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The Constitution was a noble piece of paper
With Free Society it struggled, but they died in vain
And now Democracy is begging on the corner
Hoping for some rain/It look like it’s hoping for some rain
And I see the robins perched in barren treetops
Watching last-ditch racists marching ‘cross the floor
Just like the peace signs that vanished in our dream
Never had a chance to grow/never had a chance to grow
And now it’s winter, winter in America

And all of the healers have been killed or betrayed

This essay is an analysis of Black feminist interventions into the Black radicalisms of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The focus is on certain strands of Black radicalism, especially the Black revolutionary nationalism which emerged in the United States in the mid-1960s through mid-l970s and a new Black radical formation of the early 21st century, The Black Radical Congress. The idea is to break open the race/class dialectic embedded in traditional Black radical theory and practice by utilizing a gender critique.

The color line in the U.S. is nowhere more visible than between its cities and its suburbs. Urban America, comprised largely of people of color mired in poverty, is the flip side of White suburban prosperity. Gentrified urban neighborhoods and declining inner-ring suburbs are also two sides of that same coin. These patterns of racial and regional disparity define the landscape of metropolitan areas. They also reflect the maldistribution of power and opportunity. Indeed, White suburban privilege is made possible precisely because of urban distress and racial oppression.

The events on and after September 11, 2001 have intensified global economic and political reconfigurations that have been under way over the last thirty years. These transformations have shifted the balance of public opinion in the United States from a presumption of collective responsibility for the common good and toward a belief in the social survival of the fittest.

One of the remarkable findings about the ecological crisis is that race and ethnicity are more reliable predictors of environmental pollution than class and income. Thus a relatively more affluent black community is more likely to suffer a toxic waste site than is its poorer white counterpart.1 This is consistent with the startling fact that some sixty percent of the communities of color in the United States contain at least one toxic waste site within their boundaries.2

[Ed. note: This article is an edited transcription of a talk given at the Brecht Forum in January 1998. Although the main ethnic/geographic targets of the U.S. government's "concern" have shifted somewhat since that time, we believe that the underlying issues highlighted by the author have been posed even more strongly.]

In a game of free association, if I say "Einstein," what's your response?

Probably "genius." Maybe "brilliant." Possibly even "absent-minded professor."

But few, if any would say, "social activist" or "human rights advocate," and virtually nobody would say, "anti-racist."