelage, and beast-like black males who, when unrestrained by whites, roamed the woods looking for white women to rape. The storyline depicted the Ku Klux Klan as being necessary to protect white women from black rapists and to restore the glory of the old South. It presented the view that when blacks acquire the right to vote, they elect illiterate, dirty, uncouth blacks who eat fried chicken in the chambers of the illustrious state legislature, drop chicken bones and trash on the floor, and pass irrational laws that bankrupt the state. The only rational thing to do – for the good of blacks and the South – was to disenfranchise blacks, segregate them from whites, and hang black rapists. These stories ennobled both the planter class and the Ku Klux Klan and legitimized racial oppression. The fact that the book was written and the movie co-produced by the grandson of a major plantation owner illustrates the connection between the dominant class and the initial construction of racist culture.

Aversive Racism and Industrial Capitalism: Conventional Wisdom

A number of scholars explain racial conflict during the period of industrial capitalism in the North in the first two-thirds of the 20th century in terms of conflict between black and white workers. These scholars focus on industrial labor and the skilled trades and, in particular, on two types of intra-class dynamics. First, white workers fight to prevent management from using black workers as strikebreakers. This view assumes that white hostility directed at blacks arises out of the fear and anger toward black strikebreakers. Second, white workers maintain status, prestige, and higher wages by pushing blacks down into lower paying and lower status jobs.¹⁹

Contemporary scholars explain the racially exclusionary behavior of white workers in terms of either the advantage of whiteness or the impact of racist culture. Roediger, in Wages of Whiteness, insists that white workers gain status and prestige in defining themselves as white.²⁰ He argues that white working-class consciousness emerged as white labor was contrasted with black labor. White labor was free; black labor was enslaved. White labor had privileges and advantages; black labor had none. It is these advantages that constitute the wages of whiteness, an expression Roediger borrows from Du Bois.

Labor scholars insist that the greatest barrier to hiring blacks into the skilled trades had been white workers. These scholars present examples of white unions excluding black workers. Indeed, many white union constitutions contained language which explicitly excluded blacks.²¹ Other scholars blame uneducated, low-income whites for racism and racial violence. They see racial violence as operating on the fringe of society, executed by ignorant social misfits, alienated from the mainstream.²² In either case, scholars insist that white workers created the form of racism associated with industrial capitalism.

Aversive Racism and Industrial Capitalism: Neo-Marxism

Although white workers exhibited racism, the issue is where to locate the origin of racial oppression under industrial capitalism. There are a number of reasons to believe that responsibility lies with the dominant class of industrial capitalists, the bourgeois class.

One reason is suggested by the case of the Ford Motors company. During the 1920s and early 1930s Henry Ford recruited blacks into his plants – in some case, into skilled positions. Although there was resentment among white workers, they lacked the power to prevent this. By 1926, Ford employed 10,000 black workers in his River Rouge plant. Summarizing the role of Ford in hiring blacks, Meier and Rudwick observe:

…not only were many blacks on assembly lines, but others were employed in laboratories and drafting rooms; [as] bricklayers, crane operators, and mechanics; and in such highly skilled trades as electricians and tool-and-die makers.… Only at Ford were blacks admitted to apprentice schools; black and white Ford employees operated machinery…. Finally the company had more black foremen than the rest of the industry combined.…²³

During this period, Ford had black supervisors over integrated work crews. In one case he had a black supervisor over a white, predominantly Polish American crew.

The racial hiring patterns in the automobile industry reflected the attitudes of the leaders of the companies, not the attitudes of white workers. Although Henry Ford subscribed to the racist beliefs of his time, he was paternalistic. He believed that whites were superior and blacks inferior and that blacks and whites should live in separate neighborhoods. However, he believed that the superior races had obligations to the inferior races to help them obtain decent neighborhoods and jobs.²⁴ He also believed that blacks were passive, much like the happy slaves. He saw them as useful allies against labor unions.

Ford changed his policies in the early 1940s, just after blacks joined the United Auto Workers. Feeling betrayed and angered at this step, Ford became the most racially discriminatory automaker. Meier and Rudwick note, “Violating wartime regulations, Ford was actually recruiting white labor from other Michigan cities while turning away black applicants in Detroit”; they add, “…at the Rouge itself the management instituted segregation in the new steel and aluminum foundries, while sharply limiting transfers to other departments.”²⁵

The point here is this: When Henry Ford decided to hire and promote blacks and integrate his work force even during the 1920s (when the Ku Klux Klan was active among Detroit auto workers), white workers were powerless to stop it. It was Ford, not the white workers, who segregated the work force.

Another reason for locating the origin of racial oppression within the capitalist class is that in many of the cases in which white workers’ anti-black strikes were successful, there was little opposition from industry, as management already shared the views of the white workers. A good example of this occurred during World War II. The white workers initiated an anti-black sit-down strike at the Packard Automobile Company’s tank factory, in protest of two black workers being transferred into a metal polishing job. The federal government had ordered the transfer. A spokesperson for Packard defended the strike, saying that metal polishing was a “white man’s job.”²⁶ However, threatened with the loss of a major defense contract, the company conceded. The sit-down strike collapsed. The two blacks remained on the job. White workers clearly did not have the power to keep the workplace racially segregated

Studies of racial oppression in the steel industry demonstrate that hiring patterns tend to reflect the attitudes of the owners and managers of the company. Company leaders saw blacks as suitable for the dirtier, hotter, more dangerous jobs and consequently hired them into these job areas, while excluding them from skilled jobs. Labor historian Foner quotes a factory manager saying in 1919, “Negroes do work white men won’t do, such as common labor; heavy, hot, and dirty work; pouring crucibles; work in the grinding room; and so on.”²⁷ A foreman in a Pennsylvania steel mill said, “They [blacks] are well fitted for this hot work, and we keep them because we appreciate this ability in them… The door machines and the jam cutting are the most undesirable; it is hard to get white men to do this kind of work.”²⁸

As we see once again, it is the owners and managers of industrial corporations who are primarily responsible for how labor is organized in production. These capitalist leaders create the labor hierarchies. They are initially responsible for privileging white labor. Once having acquired this privilege, white labor operates to protect it. As a privileged stratum, white workers felt that they had an interest in promoting segregation.

This principle is reflected in the difference between skilled trade unions and industrial unions. Skilled trade unions have the worst history of racial exclusion. Industrial unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World, Knights of Labor, the United Auto Workers, and the United Mine Workers of America have a strong record of commitment to racial integration and labor solidarity across racial lines.

Meta-Racism: Conventional Wisdom

Conventional wisdom insists that racial oppression is now a thing of the past. Indeed, there is no way of overstating the progress that has occurred during the last few decades of the 20th century. Within the past decade, African Americans have at one time or another served in most cabinet positions. Under George W. Bush’s administration the Secretary of State position was held first by an African American male, Colin Powell, and then by an African American female, Condoleezza Rice. Today, the president of the United States and the chair of the National Republican Party are black.

William Julius Wilson had pronounced the declining significance of race over thirty years ago.²⁹ In The Truly Disadvantaged, he argued that affirmative action had contributed to the substantial advancement of the black middle class. As members of this class attained high levels of education and professional jobs, they moved out of the inner cities and left the black poor isolated and concentrated. Lacking education and middle-class values, the black underclass could not qualify for the knowledge-intensive jobs of the post-industrial, global era.³⁰ Wilson’s perspective represents part of the new conventional wisdom.

Another part of the new conventional wisdom explains the rise of right-wing politics among the white working class. Thomas Frank in his book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, claims that white workers and poor whites are part of the religious right and that the powers of the new conservatives arise out of the alliance between the corporate sector and the religious right.³¹

Meta-Racism: Neo-Marxist Perspective

Within the neo-Marxist framework, the current period is no different from the previous eras. Racial oppression persists today. Although there are signs of dramatic progress in some areas, there is severe regression in others. Racism has not declined; it has simply changed form. Today, racial oppression overlaps with class oppression more than ever before. Whereas dominative-aversive racism, the old Jim Crow system, excluded all blacks of all social classes, meta-racism impacts low-income blacks most severely, particularly those living in concentrated poverty areas of inner cities. New racial stereotypes focus on the urban poor or urban underclass. New economic arrangements correspond with the new form of racial oppression.

The new economic arrangements can best be classified Gramscian terms as post-Fordism. These arrangements have produced enormous surplus labor and substantial inequalities. The new racial oppression is characterized by concentrated urban poverty, by the warehousing of black males in the criminal justice system, by high infant mortality rates, and by diminishing political power.

From Fordism to Post-Fordism to Meta-racism

Gramsci coined the term Fordism to define an era named after Henry Ford, who had envisioned his assembly-line workers earning enough money to purchase an automobile. Thus, Fordism was an era in which corporations accepted a well-paid work force, protected by strong unions; promoted Keynesian economic policy; and invested in local communities. Capital (production facilities) was fixed. That is, it was unfeasible to move factories because of their mammoth size (with often close to 20,000 workers), the enormous initial investment in them, and their dependence on established railroad lines.

Fordism ended during the middle 1970s, as a result of technological changes and of conscious decisions by corporate leaders. Technological changes led to the rise of mobile capital, the ability of corporations to easily close down a production facility in one area and relocate in another. These changes included the rise of the trucking industry, which freed production facilities from dependence on railroads; the telecommunications revolution, which allowed corporate headquarters to engage in instant audio and visual communications anywhere in the world; and the development of smaller, more automated production facilities, which made it easier to close down a facility in one region and relocate to another.

Corporate leaders made three conscious decisions that spelled the end of Fordism. They deliberately engaged in economic strategies to weaken labor and reduce wages. They decided to become more politically active in order seize the state and promote neoliberal public policies designed to trash protective regulations, shred the social safety net, and further weaken labor and reduce wages. And they decided to pour huge sums of resources into think tanks for the dissemination of neoliberalism and the construction and promotion of a new racist ideology. These decisions had their most devastating impact on inner-city blacks and contributed to the rise of meta-racism

From the mid-1970s, corporations slashed wages and eviscerated unions by closing down production facilities in high-wage, unionized, old industrial cities and moving to low-wage, anti-union areas in other parts of the country and the world; by outsourcing to non-union, low-wage firms; and by relying on part-time, temporary workers. This process had its most severe impact on declining industrial cities with large populations of African Americans. It contributed directly to a rise in surplus labor, an increase in people without jobs. It produced substantially high poverty rates in industrial cities. Older industrial cities suffered catastrophic losses of industrial jobs. Between 1972 and 1982, Detroit lost 69,300 industrial sector jobs, 24,900 jobs in retail and 17,000 jobs in wholesale.³²

There was some job growth in the service sector, but this was in the areas of security guards, nurses’ aides, janitorial services, and other low-paying occupations. Professional jobs tended to be in areas such as social work and teaching. The rise of poverty was associated with the city’s hemorrhaging of decent-paying industrial jobs in the automobile industry.

These losses impacted the city’s poverty rate. Poverty in Detroit rose from 14.9% to 21.9% between 1970 and 1980.³³ In 1980, a city poverty rate of over 20% was extreme. Today, most of the older industrial cities have poverty rates well above 20%. By 2008 Detroit’s poverty rate was 33.1%. Today, most of the older industrial cities suffer extremely high poverty rates: Flint, Michigan has a rate of 34.4%; Youngstown, Ohio, 32.6%; Buffalo, New York, 29.9%; Cleveland, Ohio, 28.9%; Cincinnati, Ohio, 25.7%; Newark, New Jersey, 24.7%.

The rise of severe poverty in these industrial cities has had other consequences, notably, high infant mortality. Infant mortality rates vary widely throughout the world. Countries like Japan, Sweden, and Norway have rates lower than 3.5 per every 1,000 live birth. Canada, the United Kingdom and France have rates below 5 per 1,000 live births. Cuba, Costa Rica, Argentina have rates of 5.82, 8.77 and 11.44 respectively. The infant mortality rate of the US is 6.26 deaths per 1,000 live births The infant mortality rates in select older industrial cities is above 12 per 1,000 births. Among blacks in these cities the rate is over 14.8 per 1,000. The rates for Buffalo, Detroit Cincinnati, Newark and Philadelphia are 17.6, 16.0, 17.8, 15.6 and 16.6 respectively.³⁴

Warehousing and Surplus Populations

Another severe impact of the Post-Fordist period, particularly on blacks, is the warehousing of surplus populations. Four trends reflect the severe racial repression associated with Post-Fordism. First, incarceration rates in the US have increased exponentially since 1980. In 1980 about 1.8 million people were in the system (jail, prison, probation or parole). About 400,000 were in jail or prison. By 2007, there were over 7.3 million in the system and over 2.3 million incarcerated.³⁵ The United States incarcerates more people than ever before in its history and more people than any other nation in the world. Whereas the US only has 5% of the world population, it holds 25% of the world’s prisoners.³⁶

Second, the increase in the prison population has been tied directly into surplus populations, the populations of the poor and unemployed. The overwhelming majority of those incarcerated are poor people and people of color:

Across all racial groups, prisoners are drawn from the poorest sectors of society. A large percentage (of prisoners) are unemployed at the time of their arrest or have only sporadic employment. Of those with jobs, many have incomes near or below the poverty level. Seventy-two percent of prison inmates and 60 percent of jail inmates have not completed high school; many are illiterate….

The statistical link between unemployment or underemployment and imprisonment is borne out in the demographic characteristics of prison populations. In 1990, 58.2 percent of all those jailed (about 561,700 people) were unemployed at the time of their arrest. Roughly 68 percent earned less than $15,000 a year. State prison populations reveal a similar link. In Florida, for example, of nearly 30,000 people imprisoned in 1986, barely half (52 percent) were employed full-time at the time of their arrest. Nearly half earned less than $500 a month.³⁷

Third, not only does the US have the highest incarceration rate in the world, it incarcerates a higher percentage of its minority population than any other country. The US incarceration rate is 702 per 100,000. The nearest competitor is Russia with a rate of 628. US incarceration rates are much higher for male populations. The white male incarceration rate is 736 per 100,000. This high rate is indicative of a class repressive society. The black male incarceration rate is an alarming 4,789 per 100,000. This rate is indicative of an extreme racially repressive society.³⁸ In 2006 there were about 836,800 black males in jail or prison out of a population of about 18,262,000 black males.³⁹ That is, about 4.58% of the total black male population. The percentage is much higher when the age group of 20 to 29 is considered, close to 10%.⁴⁰

Fourth, the repressive level of incarceration rates of blacks is a function of racial stereotypes and racial targeting of black populations. Conventional wisdom suggests that more black males are arrested for using and selling crack cocaine because this drug is more popular in the inner city and black dealers sell it openly in public places, thus making themselves targets. However, Michelle Anderson points out in her research that suburban whites buy their drugs – cocaine, ecstasy, crack – from a local white dealer who also sells in public. Police agencies target the black inner city drug dealers, but ignore the white suburban dealers.⁴¹ Moreover, research indicates that the overwhelming majority of drug users are white. Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project says, “Thus, SAMHSA  data indicates that whites represent 77 percent of current drug users, African Americans constitute 15 percent and Hispanic 8 percent”; he adds that black crack cocaine use is 0.6% of the population compared to a white use of 0.2%.⁴² However, given their much greater proportion of the population, the white user rate translates into whites representing 54% of current crack cocaine users, blacks 34% and Hispanics 12%. Nevertheless, blacks constitute close to 90% of those arrested for crack cocaine use.⁴³

A further indicator of a racially repressive society is the increase of draconian laws used in a racially discriminatory way to target African Americans. A good example of this is the mandatory sentences of five years for possession of five grams of crack cocaine, a law used to target African American users and dealers. Another example is the establishment of mandatory life sentences for three or more felonies. In the Ewing v California decision the US Supreme Court allowed a mandatory life sentence for the theft of three golf clubs.⁴⁴ A further example is the imposition of life sentences for two felony drug offenses. In Georgia, over 98% of those sentenced to life for two or more drug offenses are black.⁴⁵

The targeting of African Americans is not limited to adults. Recently, Human Rights Watch cited the United States for human rights violations for sentencing youth offenders to life imprisonment without any chance of parole and for racial biases in the sentencing. The report reads:

Our data reveal that blacks constitute 60 percent of the youth offenders serving life without parole nationwide and whites constitute 29 percent…. However, research studies have found that minority youths receive harsher treatment than similarly situated white youths at every stage of the criminal justice system from the point of arrest to sentencing.⁴⁶

The incarceration rate is so high and sentences so severe that some critics refer to the United States as “the warehouse society,” warehousing a significant proportion of its poor and minorities. They refer to the explosive growth of the prison population as “correctional Keynesianism.” Regardless of these titles, large numbers of the poor and unemployed from industrial cities are warehoused in prisons, thus artificially reducing the unemployment and poverty rates.

Several factors explain this extreme racial repression: anti-crime hysteria, the rise of neoliberalism and neoliberal public policies, and the war on drugs. However, the most critical factor is the emergence of a new dominant racist culture arising out of corporate sponsored think-thanks.

Corporate Construction of the New Racist Culture

Corporations are directly connected to the process of generating the new racist culture. The late 1970s and early 1980s saw the emergence of new conservative think tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Olin Foundation, the Pioneer Institute, the Cato Institute.

The American Enterprise Institute’s budget rose from one million in 1970 to over ten million by 1978.⁴⁷ This organization’s sponsors include “the largest banks and corporations in America: AT&T contributed $125,000, Chase Manhattan Bank gave $171,000, Chevron donated $95,000, CitiCorp $100,000, Exxon $130,000, General Electric $65,000, General Motors $100,000, and Procter & Gamble $165,000.⁴⁸

The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) played a major role in constructing and perpetuating contemporary racist culture and ideology, most notably by marketing The Bell Curve and giving it an air of legitimacy. The Bell Curve exhumes the decomposed body of biological racism, as this quote indicates:

Ruston argues that the differences in the average intelligence test scores among East Asians, blacks, and whites are not only primarily genetic but part of a complex of racial differences that includes such variables as brain size, genital size, rate of sexual maturation, length of the menstrual cycle, frequency of sexual intercourse, gamete production, sexual hormone levels, the tendency to produce dizygotic twins, marital stability, infant mortality, altruism, law abidingness, and mental health.⁴⁹

In other words, what Murray and Herrnstein are saying through Ruston is that black men tend to have small brains and large penises, tend to have unstable relationships and are prone to criminal activities. The book combines the old biologically based racism with the new culturally based racism.

Think tanks have contributed directly to an ideology that legitimizes police repression. For example, in an earlier book, Losing Ground, supported by AEI, Murray insists that overly lenient criminal justice policies developed during the 1960s encouraged the rise of violent street crime by making such crime less risky and more profitable. The rational response is to increase police powers and imprison more people for longer times.⁵⁰ Some cities have instituted zero tolerance policies, particularly in inner city schools, arresting juveniles for the most trivial offenses.

The emerging literature of the urban underclass also contributed to the new racism. This literature constructed and promoted images of predatory black males prowling around inner city streets. In fact the urban underclass was defined as a criminal class, as for example by Ken Auletta:

Although individuals often defy categories, in general members of the underclass seem to fall into four distinct groups. First are the hostile street and career criminals who openly reject society’s dominant values, a surprisingly small number of whom are responsible for the majority of crimes in most cities. The second group consists of the hustlers, those who out of choice or necessity operate in the underground economy, peddling hot goods, reefers, or hard drugs, gambling, and pimping…. Third are the passive, those who have become dependent over the years on welfare and government support. The fourth group is made up of the traumatized – those whose minds have snapped and who have turned to drink and drugs or roam city streets as helpless shopping bag ladies, derelicts – or sadistic slashers.⁵¹

In short, the underclass is made up of street criminals, violent predators, stick-up artists, robbers, burglars, merchants of stolen goods, drug dealers, pimps, prostitutes, welfare dependents, and psychotics. This definition depicts the black urban poor as a dangerous predatory class, a class needing to be repressed.

The Hoover Institution, another corporate-sponsored think tank (founded in 1959), published reports recommending that street criminals be targeted and incarcerated for life. A study by Williamson Evers of the Hoover Institution insists that rehabilitation programs do not work and that criminal justice policy should target career criminals and remove them from the streets permanently.⁵²

A torrent of literature rushed out of these think tanks into the academic world and the rest of society, contributing to the rise of a new racism, one that deemphasized biology, but touted the existence of an underclass subculture that rejected white middle-class values. The new corporate-sponsored racist culture influenced the views of members of all classes and races, convincing them that the black poor are responsible for their own poverty.

Unlike think tanks of the past, the new corporatist think tanks had a direct pipeline to the mass media. A good example is the case of Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation, of which he is the major shareholder. The subsidiaries of News Corp include 20^th Century Fox, the New York Post, London Times, T.V. Guide, HarperCollins, Fox News, Fox News Family Channel, National Geographic Channel, and several sports teams. In his book, The Republican Noise Machine: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy, David Brock says this of Murdoch’s connections:

Beginning in the Reagan years, many of Murdoch’s speeches were quietly written by his close adviser, Irwin Stelzer, an economist who linked Murdoch’s media world to the world of the right-wing think tank network, which would come to supply a good deal of the content for his print and TV “news” divisions. Stelzer had been the “director of regulation” at AEI before joining the Hudson Institute.… Stelzer was published widely throughout the world in Murdoch publications, including in The Weekly Standard, William Kristol’s neocon sinkhole. Stelzer arranged lucrative writing assignments for other think tank denizens, including Charles Murray, whose theories liking intelligence to genetics Stelzer supported. Murray called Stelzer “the Godfather.”⁵³

The material from conservative think tanks is piped into Fox News. Brock insists that Fox broadcasts in an echo chamber. That is, when Fox News reports on a study from the Hoover Institution, other networks like CNN, ABC and MSNBC uncritically repeat the same story. None of the networks have challenged the study.

Summary

In every era, racial oppression was undergirded by exploitative and oppressive economic arrangements. The dominant class played a major role in the initial formation of these arrangements and in the construction of a racist culture, which operated to legitimize the oppression. Moreover, racism changed as economic arrangements and the dominant culture changed.

The Jim Crow system of segregation in the South was not established by the white working class. It was established by the landed aristocracy or planter class. This class had substantial economic power. It controlled the organization of production both on the land and in the production facilities. It disenfranchised both blacks and the white working class. The planter class dominated Southern politics and contributed to the formation of racist culture.

The system of segregated labor was established, not by the white working class, but by the owners of industry, the bourgeois class. This class, not the white workers, had the power to organize industrial production. Where white skilled laborers played a role in excluding blacks from the skilled trades, it was with the support and encouragement of the dominant class.

Despite enormous progress, racial oppression has not declined. It has changed form. It is even more severe today than it was forty years ago. It overlaps with class oppression. It arises out of advanced capitalist production, post-Fordism. As with previous eras, the dominant class contributed to the formation of contemporary patterns of oppression. Moreover this class supported the construction of the current form of racist culture.

The Urban Underclass: Surplus Labor⁵⁴

In the final analysis, several additional points need to be made about a neo-Marxist analysis of contemporary racial oppression and racist culture. First, the urban underclass is the product of advanced capitalism, post-Fordism. Marx referred to a reserve army of labor and a surplus population arising out of the accumulation process:

The greater the social wealth, the functioning capital, the extent and energy of its growth, and, therefore, also the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labour, the greater is the industrial reserve army. The same causes which develop the expansive power of capital, develop also the labour-power at its disposal…The more extensive, finally, the lazarus-layers of the working class, and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism. This is the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation….⁵⁵

Capital accumulation thus produces the reserve army of labor or surplus populations. Today’s counterpart to this reserve army is the so-called urban underclass. Marx adds:

The law by which a constantly increasing quantity of means of production, thanks to the advance in the productiveness of social labour, may be set in movement by a progressively diminishing expenditure of human power, this law in a capitalist society – where the labourer does not employ the means of production, but the means of production employ the labourer – undergoes a complete inversion and is expressed thus: the higher the productiveness of labour, the greater is the pressure of the labourers on the means of employment, the more precarious, therefore, becomes their condition of existence, viz., the sale of their own labour-power for the increasing of another’s wealth, or for the self-expansion of capital.⁵⁶

Second, the urban underclass is the victim. Marx refers to the surplus population or reserve army of labor as victims of industry: “… the demoralized and ragged, and those unable to work, chiefly people who succumb to their incapacity for adaptation, due to the division of labour; people who have passed the normal age of the labourer; the victims of industry, whose number increases with the increase of dangerous machinery…”⁵⁷

Third, the immorality of capitalism comes not from the bottom but from the top. This point is more clearly expressed in the early writings of Marx, particularly in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Charles Derber expands on this idea in a chapter entitled “A Fish Rots from the Head First,” in his book The Wilding of America. The book responds to the racist stereotype of poor inner city black males as engaging in wildings, having no regard for human life, taking pride in gang culture, and preying on the weak and helpless.⁵⁸

The concept of wildings came from the arrest of five black juveniles in the summer of 1989 on charges of brutally assaulting and raping a 28-year-old jogger and investment broker. The jogger was so severely beaten that she was not expected to live. Her face was disfigured, her skull fractured and her eye destroyed. For years the case exemplified the pathology of the urban underclass and the need for police repression of inner city black males. Twelve years later, DNA tests proved the five black males innocent. A serial rapist was then arrested. But the stereotypical image of young black male predators remained a part of the dominant racist culture.

Derber’s point is that the worst values found in the underclass – the violence, the greed, the frenzy to acquire material wealth, the disregard for the welfare of others, the predatory spirit – were values that did not originate at the bottom. Where these values exist among a few members of the urban underclass, they originated from the top. They are the same values found among members of the dominant class; they are just imitated by members of the underclass. These values were exhibited when Ford Motors released the Pinto knowing that it would explode on contact, when the tobacco industry increased the nicotine content in cigarettes knowing that it was addictive and lethal, when the mining industry released arsenic into rivers and streams, when Enron executives joked openly about the shock the elderly would experience with the doubling of their electric bills, when the US apparel industry and retail companies relocated abroad to exploit child labor, when the deregulated savings and loans industry in the 1980s and the deregulated finance industry in the first decade of the 21^st century reaped billions in profit before going bust. All of these industries were engaging in wildings. The gangterism and disregard for human life exhibited by members of the dominant class is far more destructive and pernicious than anything conceivable among drug dealers or street criminals in any inner city. Derber adds:

In capitalism, as Marx conceives it, wilding is less a failure of socialization than an expression of society’s central norms. To turn a profit, even the most humane capitalist employer commodifies and exploits employees, playing by the market rules of competition and profit-maximization to buy and sell their labor power as cheaply as possible.⁵⁹

The point here is that the characterization of the urban underclass as criminal, irrational, greedy, overly materialistic, devoid of any regard for human life is part of the new racism. It shifts attention from the immoral behavior of those at the top to the victims at the bottom. This new racism not only alienates poor blacks from the larger society. It dehumanizes them. It desensitizes the larger society to the suffering and victimization of the poor inner city blacks, just as earlier forms of racist culture rationalized slavery and segregation. Moreover, this racist culture provokes contempt and hostility toward them. It encourages and legitimizes the warehousing of black males in the prison system.⁶⁰

A Marxist approach shifts the focus to the capitalist system and to the dominant class. It interrogates the dominant ideology that dehumanizes and demonizes the lower classes. This approach offers a deeper and richer analysis of contemporary racism.

Notes

1. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971). Because of its main focus on the dominant or ruling class, this paper oversimplifies Gramsci’s view. Gramsci witnessed the destruction of a revolutionary workers’ movement in Italy, as many of the workers joined the fascist movement. He understood the role of the ruling class in striving to control the economy and the state and to construct a dominant ideology that “not only justifies and maintains its dominance, but manages to win the active consent of those over whom it rules” (244). See also Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969), and Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London: New Left Books, 1974).

Gerald Horne, Race War!: White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire. (New York: New York University Press, 2003).

Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001).

Bill Mullen, Afro-Orientalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

Afro-Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between African Americans and Asian Americans. Eds. Bill Mullen & Fred Ho (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).

Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che (London: Verso, 2006).

AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics. Eds. Heike Raphael-Hernandez & Shannon Steen. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

The importance of considering African American identity and history through a transnational and diasporic frame is hopefully no longer debatable. There are countless works that detail the history and current status of global African American thought, activism, and policy, and that show how various foreign ideologies, movements, personalities, and forms of cultural production have helped shape black life. Included in this analysis are studies focusing on African Americans’ collaboration with various Asian populations against their mutual oppressions during the 20^th century.¹ Key works have probed how race, nationality, ethnicity, gender, and geopolitics mediated, impacted, and curtailed Afro-Asian solidarity, and several theories have been offered to describe these relationships of cross-cultural exchange and intercultural communication.

Marc Gallicchio’s The African American Encounter with Japan and China (2000) provides an informative history of African American support for Japan and China during the first half of the 20^th century. Gallicchio details the altering lens through which Japan and China were identified by black activists, organizers, church groups, and foreign correspondents up until the end of World War II; and examines how African Americans’ reflections on the two nations was at some points a challenge to, while at other times in tandem with, US foreign policy. Japan’s defeat of Russia in 1905, its call for the League of Nations to establish an international policy promoting racial equality, and its willingness to confront Euro-American hegemony were all factors that fueled African American interest and conversely Euro-American fear about Japan’s impending advancement. Yet while large numbers of African Americans, with the exception of African American Communists, believed Japan might overthrow the imperialist system, they were frequently indifferent, at times disapproving, of China, a nation ravaged by Western imperialism after the Opium War and the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842. According to Gallicchio, segments of the African American population deemed China as “a kind of ‘uncle Tom’ of Asia” (65), and consequently endorsed Japan’s occupation of China in 1931 because they believed Japan’s invasion might unite Japan and China against Western imperialism in China and other parts of East Asia. It is in these sections that Gallicchio’s analysis becomes especially intriguing. Gallicchio lays out the various negative depictions through which Japan racialized other Asian populations such as Koreans and Chinese, and how African Americans overlooked these policies. He also examines how African Americans, Chinese, and Asian Americans too created stereotypes of each other and how and why this contradicted their efforts to build solidarity.

There are several conceptual and methodological issues to consider relative to this book. At the beginning, “black internationalism,” the study’s central heuristic device, is defined as the belief “that color (or race) determined world politics…the existence of a color scheme to international affairs…” (2). But because Gallicchio never explicitly defines “race,” his definition of black internationalism reduces African Americans’ participation in global affairs to having been motivated by an uncritical, ahistorical conception of race and international relations. This one-sided construction of early-to-mid-20^th-century African American activism as, according to Gallicchio, “resistant to other theories of international relations” (63) sounds somewhat similar to late 20^th-century right-wing attacks, in that both cite black activism as being prompted simply by “identity politics.” In addition, Gallicchio’s definition collapses the divergent viewpoints constituted within black internationalism. It is thus implied that conservative, moderate, liberal, and radical black internationalisms are equivalent. Gallicchio also devotes too few pages to situate and/or problematize black newspapers’ constructions of Japan and China in relation to representations circulated in more mainstream US publications. Lastly, a significant omission in the text is analysis of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and how its newspaper, The Negro World, depicted Japan and China. Seeing that The Negro World’s distribution network extended throughout the entire US, the Caribbean, Central America, Canada, Europe, and Africa, it is odd that Gallicchio does not address or excavate its representations of Japan and China.

Gerald Horne’s Race War! White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire (2003) provides a scrupulous examination of Japan’s challenge to US-British hegemony. Horne challenges the standard, moralistic World War II narrative by offering an alternative assessment of the war’s stakes. He views arguments about race and anxieties about the demise of white supremacy as essential elements of the war. Hoping to distinguish the Pacific front from its Atlantic counterpart, Horne emphasizes the Pacific front as an attempt to eradicate European colonialism. Throughout the work, Horne explicates the fragility of Euro-America’s conception of national identity and whiteness to demonstrate just how close these conceptions, and the regimes of power that they helped sustain, came to being displaced by a foreign force of color. Japan’s “flip of the script” (viii), as Horne comically refers to it, was embodied in Japan’s seizure of Hong Kong in 1941, its bombing of Pearl Harbor, and its policy of internment and racial discrimination against Europeans and Euro-Americans living in Japanese-controlled areas. This attack on global white supremacy, Horne attests, played a primary role in white supremacy’s devolution and the shape it would take in the post-World War II international political climate. The US and British “retreat from the dictates of white supremacy” (ix), according to Horne, was made manifest in the US’s repeal of its laws and customs sanctioning Jim Crow racial discrimination and Britain’s dissolution of its empire.

Drawing on research conducted in five continents, Horne accomplishes a great deal in 430 pages. He begins by detailing the history of racial segregation in Hong Kong from 1842, when the territory was seized by the British at the end of the Opium War, to 1941, the year of Japan’s invasion and occupation. His argument demonstrates how localized ideas about race in Hong Kong were entangled with and influenced by global discourses about race. Cloaked behind discourses of “pure European descent,” Euro-American articulations of whiteness and white supremacy often mirrored racial inequality in the US.  Racial chauvinism, class prejudice, anxieties about interracial relationships and miscegenation, and the state’s use of violence sustained a stratifying divide between Hong Kong’s white Western European inhabitants and its Chinese and Asian residents. Nonetheless, this dividing line of race, ethnicity, and power and the currency of Whiteness was also deeply influenced by class: Scottish and Irish settlers, European prostitutes, and elements of the British lower class were also episodically discriminated against in Hong Kong. It was in this context, Horne explains, that both racially and geopolitically, “Japan became the touchstone, the lodestar, for matters local and global” (45). Japan’s reversal of Hong Kong’s racial status quo, according to Horne, was a result of: 1) the nation’s shift towards a “militant right wing nationalism” (39), 2) its ability to obtain support from colonized populations of color worldwide (including African Americans, West Indians, Australian Aborigines, New Zealand Maoris, Indians, Vietnamese, Malaysians, and Koreans), and 3) British and US policies of racial imperialism and conquest.

Race War! does a superb job of engaging the multiple and complex ways “white supremacy shaped the global context” (xvii). Horne successfully relays that the mid-20^th-century geopolitical rivalry between Japan and the Great Britain-US nexus was also an interracial rivalry. Japan’s efforts to become the hegemonic force of the Pacific thus worked hand-in-hand with its racial appeals to colonized populations of color. For many downtrodden populations of color, Japan supplied the possibility and vision of a new racial order. Nonetheless, Horne affirms that “Japan’s claim to be “champion of the colored races” was fraudulent in no minor way” (ix). The Japanese government’s declaration of a transformed, global racial status quo belied a harsh and brutal anti-white racism and right-wing nationalism. At Stanley Camp in Hong Kong and other Japanese-run internment camps, where thousands of Europeans and Euro-Americans were detained for three years, mayhem and inhumane treatment were the norm. Moreover in the camps, disputes among the internees were often based on ethnic and national divisions, rifts that the Japanese government exploited to its advantage. Still, Horne concludes that the Pacific War weakened and drastically altered the face and shape of white supremacy globally by helping bring about the collapse of the British Empire’s imperium in Asia and adding fire to an evolving Third World viewpoint whose increasing momentum called for the upending of Western domination.

Japan’s defeat at the end of World War II and the 1949 establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) opened the way for Communist China to emerge as Japan’s successor in confronting global white supremacy in the East. From the 1950s through the mid 1970s, the PRC was a premier international political force, capable of challenging Western influence and willing to assist less powerful governments and liberation movements in becoming autonomous, self-determining, and modern. Consequently, activists, radicals, and militants throughout the Third World began to orient themselves towards China.

Vijay Prashad’s Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (2001) examines over five centuries of intersecting connections and transnational exchange between Asians and blacks. Prashad investigates the impact of race as a social construct on India due to its colonial relationship with England; affirmative action’s impact on Asian Americans and their responses to it; neo-conservative discourses of colorblindness versus liberal discourses of multiculturalism and the failures of both; the impact of 20^th-century black nationalism and radicalism on Asian Americans and Asians abroad; and the consumption by African Americans of Asian cultural products such as films starring Bruce Lee.

Prashad’s work is superbly provocative because it pushes scholars to attend to the multiplicity of people’s lives and experiences in a more rigorous way than that proposed by the discourse of multiculturalism. Prashad critiques multiculturalism as a liberal project that merely attempts to account for identities as disparate pieces of a unified and diverse whole. Appropriating Robin Kelley’s concept of “polyculturalism,” Prashad contends that it, better than multiculturalism, engages how people live varied and complex lives and as a result generate identities that are deeply multifaceted. Efforts to fix those identities or play into essentialist notions that stress “beginnings” and “origins” delimit and ignore the range of factors, identifications, and lineages that are comprised in that identity. Prashad agrees with Kelley’s contention that people’s lives are not “easily identifiable,” and asserts that in order to better understand cross-cultural exchanges you must comprehend the uniqueness and range of modern-day identities. Furthermore Prashad maintains that polyculturalism is forged in difference. It acknowledges that an ever-present feature of intercultural collaboration and solidarity is the negotiation of group and individual differences.

Bill Mullen’s Afro-Orientalism (2004) also examines 20^th-century political interaction and activism between Chinese, Asian Americans, and African Americans and tags these relationships as examples of “Afro-Orientalism,” an indigenous American counter-discourse that is both liberating and oppressive. Through black radical newspapers, journals, autobiographies, and other works of literature, Mullen examines the influence of China and Maoism on the transnational correspondence, activism, and radical theory of organizations such as the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), the Republic of New Africa (RNA), the League of Revolutionary Workers, and the Black Workers Congress as well as on individuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, Robert F. Williams, James and Grace Lee Boggs, and Fred Ho. Mullen argues that black radicals, while embracing China as an alternative model, have nevertheless made Asia into their fetish. He asserts that they have suffered from “the tendency to conjure Asia primarily for the purposes of delineating Occidental problems and desires” (xii).

A key shortcoming of Afro-Orientalism is Mullen’s limited attention to political economy and geopolitics. He does not flesh out how ongoing shifts in the world system and global affairs impacted China or black radicals’ viewpoints of China. What geopolitical and cultural gains did China obtain by linking itself to African Americans’ struggles in the US? In what ways did shifts in communication technologies and travel create new means and opportunities for Afro-Asian exchange and solidarity? What role did China’s willingness to invest in foreign infrastructure development without economic or political stipulations play in increasing political and cultural currency of the Chinese development model among Third World nations?  I agree with Graham Garfield, who sums it up best when he states that after reading Afro-Orientalism, “It is far from clear what the relationship of the Afro-Orientalists to broader anti-colonial movements was.”²

Afro-Asia: Revolutionary Political and Cultural Connections between African Americans and Asian Americans (2008), an anthology edited by Mullen and saxophonist and activist Fred Ho, fills in some of Afro-Orientalism’s conceptual gaps. Twenty-three essays, encompassing historiography to short story to autobiography to polemical essay to poetry, illuminate the myriad exchanges connecting the African and Asian Diasporas. Robin Kelley and Betsy Esch’s contribution, “Black Like Mao,” to date provides one of the most valuable overviews of African American radicals’ study and interrogation of Chinese communism and Maoist thought. This essay, published originally in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society in 1999, and in sections of Kelley’s Freedom Dreams (2003), concisely historicizes the intellectual debates and activism of an exhaustive list of organizations and individuals including the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP), the Provisional Organizing Committee (POC), the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), the California Communist League, the Congress of African People (CAP), Robert F. Williams, Vicki Garvin, Harold Cruse, Nelson Peery and Huey P. Newton. Also included in Afro-Asia are two official statements issued by Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong in 1963 and 1968 that established the PRC’s support for African Americans’ struggles against US racial discrimination and that linked the black freedom struggle to the global anticolonial liberation movement.

Scholars of the 1960s and 1970s New Left movement have also pointed to the rise of Maoist thought among black nationalists and radicals, and it is Max Elbaum’s Revolution in the Air (2006) that has best captured the essence, ethos, and revolutionary vigor of the period.³ Elbaum analyzes US social conditions during the 1960s and the rise of Third World Marxism to affirm that the upheavals of the New Left post-1968 were deeply impacted by both national and global social forces. This rich and comprehensive account provides the perfect backdrop for the rest of the work, which examines the theoretical debates, political alliances and divisions, mobilizing efforts, coalitions and collaborations, and developing and altering relationships between revolutionary nationalists, Third World Marxists, and New Left Marxist-Leninists. Elbaum supplies a broad historiography, giving ample attention and analysis to black radical and nationalist organizations including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the League of Revolutionary Workers, the Black Workers Congress, the African Liberation Support Committee (ALSC), BPP, CAP, and major individual activists. He concisely explicates that throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, group and ideological tensions between the black liberation movement’s cultural nationalist, revolutionary nationalist, and Marxist-Leninist lines gave way to a “hegemonic discourse of Black radicalism” that explicitly merged nationalism and Marxism. (85)  

With the exception of Afro-Asia and Bill Mullen’s analysis of Fred Ho in Afro-Orientalism, most of the works reviewed here draw their research and construct their narratives from archives composed predominantly of textual documents and interviews/oral histories. The dominant use of textual archives means less attention to historicizing and theorizing instances of Afro-Asian cultural exchange manifested through music, radio, television, and film. For example, the conjured images of China and the East in black militant and propagandist Robert Franklin Williams’ Radio Free Dixie radio shows, in his film about Chinese development, and in the poetry contained in his newsletter The Crusader are untouched subjects in these studies. It is hoped that future work on Afro-Asian interconnections and collaboration will move in other methodological and conceptual directions to consider the role that practices of sound, visual representation, and other mediums of popular culture have played in establishing, circulating, and constructing Afro-Asia. One example of this type of project is the anthology, AfroAsian Encounters: Culture, History, Politics (2006) edited by Heike Raphael-Hernandez and Shannon Steen. Contributions such as David Stowe’s “‘Jazz That Eats Rice’: Toshiko Akiyoshi’s Roots Music,” and Deborah Elizabeth Whaley’s “Black Bodies/Yellow Masks: The Orientalist Aesthetics in Hip Hop Culture,” relate a variety of artistic endeavors and aesthetics reflecting Afro-Asian fusions of culture that until recently have gone uncharted in conventional historiography.

Still, the reviewed works convey what historian Nikhil Pal Singh calls “the autonomous dimensions of black political discourse” and its diverse diasporic trajectory whose plurality often prevents it from being easily located and situated.⁴ These books remind readers that dynamic social movements have not just been national phenomena, but also the products of global developments. They also document the history of African American attentiveness to foreign affairs and developments in East Asia and establish that blacks and Asians at specific points in time have considered themselves to inhabit a space of commonality based on racial domination and economic exploitation. Made more transparent is the reality and the multiplicity of spaces, places, social movements, ideologies, and cultural forms with which African Americans have identified in making demands on the local, national, diasporic, and international levels. Paraphrasing a point made by scholar Brent Hayes Edwards, the dialectic that exists between black internationalism and transnationalism is brought to life in these texts, where what becomes more obvious is the ever-changing ways black radicalism and internationalism transform when traveling through transnational circuits.⁵

Notes

1. Andrew F. Jones and Nikhil Pal Singh edited a special issue of positions dedicated to examining and theorizing Afro-Asian connections. See positions: east asia cultures critique, Vol. 11, No. 1, Spring 2003, Special Issue: The Afro-Asian Century.

Following Melanie Bush’s “Un-Pledging Allegiance: Waking up from the ‘American’ Dream” (M. Bush 2008), I argue here that the central task of Africana Studies in the 21^st century is to engage its faculty, its students, and its various publics in the intellectual and political task of decolonizing the nationalism of empire within the United States, and thus moving toward solidarity with the billions of oppressed people in the world-system whose lives are constrained by the overarching power of the US hegemon. Utilizing Malcolm X’s observation about the “chickens coming home to roost,” I will argue that the nationalism of empire within the US has been undermined by its historical constitution as an imperial nation which colonized numerous populations and incorporated them as either second-class citizens or non-citizens. These internally colonized populations (among which African Americans have been prominent) articulated their own sense of peoplehood, cross-cutting the nationalism of empire on which social and political stability depended, and thereby becoming the empire’s potential gravediggers.

The demand for African American Studies and Africana Studies did not simply emerge like Athena from the head of Zeus in the late 1960s. It was an outgrowth of the civil rights and Black Power movements which themselves had their origins in the much larger history of African people in the United States.

Though various forms of Black Nationalism and Black solidarity had been a constant throughout US history, they would be dramatically ratcheted up and internationalized at the Pan African Conference of 1900, where W.E.B. Du Bois announced that the problem of the 20^th century would be the problem of the color line. Du Bois’s liberal anti-colonialism was soon to be overtaken by a new and more radical force. The urbanization and concentration of Blacks during the first Great Migration created the social conditions which, along with World War I, gave rise to the New Negro. The New Negro clearly articulated both the interdependence and the tensions between Black internationalism and Black nationalism. (Black Nationalism or nationalist consciousness arises from the experience of African-descended people within the United States.)

Since elite white men have always controlled the structures of knowledge in the US, people of African descent have continuously elaborated counter-hegemonic discourses and epistemologies that have been variously called a Black perspective, cultural nationalism, Ethiopianism, Afrocentrism, Pan Africanism, and Black internationalism. These interventions in the structures of knowledge have sought to counter the Eurocentric perspective which presents itself as universal and supposedly objective or scientific. Since Eurocentrism is much more visible from below than to those whose experiences it valorizes, one must tread carefully in order to get the message across. This has been a most difficult passage. Understanding why requires unpacking the social dynamics which tend to camouflage what is happening.

Resisting Racism and Undermining Empire

Since both the honor and the social position of the white US American world has always been dependent on the invidious distinction it made with African peoples and other people of the Dark World, our freedom fighters had to adopt a variety of postures in addressing the issues involved. Behind what might seem to be merely a matter of dealing with individual personalities, is the issue of US American nationalism, which has always been the nationalism of empire. Asserting the humanity of the “inferior peoples” as victims of conquest thus clashes irreconcilably with the white nation’s image of itself. Only a relatively small minority of the white nation at any given time has been willing to face the full implications of its racialized social system.

Confronted with this racial system, some did not challenge it at all but only sought to assimilate into it; some challenged it indirectly by focusing on the class system, thought to be the foundation of the racial system; and some sought a direct counter-hegemonic strategy to separate from the white nation and be self-determining. But the latter approach presupposed a defined territory that met the economic, demographic, and psychological requirements of being a nation. And then on top of that, it would require its own strategy of implementation. This is what Marxists posed as the national question. Dr. Du Bois, the most brilliant among us, tried for seventy years and finally gave up on what he could accomplish within the United States.

The New Negro radicals who saw themselves as outcasts in the land of their residence were products of an intellectual tradition pioneered by Du Bois. But as products of an insurgent period in world history, they soon came to view themselves politically as part of world anti-colonial forces – consisting of revolutionary organizations primarily located in the semi-colonial (Russia, China, Mexico), colonial, and dependent zones of the world economy. Although they came to prominence during the first great migration (1910-30) in a political community dominated by the towering figure of Du Bois, they increasingly identified Du Bois with the “Old Crowd Negroes.” However, New Negro radicalism was eventually incorporated into Du Bois’s own worldview, as indicated in The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), The Negro (1915), Darkwater (1920), Dark Princess (1928), and Black Reconstruction (1935). In May 1919 Du Bois himself was moved to say that a “new radical Negro spirit had been born in France, which leaves us older radicals far behind.”¹ Though the tension between “race first” and “class first” was not alleviated, this radical spirit would prevail in the social thought of the activist intelligentsia of both the interwar and postwar periods.

The evolution of US Black social thought is more complex than is indicated here, but despite the continuing ideological struggle over class vs. race, and over Marxism vs. liberalism vs. social democracy, the main currents of the Black Left and Center Left established a broad progressive front during the 1930s and 40s which re-emerged in the 50s and 60s in the midst of a withering repression of the Left. The groups that had arisen during the first great migration and the Great War thus transformed radical politics in the United States, to the extent that the re-emergence of radical forces since the late 1940s should not be surprising.¹

The Black Popular Front of the interwar years was part of a nationwide transformative project with international connections that moved US political culture dramatically to the left.³ It was undercut, however, by the emergence of the Project for the American Century which came to replace the New Deal Left’s notion of a “century of the common man.”⁶ While the American Century was the framework for the social-democratic compromise in the core states of the world-system (the US, Western Europe, Japan, and Canada), the changes in the relations of force entailed in this compromise so threatened the power of capital on a world scale, that the trajectory toward social democratization within the United States had to be curtailed. The domestic weakness of this American Century project – which Piven and Cloward call the “American Social Compact” – stemmed in part from the fragility of the political coalition which constituted it (including a powerful bloc of Southern Democrats) and the abandonment of the transformative “race first” radicalism of Du Bois, Harrison, Briggs, McKay, Moore, and others.⁵

I will concede that my claim of a downward US trajectory – from underwriting the golden age of capitalism, to the twilight of the American Century just thirty years later – is counter-intuitive. Let me explain. Although some argue that capitalism was not as moribund as V.I. Lenin thought in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, the evolution of world capitalism in the 20^th century seems to vindicate his analysis. Du Bois seems to have had the same sense when in Darkwater he juxtaposed the arrogance of pan-European power with the lowly oppressed pointing to their feet of clay. The social compact or social democratic compromise of the interwar and postwar period was a consequence of the struggles of the oppressed, which enlarged the space for possible future concessions. The civil rights movements, Black Power, Native American, Puerto Rican, Chicano, and Women’s movements; the student movement and anti-war movement, the Gay and Lesbian movements within the US were all agents that expanded the scope of democracy and, with the later New Communist Movement, sought active allegiance with world revolutionary struggles as Malcolm X had called for.

But the logic of concessions and compromise extended to the third world, where it took the form of neocolonialism. All of this led to a certain unruliness, as Giovanni Arrighi (1982) argues, following Malcolm. The American Century then encountered the pushback of the extra-European world, joined by the internally colonized social strata. In the same year that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. made his “I Have a Dream” speech, Malcolm X argued that we had arrived at the end of white world supremacy. King had his eye on the upward swing of democratization within the United States. Malcolm X had his eye on the multiple crises confronting white supremacy around the world. These intersecting trends demonstrate Wallerstein’s (2010) observation that concessions can be made to tens of millions of oppressed people in the core of the world-system, but not to billions in the periphery. That would create a profit squeeze that is not acceptable for capital; it would strengthen the bargaining power of the oppressed and would dramatically tilt the balance of power on a world scale.

With the rise of US imperialism to dominance of the world economy, the Black Left intelligentsia who had played such an important role from 1900 to the 1950s were sidelined by the centrist leadership of the NAACP, which abandoned the human rights strategy of the Black Popular Front (later revived by Malcolm X) for an assimilationist stance that used anti-communism as a bargaining chip with US elites. However, the postwar sweep of African liberation would revive the radical forces within the Black Freedom struggle, while the larger arc of world revolution shattered the ideological conformity that was established during the late 1940s and 1950s. Some African Americans came to interpret these events as a sign of the increasing vulnerability of white power, not only in the wider world, but at home.

In the decade prior to the April 1955 meeting of 29 nations at Bandung, Indonesia, millions of people emerged from the shadow of European colonialism through the pursuit of anticolonial social struggles. India, Burma, Indonesia, Egypt, and China were among those who achieved independence during this period. The 29 countries meeting at Bandung represented over half of the world’s population at that time, 1.4 billion people (Layton 2000:70). In Africa independence victories followed swiftly – Nigeria in 1957, Guinea in 1958; in 1960: Cameroun, Central African Republic, Congo, Dahomey, Gabon , Ivory Coast , Malagasy Republic, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Somalia, Togo, Upper Volta; in 1961, Sierra Leone and Tanganyika (Wallerstein 1961:169).

The vulnerability of empire was a truism which Malcolm X presented so powerfully that he revived some of the radical forces which had been sidelined by the NAACP leadership, and won the support of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the left wing of the civil rights movement. Malcolm had attracted the attention of an entire cadre of organic intellectuals who formed the backbone of the Black insurgency of the 1960s and were variously associated with the Freedom Now Party, Liberator Magazine, and the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM). There was also a group of intellectuals associated with the journal Freedomways and the Black Popular Front of the 1930s and 1940s who were important in transmitting the lessons of that period to a new generation. The latter group was less nationalistic than the former, and included some who were anti-nationalist in the “class first” sense that I discuss at greater length in The End of White World Supremacy: Black Internationalism and the Problem of the Color Line (2009).

But the turmoil of that period would gradually undermine the prospects for social change. The incorporation of Blacks into the various social compromises led to the mobilization of other sections of the population (Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, Asians, Women, Gays And Lesbians, Youth). It was during this period that the long-standing demand to remedy the “mis-education of the Negro” (expressed by Carter G. Woodson in 1923) was echoed by all of these oppressed groups. The liberal politics of the time sought to incorporate this demand, and thus co-opt these forces. But there were many who called for the decolonization of knowledge, and were thus reinforcing the demand to push back the ramparts of the US power structure. The increasing radicalization of social movements composed of or allied with oppressed social strata – within both core states and the periphery – loomed large. At the same time the window for concessions was beginning to close by 1967-73, when the US could no longer afford the global liberalism of the postwar order.

The US form of empire differed from that of Europe in that, with the exceptions of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, it was neocolonial, i.e. it did not seek direct political control of a territory. The US could thus present itself as a friend of nationalist movements, citing its own independence fight against Britain. Neocolonialism constituted a social compact similar in logic to the social democratic compromise in the core states, but as Wallerstein had noted, it was not viable on a global scale. But the neocolonial deal was on the table because of the dramatic upward surge in social power of the oppressed in the third world. The radical national liberation movements that had seized power found that they did not have as much control over economic matters as they had anticipated. With the neocolonial deal, dominant capital externalized its problems in such a way as to give the appearance that the problems lay within the periphery itself.

In the 1970s a strategy for the world bourgeoisie was presented to the Trilateral Commission in a report entitled The Crisis of Democracy. Samuel Huntington’s section of the report argued that the contemporary world suffered from an excess of democracy, as ordinary people were having too much input into governance. Earlier, in response to the perceived US crisis in “race relations,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan counseled President Nixon that the race issue could benefit from a period of “benign neglect” in which Negro progress continues and racial rhetoric fades. Moynihan argued that the race issue “had been too much talked about and taken over by hysterics, paranoids, and boodlers on all sides” (O’Connor 2004: 370). The biggest threat to Black progress, he argued, is the Negro lower class, which must be dissolved by creating a stable working class. But Moynihan did not think that this could be done by government policy. Better to deescalate the rhetoric of crisis on such issues as crime, de facto segregation, and low education attainment. In the meantime the administration could seek to restore confidence in a wide range of nongovernmental institutions – family, church, civic groups – as a means of pacifying the ghetto.

Alice O’Connor argues that Moynihan’s prescriptions were not only a recipe for policy retreat but also a strategy for putting a conservative spin on the race issue by framing it as a phenomenon of Black social pathology rather than of white racism. But I would argue further that this was a tactic for defusing and overturning one of the central forces for democratizing the US system. President Ronald Reagan would later exemplify this agenda by disingenuously using the rhetoric of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech – that one day his children would not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Reagan, who had long opposed anti-racist measures, argued that King’s dream had been achieved and that racism was a practice of fringe elements, including people of color and their liberal allies who (unlike King) advocated color-conscious policies which discriminated against white men.

It is most important to understand that this was part of a far-reaching counterrevolution against the struggles of the postwar period to extend the social compact to previously excluded populations. The liberal establishment had tried to co-opt the challenge. But since liberals no longer had the upper hand, conservatives sought to shout them down in the public arena, reviving the discourse of white supremacy, harking back at least to Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, and revealing a deep chasm in US political culture. It was in this environment that the redistributive logic of the postwar reforms was replaced by an emphasis on diversity. While some argue that this is all that we can realistically expect, we should be clear that it implies a rejection of the direct attack on structural inequality and white supremacist ideology which gained support during the 1960s and 1970s.

Diversity discourse was a retreat, aimed at saving at least some of the postwar concessions. But the triumphant neoliberal strategy subsequently lost much of its sheen, and we can now return to a transformative strategy. We are in an era of transition: capitalism, US hegemony, and white world supremacy have entered a twilight period. Our efforts may once again bear fruit. But to be successful, we must examine the longer-term trends of the system. We must overcome the post-1979 counterrevolution of neoliberalism, which shook the confidence of the Left in the core states even as neoliberal economic strategy was causing economic disasters everywhere. In such times of structural crisis, agency is important, and here the structures of knowledge must play a role.

Black Revolution, Social Revolution and African American Studies

What the anti-colonial Left of the 1960s referred to as the Black Revolution was viewed by them as an integral part of a “world revolution,” in which oppressed strata everywhere seemed to be on the march. During this “world revolution” of the 1960s, militants in the imperialist countries used the phrase “belly of the beast” to describe their social location. The rise of the colonized, semi-colonized, and internally colonized masses had reversed the longstanding presumption that the so-called backward and less civilized parts of the world would be given the gift of freedom by the victorious proletariat of the so-called advanced industrial societies. The language of liberation had passed from revolutionary centers in Ghana, Guinea, China, Cuba, Algeria, Indonesia, and Vietnam to young people in the imperialist countries, including Pan-African social strata who overlapped with what some called a “third world within” the imperialist countries, especially the United States.

Nkrumah, Mao, Lin Biao, Fanon, Rodney, Nyerere, Che, Césaire, Cabral, and Touré all spoke eloquently about the forces within the “belly of the beast” that implacably opposed imperialism, not simply as solidarity movements, but as part of the revolutionary wave sweeping the world-system. Huey Newton spoke of the Black Panther Party as being drawn from a group of “implacables.” Muhammad Ahmad and members of RAM⁶ characterized this worldwide social force as the rise of the Black Underclass.⁷ Some viewed the social practices and political thought of these anti-colonial militants as “ultra-Leftist,” but they appealed to the romantic revolutionary notions of a section of the white Left. The subsequent institutionalization of Black politics within a liberal polity shifted the terrain of political discourse to such an extent that by the middle of the 1970s the forces on the Left began to question themselves. The Black Liberation Movement and its Puerto Rican, Chicano, and Native American counterparts were all said to have gone too far. There was now a sense among some that the militants had brought much of the drama of state repression upon themselves. Their adventurism and their elevation of identity politics to a principle, had brought us to the “twilight of our common dreams” (Gitlin 1995). Blauner (2001) argues that the social practices of the Left during this period so polarized US society that the Left broke away from its liberal allies, which had always been the foundation of its viability.

Looking at this history from a somewhat different vantage point, I am not so inclined to assume that it was the radicals who broke the alliance. Rather, some liberals were unwilling to confront the realities of the US role in the world. After all, it was in 1963 that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover argued that United States was in the midst of a social revolution with the racial movement at its core. He decided that the trajectory of the civil rights movement had to be radically altered or else simply stopped, in order to forestall that revolution. This declaration of war on the civil rights movement coincided with the renunciation of liberalism by a group of intellectuals who came to be called neo-conservatives, who now viewed their past sensitivity to the needs of the disadvantaged as a perversion of human nature, which is to guarantee one’s own welfare above all others. While the neoconservatives asserted that they were the true liberals who supported the civil rights movement when its demand was that we be judged by the “content of our character,” some were providing information on Dr. King to the FBI (Hilbink 1992).

The conservative backlash was a mounting counter-insurgency against the challenge of people of color (within and outside our borders), anti-imperialist and national liberation movements, insurgent workers, and the women’s movement. This conservative counterrevolution included the ever class-conscious capitalist elites, a class-conscious and ideologically sophisticated intelligentsia based in the white middle strata, and a large number of working-class whites who sought to defend their racial and economic interests from what they perceived as the challenge from people of color. The genius of this movement is that the backlash was conceptualized in such a way that it seemed to derive naturally from the values of ordinary (white) people. This was a stroke of “genius” since it enabled those forces that opposed the country’s egalitarian drift to restore major elements of the “racial” status quo while maintaining a sense of their own virtue and rectitude, and to transform the egalitarian spirit into a concern about interfering with the rights of individual white men.

In contrast to this attempt to turn back the clock on Dr. King’s challenge, I hold that the wave of revolutionary struggle that started in the mid-1960s constituted a break from the reformist-liberal geoculture of the period 1848-1968. In response to the struggles of the 1840s, when implacably anti-capitalist working-class movements came to the fore, the ruling classes of the world-system evolved a strategy of compromise with these movements, making concessions designed to draw them back into the logic of the system. Such concessions were made only when movements were so strong that simple repression would backfire. The strategy of cooptation, or what some have called the social democratic compromise, has meant that movements which rose from an anti-systemic logic would function, once in power, to maintain the existing system rather than transform it (Depelchin 2007).

What then is the role of Africana Studies in the transformation of this system of capitalist/colonial racism? Is not the task of the 21^st century to overcome the 500-year pillage of the majority of the world’s peoples? The militants of the 1960s and 70s, caught up in the revolutionary wave of that period, imagined that the time had come, that US and Western imperialism had met its Waterloo. One can understand the urgency these militants felt about building structures of knowledge adequate to what they viewed as the transformative epoch in which they were living. They disagreed with Marx and Engels’ contention that the transition to socialism would take place where capitalism was most developed (advanced). For them the clear lesson of the 1960s and 70s was that the revolutionary break with capitalism was not a gift of the workers’ movement of the pan-European world to the dominated peoples and areas, but stemmed from a dramatic acceleration in the rise of the dark world – whose pushback had been underway since the 19^th century – against the 500-year history of white world supremacy.

Third world nationalism, like social democracy in the core states, was not a sufficient strategy for transforming the capitalist world economy. Capitalism is a world-system, and the seizure of power in a few states could not in and of itself bring world-system transformation. But what the struggles of this period did achieve was a significant change in relations of force, whereby the social power of oppressed strata increased relative to the power of the imperialist system.

On August 8, 1963 Mao Zedong responded to a request made by Robert F. Williams, the exiled former president of the Monroe, North Carolina NAACP, for support of the African American struggle against racial discrimination. Williams had fled the United States for exile in Cuba after calling for his followers to arm themselves against the Ku Klux Klan when local police refused to protect them. Mao called for the people of the world to stand in solidarity with the Afro-American people. He denounced the “handful of imperialists headed by the United States, and their supporters, the reactionaries in different countries, who are oppressing, committing aggression against, and menacing the overwhelming majority of the nations and peoples of the world”; he expressed confidence that the Afro-American people would prevail, and concluded, “The evil system of colonialism and imperialism arose and throve with the enslavement of Negroes and the trade in Negroes, and it will surely come to its end with the complete emancipation of the black people” (Mao 1964: 4).⁸

Just four months later, on December 1, 1963, Minister Malcolm X would give his last speech as a member of the Nation of Islam, focusing on the March on Washington which had also been the context of Chairman Mao’s statement. This speech was entitled “God’s Judgment of White America” though it is frequently referred to as “The Chickens Are Coming Home to Roost.”⁹ Malcolm most forcefully articulated the depths of the contradiction of that period when the US stood poised at the pinnacle of its might and prestige, but facing a world in rebellion against white western hegemony. And while the US attempted to woo the nations of the dark world as a true friend who itself had fought a war of national liberation against Europeans, in truth it was now in a position of being the police of global imperialism. So while the United States may have been basking in the public relations glow of Dr. King’s testament to the American Dream, it was Malcolm X who had his finger on the pulse of the third world rebellion against white Western hegemony, and on the pulse of many in the inner cities across the nation.

Malcolm X stripped away the veil of the liberals who he argued only pretended to befriend Black people. For Malcolm there was no doubt about where white conservatives stood. They did not pretend to be the friends of Black people. He compared the white conservatives to wolves: “they show their teeth in a snarl that keeps the Negro always aware of where they stand with them. But the white liberals are foxes who show their teeth to the Negro but pretend they are smiling.” And it is precisely this confusing signal from the white liberals that makes them in Malcolm’s view more dangerous than the white conservatives. “They lure the Negro, and as the Negro runs from the growling wolf, he flees into the open jaws of the ‘smiling’ fox” (Malcolm X, 1971: 137).

Malcolm X was a master of the word. He explained that the Negro “revolution” is controlled by those foxy liberals who he pointed out had not only manipulated the March on Washington, but had openly cautioned their white publics that they had to respond to the moderate Negro leaders in order to enhance their image in the eyes of the Black masses, and to keep them from turning to the Black “extremists.” But unlike the “Negro Revolution” the Black revolution was not under the control of any section of the white population. Malcolm X pointed out that the “Black revolution is the struggle of the nonwhites of this earth against their white oppressors. The black revolution has swept white supremacy out of Africa, out of Asia, and it is getting ready to sweep it out of Latin America” (Malcolm X 1971: 137).

Shortly after his declaration of independence from Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X gave his famous presentation on “The Ballot or the Bullet.” In this speech he called for Blacks to do away with all illusions. How could we call ourselves American if we are not sharing in the benefits of citizenship? The 22 million Black people in this country are victims of Americanism. And as one of those victims of the disguised hypocrisy which is presented to the world as American democracy, he did “not see an American Dream,” but “an American nightmare” (Breitman 1966: 26).

The Radicalism of Africana Studies

Malcolm X was the pivotal figure who linked the radicalism of the 1910-1950 period to the 1960s generation.¹⁰ In a 1964 speech at Harvard University, he captured the intellectual/philosophical mood of African American communities as it related to structures of knowledge. He told the audience, “the oppressed is not looking to the oppressor to give him some system or form of logic or reason. What is logical to the oppressor is not logical to the oppressed. And what is reason to the oppressor is not reason to the oppressed. The black people in this country are beginning to realize that what sounds reasonable to those who exploit us doesn’t sound reasonable to us. There just has to be a new system of reason and logic devised by those of us who are at the bottom, if we are to get some results in this struggle…” (Epps 1968: 133).

Sylvia Winter holds that the Black Studies movement emerged as a challenge to the mainstream order of knowledge; it was inseparable from the Black Aesthetic Movement (Black Pride) and the Black Arts Movement, and was an analog to the Black Power stage of the civil rights movement. For Wynter these three movements rose to commanding heights as a consequence of the murder of Dr. King in 1968 and the massive rebellions of inner-city residents across the nation in its wake. University officials evidenced a new willingness to accede to the demands of student activists for the establishment of Black Studies programs and departments. This allowed some of the major figures of the then much more powerful Black Aesthetics and Black Arts Movement to gain entry into the academic mainstream. As a consequence of this entry, they found their original transgressive intentions defused and their energies rechanneled as they came to be defined or actively chose to redefine themselves in “new multicultural terms” (Wynter 2006: 108f).

The increase in social power that had opened those doors was dissipated as the social uprising subsided and as the Black middle class was incorporated into the US American mainstream. The consequent separation of the integrationist goals of that stratum from the ongoing struggles of the Black lower strata created a mood of quiescence and defensiveness which encouraged a rightward backlash.

Henry Louis Gates stepped into the breach thus established by the decline of the Black Aesthetics and Black Arts Movement. While the movement had sought to “unfix the notion of Blackness from the traditional color symbology of the West” and to challenge the “Western equation of Blackness” with ugliness, evil, corruption, and death,” Gates accused it in Derridian terms, according to Madhu Dubey, of posing a metaphysical concept of “blackness as presence” instead of displacing an essentialist concept of identity. For Gates, the Black Aesthetics and Black Arts Movements were “entrapped in racial essentialism” and had come to depend upon “the absent presence of the Western framework it sets out to subvert” (Dubey 1994: 28f). Though Gates’s own enterprise is held to depend upon the very same “absent presence” of the very same Western framework, it was extremely functional in pacifying a movement that had electrified and energized an entire generation literally bristling with the sense of possibility conveyed in the writings of Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Amiri Baraka, Don Lee, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Maulana Karenga, Hoyt Fuller, and Addison Gayle (Wynter 2006: 111). Dubey argues that the Gates framework sought to reconstitute a pacified, ethnically re-christened African American Studies in place of the powerful dynamism of the original 1960s conception of Black Studies. This new framework served as a complement to the Euro-American framework and its hegemonic space in the US public sphere.

The institutionalized production and reproduction of our long-standing system “of asymmetric disparities of power, as well as of wealth, education, life opportunities, even mortality rates between blacks and whites…” is the foundation of systemic black self-alienation, and of the correlated powerlessness of African-descended populations at all levels of the contemporary world order that followed the erasure and displacement of the movements of the 1960s (Wynter 2006: 118).

J. Edgar Hoover’s 1963 claim that the nation had entered a period of social revolution with the racial factor at its core was not an exaggeration. Within the US the racial factor had been the principal challenge to white supremacy, had mobilized large sections of the US population against the imperial role of their government in the world arena, and had argued for an increase in the democratic and egalitarian character of US society. These attempts at expanding the US American social compact were met by efforts at silencing these forces via a neoliberal closing down of the welfare state, ending the discussion about racial justice via the argument for a color-blind society, and blaming the poor for their own poverty via a discourse about the underclass and a culture of poverty. These closings were punctuated by the withdrawal of the state from inner-city sites of concentrated poverty inhabited by internally colonized populations, and its replacement by a carceral state. The professional managerial strata from those populations are incorporated into the class structure of the larger system through affirmative action and programs of diversity, producing limited integration or assimilation into the larger society. The whole process points to the need for a fuller study of the internally colonized within the United States – a topic which calls for larger discussion within Africana Studies.

The Relevance of Internally Colonized Populations within the United States

Colonialism is generally considered to be the extension of a nation’s sovereignty over territory beyond its borders. In the modern world-system, the model of colonialism is the extension of European dominion over almost all of the world’s people in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands. In some cases enslaved people were moved to another territory, or states actually expanded their territory to encompass territory formerly controlled by other populations, thereby forming what some have referred to as internal colonies. Many indigenous populations fit this category as do formerly enslaved Africans in territories dominated by descendants of settler colonist from Europe.

Colonialism has tended to be conceived in geographical and geopolitical terms. What I intend to do here is to view the concept of internal colony more in structural terms, and assess the impact of such structural relations on the development of hybrid cultures among the internally colonized populations and consequently on how these populations come to view themselves as agents of change. The political psychology of these populations is often the soil in which a counter-hegemonic dual consciousness emerges which provides insights on the society less available to those whom it valorizes. In his Darkwater essay “The Souls of White Folk,” Du Bois writes:

High in the tower, where I sit above the loud complaining of the human sea, I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, but none there are that intrigue me more than the Souls of White Folk. Of them I am singularly clairvoyant. I see in and through them. I view them from unusual points of vantage. Not as a foreigner do I come, for I am native, not foreign, bone of their thought and flesh of their language….

Mine is not the knowledge of the traveler or the colonial composite of dear memories, words and wonder. Nor yet is my knowledge that which servants have of masters, or mass of class, or capitalist of artisan. Rather I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. I see the working of their entrails (Du Bois 1999: 17).

Du Bois asserts that he knows their thoughts and that they know that he knows them, which makes them alternately embarrassed and furious. This special access to the dehumanizing “will to power” of the European imperial subject is a form of social power which undercuts the legitimacy of the ruling race and ruling class in a fundamental manner. For it is this special insight of the Black life-world which makes it such a threat to the claims of universalism of the white life-world. It is the insider status of the former slaves which performs such a debilitating function, one which the white life-world cannot escape, and which therefore must be silenced at all costs. It is for this reason that US American society has sought to deal with the “Negro Question” for so long, and, failing to assimilate this troublesome presence, has sought to pronounce it null and void by calling itself color-blind.

While this social dynamic is most pronounced in the United States and other former settler colonies of the Pan-European world with a substantial presence of racial colonial subjects, it is also present in all of the former Western European colonial powers vis-à-vis the migration of former colonial racial subjects to the metropolis.

But as the “third world within” continues to increase as a proportion of the population of the core states (especially in the United States), the lower and lower middle class strata will need to create an effective rainbow coalition to contend with the ideological weight of pan-European racism. Defenders of the status quo have recognized this issue since early in the 20^th century, when the New Negro radicals animated a variety of organizations and movements from the Messenger Group to the African Blood Brotherhood, the Garvey movement, and the Communist Party. To the distress of the ruling interests, such movements always tended leftwards. Woodrow Wilson’s program for the self-determination of nations was a response to the threat of Bolshevik anti-colonialism, which he thought was most likely to be introduced into the United States by Blacks. Long before Cointelpro, US security forces were employed to eliminate, discredit, and harass Black leaders that they disapproved of. The list includes many, perhaps most, of the most respected leaders and intellectuals within the African American community: Marcus Garvey, A. Philip Randolph, Chandler Owen, William Monroe Trotter, Hubert Harrison, Cyril Briggs, Claude McKay, Wilfred Domingo, Harry Haywood, William Patterson, George Padmore, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Elijah Muhammad, Langston Hughes, and C.L.R. James (Kornweibel 1998: 2002). During the 1960s of course we add to this list some of the main targets of Cointelpro: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., James Baldwin, Medgar Evers, Bayard Rustin, Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Fred Hampton, and Bunchy Carter (O’Reilly 1989; Churchill & Vander Wall 1988).

In response to the revolutionary mobilizations of the late 1960s and early 70s, US elites proposed a liberal model of multiculturalism to restore the momentum of an assimilationist rather than an oppositional movement among the internally colonized. But the US model of multiculturalism conceded “culture” while maintaining “epistemology.” In Latin America, which was one site of radicalization in the 1990s, Andean intellectuals introduced the term “interculturality” as a means of claiming epistemic rights (Mignolo 2007: 62). The Argentine scholar Walter Mignolo argues that the struggle for epistemic rights is fundamental to any strategy for transformative social change because it is this struggle that will determine the “principles upon which the economy, politics, and education will be organized, ruled, and enacted” (65). These principles will allow many worlds to coexist. Aimé Césaire has tirelessly argued the need for such a framework to allow for the unfolding of a universalism that is rich with all of the particulars.

Since the oppressed are not looking to the oppressor for a system of thought, it will be in this context that the internally colonized will be able to come into the light and be fully acknowledged. The long history of the development of counter-hegemonic ideas among the Black intelligentsia even before the institutionalization of Africana studies suggests that despite the gains of professional managerial strata within the African American population since the 1970s, there remains a significant section of the intelligentsia which is scornful of the assimilationist option, and who will likely in time come together with the oppositional culture of the youth and the older organic intellectuals of their communities to espouse and develop a decolonizing option. This will enable them to ally with and draw sustenance from similar movements in the Caribbean, Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Pacific Islands, and Central Europe, to fundamentally challenge the system of white world supremacy which was a constitutive feature of the founding of the Americas and the establishment of the capitalist world-economy.

While the capitalist world-economy itself is entering into a structural crisis, the past inability of workers’ movements and national liberation movements to transform capitalism will be surmounted by populations who will not accept the gift of assimilation but will seek to overcome not only capitalism but its coloniality of power, of knowledge, and of being.

The Modern/Colonial/Capitalist World-System: The Chickens Come Home to Roost

The old order is now in a period of transition, and the delinking of these internal colonies from the centers of power will significantly transform the old structures of power, knowledge, and being. In the new situation, we will be less likely to have a system with global designs. Instead, there will be a plurality of centers, where there is a genuine right of difference. The basis for such diversity of power-centers is becoming evident as the working class within the imperialist countries increasingly includes what Grosfoguel (2008) calls colonial/racial subjects of empire (African Americans, Caribbean Americans, Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, Filipinos, Asian-Americans, and other Latin Americans).

During the 1970s when I belonged to a tendency in the Black Power movement that called ourselves Nkrumahists, we argued that revolutionary conditions would come to the belly of the beast as socialist and national liberation movements began to cut off the tentacles of the imperialist octopus. Later when we came under the influence of the Chinese revolutionaries we emphasized a scenario in which revolutionary movements in the countryside would increasingly surround the cities at the core of the capitalist world. Migrations from the periphery to the core may have an analogous effect. Decolonization and socialist revolution are intertwined in ways that will challenge our creativity in this age of transition. Dare I say with Malcolm that the “chickens have come home to roost”? The task for Africana Studies in the 21st century is to theorize where we go from here.

Bibliography

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Notes

– Countee Cullen¹

Afrocentrism has gained wide currency throughout African-American popular culture. In most circles, it has acquired the character of a buzzword, an abstract notion without specific content. It is often used to express an all-encompassing identification with the continent of Africa and with Africana people worldwide. The term has been used to describe public school curricula across the nation such as the Afrikan Centered Education Collegium Campus in Kansas City (Missouri), books such as Marimba Ani’s Yurugu, music ranging from R&B singer Eryka Badu to Hip-Hop artists like Mos Def (of the group Black Star), fashion statements like Kente cloth embroidered with the acronyms of various Black fraternities and sororities, and even pornography.

Beneath the populism of Afrocentrism lies a utopian, reactionary image of African people and history. Our Afrocentric friends believe that the cluster of ideas, beliefs and tenets of their theory provides a corrective to Eurocentric histories of Africa that diminish and neglect the achievements of the continent’s pre-colonial past. Yet, the reality is that an African-centered perspective fosters the reification of Black abstracted from its historical context. Rather than move forward and progress to self-determination, we are left with a romantic, idealized past of African grandeur, the so-called Age of Pharaohs in Kemet. Our Afrocentrists are imprisoned by the incessant need to think in terms of an authentic representation of the African subject located in a reconstructed African past. By focusing exclusively on ancient Kemetic (or Egyptian) tradition and culture, Afrocentrists by implication ignore the complex socio-historical development of Africa and of various peoples of African descent.

The Afrocentric quest for an authentic past is utopian in the sense that it seeks to recapture a fantasy or fairy-tale. The utopia is impotent for matters of political struggle because it fails to see the value of a concrete investigation of concrete conditions in Africa. It arrests the dialectical character of Black culture by focusing exclusively on classical African civilization and positing a Black intellectual culture which is ahistorical, static and monotypical. This quest for authenticity is grounded in a narrative of ancient African civilization which seeks to dismiss its class character. That is to say, it ignores the fact that the Pharaohs in conjunction with the priests were an oppressive and exploitative aristocracy. Dreaming of what Kwame Nkrumah termed an idyllic African classless society is a wrong-headed approach for Black Studies. Most importantly, it ignores the present-day class struggles of Africa and of Africana people throughout the diaspora. While I am not advocating a wholesale rejection of all traditional African beliefs, values, customs and practices. Rather the determination of which elements of African belief-systems and practices we value has to be made in light of the contemporary socio-economic realities. However, in regard to ancient Africa, the African-centered perspective ignores the democratic spirit of traditional African societies as crystallized in their humanism and communalism – a necessary component of African self-determination.

Afrocentrism as a particular theoretical and methodological approach to African-American Studies (AAS) has its origins in 1980 with the publication of Molefi Asante’s Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change – a book written in the tone of an impassioned ideologue with little concern for explicit arguments or standards of accepted scholarship, such as citation of sources. In this manifesto of sorts, Asante argues that Afrocentrism as a mode of thought and action means placing African interests, values and perspectives at the center of any analysis of African phenomena.² Asante claims that Afrocentrism is the “most historically correct philosophy of scholarship and life” for the AAS scholar.³

To identify with Afrocentrism in the field of African-American Studies entails a particular mode of academic inquiry, a mode of intellectual discourse, a style of intellectual discursive practices, and a philosophy of history. Most importantly, Afrocentricity offers an idealist approach to the negation of Eurocentrism via the affirmation of a distinctive (metaphysical) perspective (or what can be termed a quest for particularity).⁴

Afrocentrism is not the only ideological, philosophical, theoretical and methodological approach in African-American Studies. Yet, it has been one of the dominant trends since the late 1980s.⁵ Afrocentrists specializing in diverse areas such as psychology, literature, linguistics, cultural expression/aesthetics, social work, history, philosophy, communications and political science have greatly impacted the field of AAS. Molefi Asante in conjunction with the scholarship of Marimba Ani, Daudi Ajani ya-Azibo, Maulana Karenga, Naim Akbar, Wade Nobles, Linda Myers, Lucius Outlaw, Van Horne, James Stewart, Greg Carr, and others have sought to make Afrocentricity the critical cultural philosophy which will awaken AAS scholars from their supposed dogmatic slumber.

This essay is an attempt to elaborate on the utopian conception of history that undergirds Afrocentrism and its philosophy of African-American Studies. My tone is predominantly critical, and from the perspective of philosophical materialism. My concern is to demonstrate the limitations of Afrocentrism, not necessarily to expound my own view. However, implicit throughout the essay, and intermittently explicit, are fragments of a dialectical materialist outlook on a seminal debate in African-American Studies, particularly the relationship of African history to African-American Studies.

Afrocentrism as Racial Vindicationism

Few scholars in African-American Studies would deny that the history of Africa, as presented by some European scholars, has been fraught with malicious myths. We could easily reference the influential 19^th-century German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel as confirmation of this claim. According to Hegel’s philosophy of history, Africans were outside the pale of history. Whereas other continents had shaped history, and determined their own course of development, from Hegel’s perspective, Africa had stood still in a state of inertia. It is claimed by Hegel that Africa was only propelled into history by European contact. African history can, therefore, only be seen as an extension of European history.⁶ Writing in The Philosophy of History, Hegel argued,

…[Africa] is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit. Historical movements in it…belong to the Asiastic or European World.… Egypt will be considered in reference to the passage of the human mind from its Eastern to its Western phase, but it does not belong to the African Spirit. What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World’s History.⁷

Africa does not belong to the “real theatre of History” according to Hegel.⁸ The denigration of Africa by Hegel among others was used as an ideological defense of European imperialist interest in slavery and as rationalization for the exploitation and oppression of the descendants of Africa. Africans were viewed as savage, grotesque, subhuman creatures incapable of language, art, philosophy or culture. In fact, racist ideology was so influential that Du Bois declared: “Among Negroes of my generation there was little inherited knowledge about Africa…but much distaste.”⁹

In response to the Eurocentrism of Hegel among others, the early pioneers in African-American Studies focused on setting the historical record straight. With this purpose in mind, Dr. Carter G. Woodson, the father of Black history, organized the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and founded the Journal of Negro History. Early pioneers such as Du Bois, Woodson, J.A. Rogers, and John Hope Franklin sought to correct the sin of omission within the Anglo-American world and remind the world that Black people were more than hewers of wood and drawers of water! Their efforts were focused on vindicating the humanity of the Black race by demonstrating a Black contribution to world history and culture.

Most African-American intellectuals reject racist omissions and distortions of the Black experience. They view racist or Eurocentric intellectual practices as examples of false universality. This, however, does not make one an Afrocentrist! For Afrocentrists, the rejection of false universality (or Eurocentrism) entails a quest for African particularity and authenticity.

Following in the tradition of racial vindicationism, Afrocentrists are engaged in an effort to correct the errors, omissions and distortions of the Africana experience produced by European/Eurocentric scholarship. In this vein, Woodson had argued in 1933:

The leading facts of the history of the world should be studied by all…. We say, hold on to the real facts of history as they are, but complete such knowledge by studying also the history of races and nations which have been purposely ignored. We should not underrate the achievements of Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome; but we should give equally as much attention to the internal African kingdoms, the Songhay empire, and Ethiopia, which through Egypt decidedly influenced the civilization of the Mediterranean world. […]

We would not underestimate the achievements of the captains of industry who in the commercial expansion of the modern world have produced the wealth necessary to ease and comfort; but we would give credit to the Negro who so largely supplied the demand for labor by which these things have been accomplished…. We would not learn less of George Washington, “First in War, First in Peace and First in the Hearts of his Countrymen”; but we would learn something also of the three thousand Negro soldiers of the American Revolution who helped to make this “Father of our Country” possible.¹⁰

From Woodson’s perspective, the aim of Black historiography was the identification of Black heroes and heroines who have made significant contributions to the life of the American republic and advanced the collective condition of African-Americans. With the rescue of Crispus Attucks, Frederick Douglass, Phyllis Wheatley or Benjamin Banneker from historical obscurity and their incorporation into the dominant narrative of American history, Euro-American scholars and whites in general would be made aware of Blacks’ humanity and their substantial contribution to world civilization. Woodson firmly believed that “race prejudice was based on wide-spread ignorance” and that “carefully gathered scientific proof” would eliminate it.¹¹

The African-centered perspective has not differed substantially with Woodson’s interpretation of the efficacy of Black history and culture. The Afrocentrists have simply replaced the names of Wheatley, Douglass and Banneker with those of Ptahhotep, Amenemhat, Duauf and Imhotep. They differ with the vindicationist tradition in one respect which is of great importance. Our friends have replaced the racist representation of Africa with a bold, fantastic and passionate reconstruction of African history which accents the role of African subjectivity. As Tunde Adeleke astutely notes, “Afrocentric scholars have made, and continue to make, certain claims about African/black history and culture that often ignore or compromise historical reality, assertions that are socially and therapeutically utilitarian but historically misleading and inaccurate.”¹² In this respect, they have turned historiography on its head, replacing Euorcentric diffusionist theory with an Afrocentric one. Africa, instead of Europe, becomes the epicenter of world civilization. In a manner of speaking, the master narrative has moved from Mt. Olympus to Mt. Kenya!

In my estimation, Afrocentrism is a form of petit-bourgeois sentimental exoticism grounded in an idealist philosophy of history. While I agree with the Afrocentric need to affirm the contribution of African subjects to world history, the vindicationist (and Afrocentric) tradition leads to a conceptual narrowness that exaggerates the significance of Blacks’ contribution to world history and, ultimately, hinders critical reflection on Africana culture and history.

A Critical Evaluation of Keto’s African-Centered Perspective of History from the Standpoint of Historical Materialism

Tsehloane C. Keto’s The African-Centered Perspective of History represents the first attempt to articulate a systematic Afrocentric theory of history. Keto argues that his work is a continuation of the efforts by Cheik Anta Diop, Tsenay Serequeberhan, Kwasi Wiredu, Kwame Gyekye, D.A. Masolo, Okondo Okolo and E. Wamba-Dia-Wamba in the study of African history, culture, and philosophy.

Keto seeks to outline the epistemological foundation for the historical and social sciences from the standpoint of Afrocentrism. Following Asante, Keto argues that the Afrocentric paradigm seeks to place Africa at the center of any analysis of African history and culture, including that of the diaspora. The African-centered perspective of history (ACPH) seeks to reclaim Africa’s cultural centers, ancient Kemet and Ethiopia. “African history must possess a fruitful theoretical relation and linkage to the history of Africans in the Nile Valley and ancient Kemet because Kemet and the Nile Valley have always been part of Africa geographically and culturally as well as the cradle for ideas that influenced the world.”¹³

According to Keto, as well as all Afrocentrists, Africa is the “historical core.” To speak of the African historical core as an “epistemological center” means that Africa defines both the object of investigation and the conceptual framework of the researcher. Thus, the African historical core is implicitly a worldview, i.e., a particular, unique way in which people of African descent view reality and the world at large.

ACPH is based on the problematic of the subject. Keto argues that the human sciences need to be transformed from viewing African people as objects of historical study to viewing them as subjects of history. Eurocentrism results from neglecting or denying the role of the African subject in world history. In turn, the African-centered conception of history provides a framework focused on the agency of Black people; it produces, in his words, “knowledge about Africans and people in Africa in the human sciences, in which Africans occupy the center and are therefore the subjects, the main players if you wish, and the makers of their own history rather than peripheral players who inhabit the margins of other peoples’ histories.”¹⁴ In this respect, Keto argues that ACP represents an “epistemological break” from Eurocentrism that carries far-reaching theoretical and practical consequences.¹⁵

Yet, in the process of highlighting African agency or initiative, the Afrocentrists have ignored the objective social (material) conditions that shape the intentions, motives and relations of individual people. This idealist problematic ignores the fact that

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.¹⁶

This celebrated passage from the beginning of Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte offers an important insight into the relationship between social structures and human agency. History is the process through which human beings constantly make and remake their lives. Structures – for example, modes of production – represent limits to human practice, obstacles to be overcome by men and women in their struggles to assume conscious control of their social world. A materialist philosophical perspective brings to the forefront the recognition that the scope for human agency depends on historically specific conditions.¹⁷

Afrocentrism must move beyond the simple assertion that Black people have acted in history. Historically, the ordeal of capitalist exploitation and national oppression has bred many forms of Black agency. There are two salient, opposing (yet dialectically related) traditions within Black political and intellectual culture: one of accommodation and another of resistance. The political quietism of Elijah Muhammad, for example, stands in direct opposition to the revolutionary politics of Malcolm X.

Keto cautions that the Afrocentric perspective does not intend to replace Eurocentricity as a universal perspective. He notes that the term “Africa-centered” or “Afrocentric” simply means “a centering of an intellectual inquiry not the denial of the validity of other paradigms of knowledge.”¹⁸ Indeed, the Africa-centered perspective is just one of several “regional-cultural perspectives.” The totality of these “regional-cultural perspectives” constitutes what Keto calls a pluriversal perspective. ACPH “redefines and redirects the focus of the human sciences in a diverse world by indicating the need to locate all geo-cultural paradigms on equal footing.”¹⁹ Keto explains further,

I do not oppose the use of a perspective based on the Europe-centered paradigm of knowledge because it is Europe-centered. This would be a violation of consistency. As one of the geo-culturally based paradigms of knowledge about the world’s people, a Europe-centered perspective is as valid as one derived from an African-centered paradigm, an Asia-centered paradigm or any other paradigm based on the experiences, thoughts and values of a people in a particular geo-cultural region of the global village in which we all live.²⁰

Therefore, ACPH is a holistic approach to the study of the world and its heterogeneous people. Prima facie, an African-centered perspective is a form of cultural pluralism because it advocates the coexistence and equivalence of other regional views. Here Keto’s motivation seems to be an attempt to counter all forms of absolutism and cultural intolerance.

Yet, this approach to history is doubly problematic. First, Keto believes that there is one historical theory or ensemble of theories which explains the experiences of people of African descent, another which explains the experiences of people of European descent, etc. Here Keto rejects historical realism and opts for an extreme version of historical relativism. Thus, he denies objective reality and replaces it with an inter-subjectivity, in which each group imposes its categories of understanding and value. Objective truth cannot exist in a “pluriverse” where every regional-cultural group expresses its worldview. Gregor McLennan rightly states, “If theory does have an important function in historiography, it is by virtue of its general explanatory capacity, not simply its immediate object of analysis.”²¹

More fundamentally, we should see that behind the shadow of cultural pluralism lurks a self-defeating cultural relativism. Keto’s position begins with the affirmation of cultural pluralism, but ultimately lapses into cultural relativism. Cultural pluralism as a descriptive claim merely points to the multiplicity and diversity of cultural norms and practices. It carries few if any implications as to their relative merits. However, Keto swiftly adopts cultural relativism and violates his principle of peaceful coexistence when he asserts that there is a need for an African-centered historical analysis of Europe and Europeans in order to prevent “parochialized views of Europe and Europeans that might emerge from a Europe-centered analysis.”²² According to Keto, the writing and research of the history of African people as well as world historical developments are best understood when valuations from the “East” and the “West” are submerged into a “hierarchy of those humanistic values whose historical core is traceable, in part or in whole, to African origins.” Hence, the African-centered perspective claims not only the right to interpret the African experience, but also the right to view the rest of the world from the standpoint of its own purportedly humanistic values. Consequently, Keto has fallen back into the hegemonic (we could even say universalist) approach he was intent on avoiding! So, despite his purported tolerance of the “Europe-centered paradigm of knowledge,” our Afrocentrist is back at square one. Instead of cultural pluralism and relativism, we are ultimately left with African cultural absolutism!

Keto informs us that the ACP has two foci, “African-Americans in American history” and “History of African-Americans.” The difference lies in the emphasis on individual accomplishments in the former and on the collective group in the latter. The study of history yields different results depending on which approach is chosen. Keto does not clearly elaborate the outcome of these two approaches. He merely says, “We should not confuse the status of African-Americans, as a group, at any point in the unfolding story of America with the outstanding achievements of a few individuals.”²³ Yet, we are told that both approaches are valid.

Keto argues that an African-centered perspective offers a “different historical scenario” when we examine the African-American experience:

When we employ an Africa-centered focus to review developments in North America, we recognize at the outset, the rights of the enslaved Africans or [second generations onwards] African-Americans to their freedom.… If Africa-centered scholars agree that from our chosen perspective, the enslaved Africans always possessed these primary human rights to begin with, then, when they seek to assert their God-given rights for themselves, for their children and for society as a whole, we can conceptualize the struggle of the African and African-Americans…as trying to restore in the new land (America), a just social order or harmony. This harmony is what the ancient Africans on the Nile valley called ma’at (social justice/righteousness), where Africans found a distorted, unjust and dehumanizing social order.²⁴

The point Keto seems to be making is simply that an Africa-centered approach emphasizes the role of African/African-American resistance and the “participation of African people in the global human struggle against injustice and dehumanization.”²⁵ Keto contends,

…the major deficiency of American history as it has been taught in the 20^th century is not that it places European Americans at the center of developments but that it denies the equally significant roles of African-Americans and First Americans at the core of the early history and cultural formation of the American social experiment. An Africa-centered perspective of America does not deny the process of “a becoming America” which involves many peoples and many cultures from different shores. It opposes the silencing of the historical African voice in describing the dynamics of the American social experiment.²⁶

Keto cites Sterling Stuckey’s Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America, John Blassingame’s Slave Community and Gerald W. Mullin’s Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth-Century Virginia as seminal contributions to the Africa-centered perspective. One is left with the impression that an Africa-centered perspective wants to simply rewrite African-American history as “the African quest for freedom and liberation” highlighting the contributions African-Americans have made to American history. Yet, ironically, Keto is critical of what he terms “uncritical contributionism” or the racial vindicationist tradition in African-American history which he associates with the work of W.E.B Du Bois, Rayford W. Logan and Carter G. Woodson. He tells us that the Africa-centered approach “encourages scholars to move away from ‘uncritical’ contributionism where everything that ‘Blacks’ did was the result of their Blackness and is proudly enumerated.”²⁷

Like “uncritical contributionism,” the Africa-centered approach is concerned with the actions and contributions of Africans and African-Americans. Yet, for the Africa-centered approach, these actions and contributions have to be “evaluated in terms of their consistency with an Africa-centered hierarchy of cultural values that places high priority on the worth of the person.”²⁸ “An Africa-centered perspective is not necessarily a blanket approval of, and justification for, everything Africans or African-Americans do,” Keto warns; “African-centered scholars should be careful not to glorify African-Americans simply because they could perform certain feats that European Americans did, or could build as the people of Europe built.”²⁹ Rather, an ACP challenges us to critically evaluate – rather than celebrate – the Buffalo Soldiers. We have to ask “tough questions,” like “whether a humanistic hierarchy of values would rank as positive the destruction of First American villages and cultures or countenance the forceful expropriation of First American lands.”³⁰

In line with racial vindicationism, Keto seeks to elevate the status of African-American history at the expense of its contradictory and complex makeup. His discourse ignores a core aspect of the historical dialectic of African-American culture, viz. that this culture is in no way defined exclusively by manifestations of resistance. Not all African-Americans sang the spirituals with an eye to joining the Underground Railroad.³¹ Some African-Americans believed that freedom was wearing a robe in ‘heaben’ and that washing in the blood of Jesus would make one ‘as white as the snow.’ Or that loyalty to ‘Massa’ was the highest virtue and resistance and revolt were the greatest folly. The modern day connotation for ‘Uncle Tom’ did not enter the lexicon of African-American language without the historical presence of real, existing ‘Toms.’

Although resistance is crucial to any description, definition and interpretation of African-American culture, it is not exhaustive of its actualities or even of its future possibilities. African-American culture is more complex than a singular thrust in the mono-direction of resistance. Rather, it embodies an ensemble of traditions within which we can locate, for analytical purposes, two primary and yet contradictory forms: one of resistance and another of accommodation. This internal dialectic is undermined when a scenario of resistance sans accommodation gains support via racial vindicationism.

If history is not an objective process established on the basis of a materialist theory of knowledge, then what is known is not the object under investigation in itself, but rather an interpretation or understanding of that object which is necessarily tied to categories imposed by the subject (the researcher). What we can know, according to this perspective, is not the thing in itself, not objective reality, but only the phenomenal form which is the product of the consciousness (or worldview) of the investigator. For Keto, consciousness determines historical reality. Arguably, Keto’s call for an African-centered perspective of history is grounded in a neo-Kantian epistemology – a school of thought that has shaped a definitive outlook within bourgeois historiography which includes Windelband’s differentiation between ideographic and nomothetic and Dilthey’s hermeneutic understanding. The anti-naturalism of Neo-Kantian thought is the prop for eschewing any general laws in history and society. Hence historical research is limited to description of the particular. Why should Black Studies scholars follow a theory and method which leads down the road of subjectivism? Why is realism or materialism not the goal of social scientific analysis and Africana history?

Keto’s work is an excellent example of the theoretical and methodological crisis that has engulfed Afrocentricity. Their methodological intervention is undoubtedly empiricist, but also superficial. Without a concern for the material determinants of people’s interactions, struggles and culture, and thus the classes which they constitute, the history of Africa continues to be a strange brew cooked up by our Afrocentrists. The African-centered conception of history is content with viewing Blacks as an amorphous mass without any determinate differences such as gender or class. This is nothing more than what Temu and Swai refer to as “drum and trumpet history” which is concerned with vindicating the African past against the charges of Eurocentrism.³²

Asante’s recent book History of Africa: The Eternal Quest for Harmony gives us another classic example of the “drum and trumpet” approach.³³ This book limits itself to a narrative of the lives of African pharaohs, priests, chiefs, nationalist leaders and the like, exempt from the objective material processes which constitute the dialectic of history. He tries to compress African history from the beginning of time to 2004 into 416 pages, but his effort is completely lacking in scholarly rigor, factual accuracy and thematic coherence. Oftentimes, he engages in hysterical rants about and simplistic readings of complex historical processes. Moreover, he bases his history of Africa on an ad hoc periodization scheme evoking “seven specific swathes of African history”: the Time of Awakening, the Age of Literacy, the Moment of Realization, the Age of Construction, the Time of Chaos, the Age of Reconstruction, and the Time of Consolidation.

We find three foundational themes in his book: 1) the continuity of African history, 2) a racialist/nationalist interpretation of African history, and 3) a mythical conception of African history based on a “quest for eternal harmony.” Asante’s work is in effect simply an updated version of Chancellor Williams’ The Destruction of Black Civilization. As historian Richard Reid has noted, from Asante’s History of Africa, “We learn much about the author and his view of his own place in the grand narrative that is ‘Africa’; we learn little meaningful about Africa’s history.”³⁴

The African-Centered Conception of History as Utopian

The crux of the African-centered interpretation of history entails a number of points which need to be made explicit. First and foremost, Afrocentrists are committed to an idealist approach which preserves the names of eminent figures and personalities such as kings, emperors and warlords as the makers of history, its chief participants. This view is clearly expressed in the work of the English philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle, who wrote in his book On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History: “Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked here.”³⁵

Asante and company take the behavior and actions of a single great individual (the pharaohs) as the only active element in history. On the other hand, we have the invisible masses of people that are passive, dull and unhistorical. In focusing on the great personalities, we ignore people’s class membership, being unable or unwilling to understand the dialectics of the relation between individuals and the activities of the classes they belong to. We have to move beyond the romantic idealism of Afrocentrism. It just is not true that all African people were descendants of Kings, Queens and Great Priests of Africa! While advanced cultures (or civilizations) did exist in Ancient Africa, it is closer to the truth to say that the vast majority of African people are descendants of African peasants.

The people are the chief creator, the real subject of history; this is a fundamental proposition of historical materialism, and it is exemplified throughout African and African-American history. Here I use the concept of the people both in the broad sense, coinciding with the population or the nation in general, and in the narrower sense, meaning the masses, the makers of history. The concept of the masses or the mass of the people is one that changes and develops historically. It must be considered in relation to certain socio-economic formations, their specific social structure, and also in relation to the particular course of development of the given society.³⁶

Second, the Afrocentrist upholds a cyclical theory of history, which Keto sees as based on “a transcendent framework modeled on the experience of the very changing seasonal cycles that rotate through the years and/or the cycles of human existence that go through irreversible stages yet follow repetitive stages for each succeeding generation.”³⁷ Keto develops a periodization of such cycles: 1) the period before the fourth millennium B.C.E. in Kemet that followed the creation of human cultures; 2) the period from 600 to 1600 C.E. in West Africa that witnessed the creation of state power and the formation of empires in Ghana, Mali and Songhai; 3) the period from 1800 to 1890 that saw the attempt to “rebuild defensive redoubts” through the unification of existing societies among the Baganda, Ashanti, Fulani, for example; and 4) the emergence of “African initiatives” in the post-1960 period through the Civil Rights movement and the struggles for political independence in Africa and the Caribbean. In this account, the course of history follows a cycle of progress and regression.

This periodization is too broad to allow for any systematic understanding. Periods should reflect actual historical processes. The leap between the first and second periods – from 4000 B.C.E. in Kemet to 600 C.E. in West Africa – is rather ambitious. The result is not concrete history, but arid abstractions about what historian Adam Fairclough calls a “seamless web,” whereby history is turned into “a homogenized mush, without sharp breaks, and clear transitions and transformations.”³⁸ This becomes apparent when one sets out to examine the actual course of African history – whether of a past epoch or the present. The African-centered conception offers us no basis for understanding the regional variations within Africa – in political economy, in class formation, in gender relations, or in other aspects of life.

How does this perspective approach African-American history? African-American history, for the Afrocentrist, is seen as a second-order enterprise compared to the history of “Kemetic high culture” which is a first-order enterprise. This results in devaluing the historical experience of the Americas as tantamount to slave culture. Hence, the aim of the Black Studies scholar is to affirm ancient African civilization. As Asante observes, “Walking the way of the new world means that we must establish schools which will teach our children how to behave like the kings and queens they are meant to be.”[³⁹ In a similar vein, Karenga once remarked, “The day the slave ship landed in America, our history ended and the white man’s story began.”⁴⁰ The search for authenticity expresses a sublimated form of the black bourgeois and petit-bourgeois flight from the slave culture of African-Americans.⁴¹ African authenticity is not to be found in the wretched lives of African-American slaves, sharecroppers or domestic servants. Rather, it is to be found in the “idealized mythic space” of the lives of the nobility of ancient Africa – in Jennifer Jordan’s words, “a pristine paradise which could be as glorious as the imagination could make it.”⁴²

What remains as genuine African culture, for the Afrocentrists, is free of class conflict and transcends time and space. “Only in traditional western societies,” Asante remarks, “are there conflicts between classes.”⁴³ This utopian approach results in ignoring the extensive class contradictions which have existed in Africa and have relegated the great majority of Africans to the working class. One should not forget that the great pyramids were built not by, but for, the pharaohs. As Akinyela observes,

Little or no mention is made in Afrocentric writing of the role of the ancient African peasantry and the laborers who actually constructed the ancient monuments of Kemet, Ethiopia, and Great Zimbabwe. The illusion is maintained that these human efforts were all accomplished in totally harmonious relations, with each person, whether king or laborer, male or female, mystically happy to stay in her/his place assigned by the universe.⁴⁴

The popular expression that we, as African-Americans, are descendants of kings and queens is at best a distortion of history and at worst a reactionary elitist conception of the value of humanity. We must draw our cultural iconography from the experiences and the class perspectives of Hubert Harrison, Fannie Lou Hamer and Chris Hani rather than Pharaoh Amenhotep, CEO Robert Johnson, Nelson Mandela or other ruling class personages.

Kings and Queens are exploiters of the masses of people whether they are African or European. The spurious cultural nationalism of Karenga and Asante treats the real material culture and experience of African-Americans as no more than a slave culture, i.e., less valuable than the monumentalist culture of past African rulers. The romantic search for authenticity thus serves ultimately to derail and detract from the progressive struggle for self-determination. The Afrocentric hope of finding, in the deep cultural recesses of ancient African history, a pristine originality is a pipe dream. As Manthia Diawara has poetically put it,

The Afrocentrists have recreated Egypt, the old African city, but their discourses, unlike James Brown’s music in the sixties, do not serve the homeless in Philadelphia, let alone inspire revolution in South Africa. And I submit that until Afrocentricity learns the language of black people in Detroit, Lingala in Zaire, and Bambara in Mali, and grounds itself in the material conditions of the people in question, it is nothing but a kitsch of blackness. It is nothing but an imitation of a discourse of liberation. Afrocentric academics fix blackness by reducing it to Egypt and kente cloths. Hence, like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Afrocentrism has become a religion, a camp movement, where one can find refuge from the material realities of being black in Washington, D.C., London, or Nairobi.⁴⁵

Classes and Class Struggle in the Africana World: A Neglected Topic in Afrocentric Discourse

How do analyses of class, class struggle and the political economy of capitalism enter into the ACPH? The Afrocentrists’ conception of African history and culture tends to be ahistorical, denying the role of classes and class struggle in Africa. The utopianism of cultural authenticity is quite evident in the empty worship and romantic glorification of Kemet and Kemetic esoteric knowledge. Aren’t the moral virtues and ideals expressed in the teachings of Ptah or the papyrus of Ani (the Egyptian Book of the Dead) really the moral virtues and ideals of a particular segment of ancient African societies, that is, the ruling class? Lest we forget, Egyptian society was a class society in which peasants constituted the largest section of the population. In ancient Egypt, peasants were excused from military service because they had to work the land. When they were not working in agriculture, they performed obligatory corvée labor, building the huge pyramids that served as religious monuments and later as the pharaohs’ tombs. The masses of people in Egypt also labored in the construction of roads, irrigation canals, quarries, and mines. While some classes were periodically exempt from the obligations of corvée labor, Andreu observes that a “sentiment of revolt” appeared during the Middle Kingdom among the masses of working people. Some of the pharaoh’s subjects fled the kingdom. If caught, fugitives were subject to a life sentence of forced labor.⁴⁶ This doesn’t sound like a society built on eternal harmony as Asante suggests!

Egypt was a patrimonial state in which everything was owned by the pharaoh. Land ownership was the expression of divine providence, dictated by the pharaoh, and held exclusively by the nobles, officials, priests, temples, or private citizens. In the name of the pharaoh, the Egyptian state was administered by a priestly bureaucracy which ensured that the kingdom’s material resources were allocated in a way that maintained social stability and political inequality. By way of divine providence, the pharaoh exercised his power in order to uphold Maat. As the Egyptologist Guillemette Andreu notes, “On this fundamental notion [that is, Maat], which simultaneously embraced social peace, justice, truth, order, trust, and all the imaginable harmonious forces that made the world inhabitable, depended the equilibrium of the state, and even of the cosmos.”⁴⁷ Asante similarly argues, “African society is essentially a society of harmonies, inasmuch as the coherence or compatibility of persons, things and modalities is at the root of traditional African philosophy.”⁴⁸ Yet, our friend Molefi Asante fails to understand that the principal task of this bureaucracy was to manage society for the benefit of the elite; when this was well done, a significant portion of the population could live in harmony with the dictates of the Pharaoh, but they were not free from oppression and exploitation.⁴⁹ His neglect of this issue reflects a failure to see the “accumulation of political power, control of knowledge, and cultural hegemony by one class in society over other classes as problematic in itself.”⁵⁰

Afrocentrists have reduced African and Africana history to a collection of dead facts. They have stripped history of its dialectical development. Most importantly, their cultural nationalist framework has ignored the political significance of class contradictions and political inequalities. For example, Karenga argued in 1967,

We say with [Sekou] Toure that for US there are no intellectuals, no students, no workers, no teachers; there are only supporters of the organization…. We do not accept the idea of class struggle; for today in Afro-America there is but one class, an oppressed class [of blacks].⁵¹

Asante does not assign much political significance to class because to focus on class struggle and class contradictions would point in the direction of a Eurocentric model of conflict. Because Asante assumes racial identity to be homogeneous, he can approach class differentiation only as a deviation from, rather than a constitutive element of, racial identity and consciousness. In this vein, he claims,

…Marxism acts on the same Eurocentric base as capitalism because for both life is economics, not culture. The class-warrior attitude dominates the thinking of Marxists and capitalists. It is a war of class against class, group against group, and individual against individual…. This, of course, is contradictory to the Afrocentric value which respects difference and applauds pluralism. Strangers exist in that they have not been known. They bring good fortune and therefore are welcomed. In economics, therefore, Marxism’s base is antithetical to the African concept of society. Life for the Afrocentric person is organic, harmonious, and cultural because it is integrated with African history. However, the Marxist view of life is as competitive as that of the capitalist, since both are rooted in Eurocentric materialism…. Marxism’s Eurocentric foundation makes it antagonistic to our worldview; its confrontational nature does not provide the spiritual satisfaction we have found in our history of harmony…. Marxism explains European history from a Eurocentric view; it does not explain African culture from an Afrocentric view. It is in fact the ultimate example of European rationalism.⁵²

Asante’s candidness is admirable!

In fairness to Asante, we should acknowledge that he has made what I take to be rather cryptic allusions to the role of class in Afrocentric analysis: “Class becomes for the Afrocentrist aware of our history, much more complicated than capitalists and workers, or bourgeoisie and proletariat. Finding the relevant class positions and places in given situations will assist the Africalogical scholar with analysis.”⁵³ How is the Afrocentric understanding of class “more complicated”?

Asante identifies four levels in the hierarchy of what he terms “property relations”: 1) those who possess income-producing properties, 2) those who possess property that produces income and a job that supplements income, 3) those who maintain professions or positions because of skills, and 4) those who do not have skills and whose services may or may not be employed.⁵⁴ Asante simply offers us a Weberian notion of class stratification. He treats class as a nominal category similar to occupational status rather than as an objective social relation. Asante would do well to examine Abram Harris’s treatment of class as an objective social category among African-Americans. Or perhaps he should examine Oliver Cox’s critique of Weber’s conception of class.⁵⁵ Is this too much to expect?

In contrast to Asante, a materialist philosophical perspective argues that people’s relations to the means of production are the basic, determining factor characterizing the division of all societies into classes. Lenin distinguished four main aspects of a class. First, he denoted a class generally as a large group of people specially placed in a system of social production determined by history. Second, he defined the basic element of class as an objective, social relation to the means of production. Third, he identified one derivative element of class as the role a class plays in the social organization of labor. And, lastly, he said that the other subordinate element of a class was the specific mode used to acquire its share of social wealth. A materialist approach to class formation offers great insight into the central and pivotal role that the Black working class has played in world-historic struggles against oppression and exploitation. This is vividly seen in C.L.R. James’s classic The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution and Sterling Spero and Abram Harris’s magisterial The Black Worker.

In his work Classical Africa, Asante discusses the nature of classes in Egyptian society. He admits that Egypt was based on a caste system with the majority of ancient Egyptians in the position of farmers and peasants, at the bottom of society. He outlines:

The people of ancient Egypt had different jobs, responsibilities, and duties. Career paths and jobs were not decided by choice. They were decided by the caste, or class, of society into which a person was born…. At the top of the society was the pharaoh, who was untouchable by the common people. The pharaoh was a god and held the keys to the society. But the pharaoh did not make all the decisions. […]

A ruling caste of priests and nobles efficiently carried out the elaborate tasks and ceremonies in the name of various gods, on behalf of the pharaoh. It was believed that the priests knew how to keep the gods happy. The power and responsibility of the priests were shown in the jobs they chose. Priests could be scribes who wrote all the official documents, doctors, architects, and legal experts. A scribe was an official, usually a priest trained in the use of hieroglyphics, who was entrusted with recording all significant events. A person became a noble by being accorded a high position in the government. Nobles were mayors, provincial rulers, generals, and ministers of the pharaoh. […]

The largest group/caste of people in Egypt were farmers, who planted small farms along the banks of the Nile. Most were peasants who barely subsisted on the food they grew. When the floods came and inundated their plots, the farmers were often employed on building projects for the pharaoh…. The farmers did not own their land. The pharaoh, who owned all the land, gave them land to farm. But the gift of land was not free. The pharaoh owned most of the crops grown on the land. Most farmers tried to grow a lot on their land. They had to, or they would not have any food left for themselves and their families. A farmer had to meet a requirement of giving more than half of the crop to the government.⁵⁶

This is basically how Asante understands ancient Africa. He does not mention, much less dwell on, the fact that the Pharaohs in conjunction with the priests were an oppressive and exploitative aristocracy. He has very little to say about the overall treatment of women in ancient Africa. Asante and other Afrocentrists are content to offer us an undoubtedly bourgeois view, that is, a heavenly picture of ancient Egypt existing in a state of class harmony. In fact, this picture of ancient Africa is not just limited to Asante. It is evident in all of the works by Afrocentrists.

It is instructive to note that Asante exhibits a gross misunderstanding of the class character of Egyptian society He describes the laborers and soldiers of ancient Egypt as a “middle caste of people with everyday jobs.” And then in the next sentence he asserts that “they were like the middle class in the United States”!⁵⁷ The terms “middle caste” and “middle class” cannot be conflated, since they connote different modes of production, different social formations. Furthermore, class is a determinate concept which Asante simply does not comprehend. Perhaps, we should refer Asante to the work of the Afro-Caribbean sociologist Oliver C. Cox for him to get a better grasp of the conceptual distinction between caste and class.⁵⁸

Asante bizarrely remarks that the ancient Egyptian caste system was flexible because “the Pharaoh could change a person’s status by bestowing special favor.”⁵⁹ Are we to believe that the Egyptian caste system based on divine kingship – as Asante describes it – exhibits a level of flexibility? Are we to believe that any given individual peasant or farmer had the potential to become a member of the ruling class? Even Asante understands that people were born into the caste system of Egypt. Not once in Classical Africa or the more recent History of Africa does Asante offer any negative assessment of the Egyptian caste system. He offers no detailed explanation for the emergence of the State and its role in African history as an agent of class rule. This is indeed strange since Asante’s hero Cheikh Anta Diop brings to the forefront the role of the ancient Egyptian state, class and class struggle in Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology.

Diop demonstrates the importance of what he calls the Osirian Egyptian Revolution which brought the end of the 6^th Dynasty. In this democratic revolution, “the destitute of Memphis, the capital and sanctuary of Egyptian royalty, sacked the town, robbed the rich, and drove them into the streets.”⁶⁰ As Diop further points out, “discontent was strong enough to provoke a complete upheaval of Egyptian society from one end of the country to the other.” This democratic revolution aimed to have “disclosure of administrative and religious secrets,” elimination of “the bureaucratic machine that was crushing the people,” and “the proletarianization of religion, which extended the Pharaonic privilege of immortality of the soul to all the people.” While this revolution ultimately failed, “the goal of the revolution was the democratization of the empire, if not the creation of a republic.”⁶¹

It is clear from Diop’s research that some ancient societies of Africa were repressive, that they went through historical changes, and that they experienced class antagonism – despite Afrocentrist assertions about the African ideal of eternal harmony.⁶² As Bernard M. Magubane notes, the absence of private property in land does not mean that Africa prior to its incorporation into the world capitalist political economy was “an eldorado of egalitarianism.”⁶³

In part, the failure of Afrocentrism to address class contradictions within Africa is because it is committed to the reform of capitalism and not its eradication. As Asante suggests:

We must struggle to gain a foothold in every sector of the American economy…. Our path to economic survival will not be based upon landholdings but owning secure industries, creative breakthroughs in art and music, exploitation of all fields of athletics and salaried positions based on education and talent.⁶⁴

However, as Akinyela observes,

The primary emphasis of this academic Afrocentrism seems to be in promoting a pluralistic, multicultural society where no one culture has hegemony over any other, yet it resists the idea of conflict or antagonism which would seem to be necessary in overcoming the power inequities inherent in current political cultural relations. These political cultural relations are evident in disproportionate poverty, disease, crime, police oppression, and other realities of the lived experience of New Afrikans in U.S. cities.⁶⁵

Conclusion

As scholars in African-American studies, what should be our attitude to our African cultural heritage? One thing is clear. It should not be the Afrocentric quest for authenticity which romanticizes the African past and remains completely isolated from modern politico-economic realities facing Africa. As Melba Joyce Boyd astutely notes, “What the Afrocentrists fail to realize, in their quest to claim civilization, is that our struggle, fundamentally and above all else, is for freedom for the common people. We do not desire to be the ‘new aristocracy.’ Monarchies were not democracies. We aspire to a new society that does not worship royalty, racial hierarchies, gold, corporate power, or any other manifestation that demeans the human spirit.”⁶⁶

If we follow the Afrocentrists, we will end up with a simple blind reproduction of outdated theses and infantile dogma, incapable of understanding the contemporary Black experience. The heritage which Afrocentrism has brought to our attention is that of ancient warriors, nobility, statesmen and priests. This utopian approach cannot be seriously regarded as a means to understanding the contemporary socio-political realities facing continental Africans and Africana people of the diaspora.

Furthermore, where is the scholarship that speaks to the needs and aspirations of working-class Black men and women in Africa and the African diaspora? Where is the empirical research from proponents of Afrocentrism which deepens our understanding of the Africana experience? Where are the pre-colonial social histories of Africa by Afrocentrists? Where are the studies (by Afrocentrists) on the process of transition to capitalism in Africa? Where are the studies (by Afrocentrists) on class formation in Africa? Where are the studies by Afrocentrists on the transition from mythology (folk wisdom) to philosophy in Africa? Where are the studies on the oppression of women in Africa? What theoretical and conceptual advances have Afrocentrists made in the examination of the African past beyond the work of the vindicationist tradition in African-American Studies? The philosophy of African-American Studies proposed by Afrocentrism has not led to the continued renewal of African-American Studies, but rather deadening quicksand.

It is not surprising that this school of thought associated with Temple University has failed to produce any groundbreaking empirical studies of African-American history and culture. Asante claims, “African-American culture and history represent developments in African culture and history, inseparable from place and time. Analysis of African-American culture that is not based on Afrocentric premises is bound to lead to incorrect conclusions.”⁶⁷ He further explains,

The African people who landed, against their wills, in the Caribbean and North and South America, were Africans – Mandinka, Ibo, Yoruba, Asante, Fante, Ibibio, Congo, Angola, Wolof, Ijo, and so forth – not African-Americans. We were never made European, though some came fairly close to being so made.… Wolof wisdom says, “Wood may remain in water for ten years but it will never become a crocodile.”⁶⁸

Asante bizarrely remarks that the ancient Egyptian caste system was flexible because “the Pharaoh could change a person’s status by bestowing special favor.”⁶⁹ Are we to believe that the Egyptian caste system based on divine kingship – as Asante describes it – exhibits a level of flexibility? Are we to believe that any given individual peasant or farmer had the potential to become a member of the ruling class? Even Asante understands that people were born into the caste system of Egypt. Not once in Classical Africa or the more recent History of Africa does Asante offer any negative assessment of the Egyptian caste system. He offers no detailed explanation for the emergence of the State and its role in African history as an agent of class rule. This is indeed strange since Asante’s hero Cheikh Anta Diop brings to the forefront the role of the ancient Egyptian state, class and class struggle in Civilization or Barbarism: An Authentic Anthropology.

Most of us are quite aware that we are descendants of slaves, sharecroppers, tenant-farmers, maids, Pullman porters, factory workers and others at the base of bourgeois society. The Afrocentric approach strips both African and African-American cultural heritages of their dialectical (dynamic and contradictory) development. Not only do Afrocentrists ignore the fact that the pyramids were built by laborers; one can spend hours reading their scholarship and not encounter a single statement critical of the political economy of capitalism!⁶⁹

Unlike Asante, the African-American political economist Abram Harris, the African-American philosopher John McClendon, the Senegalese anthropologist Cheik Anta Diop, the Guyanese historian Walter Rodney, the Ghanaian statesman and philosopher Kwame Nkrumah, the South African sociologist Bernard Makhosezwe Mugabane, the Congolese political scientist Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja, the literary critic Chidi Amuta among others appreciated the value of Marxism and made use of it for understanding the Africana experience.⁷⁰ Diop was greatly influenced by the work of French Marxist anthropologists who have had a major impact on our understanding of the internal social structures tied to the forces of production in African rural societies, on the analysis of social relations of production (including control over land, crafts, or trade), and especially on identifying the interactions between economic domination and political power. Asante should seriously take his own advice: “Although both the capitalist and the Marxist positions are European and consequently derive from European experiences, that is no reason in and of itself to reject them wholeheartedly.”⁷¹

The Afrocentric quest for authenticity reflects an American desire to capture the changeless, mythical essence of Africa. It is an American perspective that looks at Africa through rose-colored glasses and largely ignores the contemporary realities of Africa. I think Amiri Baraka gets right to the point when he notes,

The idea that somehow we had to go back to pre-capitalist Africa and extract some “unchanging” black values from historical feudalist Africa and impose them on a 20^th-century black proletariat in the most advanced industrial country in the world was simple idealism and subjectivism. Cultural nationalism uses an ahistorical, unchanging never-never-land Africa to root its hypotheses. The doctrine itself is like a bible of petty bourgeois glosses on reality and artification of certain aspects of history to make a recipe for “blackness” that again gives this petty bourgeoisie the hole card on manners to lord it over the black masses, only this time “revolutionary” manners.⁷²

The bourgeois cultural nationalist quest for authenticity is backward looking. The anachronistic examination of the African past is a yearning for an idealized epoch of racial grandeur and simplicity, free of European influence. To try to transplant such a vision into the present is the worst kind of utopianism. We renounce the portrayal of our African heritage – based on a broad distortion of fact – which seeks to glorify the great Kings and Queens of ancient Africa, without condemnation of their role as exploiters of the masses of people. We renounce the failure of the Afrocentrists to examine our African heritage in the interests of the working class. We renounce as utopian any portrayal of our African heritage that ignores the democratic spirit of traditional African societies as crystallized in their humanism and communalism.

Notes