So how does one assess Black Nationalism in 2011?

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

Last week, I posted about the American holiday of Kwanzaa, with acknowledgements to its roots in the Black Nationalist movement and its more radical iterations in the 1960s. I had actually hoped a discussion would ensue about Black Nationalism and how a celebration that has origins with the more separatist and radical elements of the movement could today find itself acknowledged by such uncontroversial figures as Maya Angelou and Elmo the Muppet.

While some discussion did occur, it only hinted at but did not make a strong accusation: namely, that Kawanzaa is CURRENTLY celebrated as a Black Nationalist demonstration and that Black Nationalism is inherently evil. I think the first accusation is seriously up for debate today, 44 years after Kwanzaa's founding. I think the second is worthy of much more direct discussion because Black Nationalism in America has seemingly found a revival, not as a particularly forceful movement, but as another one of our Bugaboos from the 1960s used to accuse people of affinity for disloyal radicalism. It is, perhaps, becoming a generic conservative's response much the same way that generic liberals are quick to accuse people of currently having affinity for the Klan.



I'll be happy to confess that Black Nationialism in America is a controversial movement with tremendously controversial figures. It's history is far more complicated that many suspect and is not remotely confined to the more Marixist inspired groups of the 1950s and 1960s. The movement with themes of self-help, separatism and potential expatriation or revolution has often railed against all whites without discriminating between avowed racists, the disinterested or genuine allies of equality. And the movement has links to any number of "scholars" and political leaders whose work can be seen as genuinely dishonest and/or hateful. Professor Leonard Jeffries is a poor representative of Black Studies and clearly an unrepentant racist. Louis Farrakhan preaches hatred of whites and Jews in numerous speeches. To say that some figures who have argued for Black Pride have also preached hatred is not a stretch.

Black Nationlism has also led to actual militantism and violence. The Black Panther Party for Self Defense was perhaps the iconic representation of that and continues to be one of the most controversial organizations of the 1960s, although elements in the party were far more interested in Marxism than in Black Nationalism, per se. Any history of the Black Panthers has to include the iconic public carrying of weapons and eventual deadly clashes with the police.

Further, there has been ongoing criticism of Black Nationalism from other leading figures within the movement for equality and civil rights. DeBois was notably critical of Marcus Garvey -- who returned the favor. Ironically, the Black Panthers, while originating with Black Power and Black Nationlist ideas ultimately criticized the movement as unwilling to see white people as ever being good. Malcolm X, in his autobiographical collaboration with Alex Haley, spoke of his regret for telling a sincere white woman deeply moved by his speaking that she could do "nothing" to help.

By the way, seriously, if you think you really understand Malcolm X, click on this link.

While I am comfortable with saying that Black Nationalism has a fair share of charlatans, sloppy thinkers and advocates of both violence and hatred among its long and complicated history and while I am willing to assess the roots of Kwanzaa as a decidedly mixed bag from the 1960s iteration of the movement, I have to ask again a question that I don't think got discussed fairly before:

Namely, given the history up that point, can activists for African Americans by the mid-1960s be fairly criticized from our position in 2011 as unjustified is turning to radical doctrines?

This isn't trite or simple to assess. One has to consider what history a young black person in America was witnessing or whose family had witnessed. A 30 year old in 1966 was born in 1936 -- and had parents and grandparents who witnessed the rise of the Second Klan, The Red Summer of 1919, the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 which saw the entire black population of Tulsa burned out of their homes and over 300 murdered. They were the children of a generation of Southern blacks uprooted during The Great Migration.

In their own lives, they saw these two Presidential Election Maps:

1948


1968


When the civil rights movement began to gain steam in the wake of the Brown versus the Board of Education was decided by the Supreme Court, they saw supposedly respectable whites join The White Citizens Council to defend segregation...essentially a "respectable" Klan that used economic and social pressure to prevent desgregation. In Birmingham, Alabama opposition from whites to equal rights for blacks led to these scenes where the mainly peaceful civil rights movement was met with uninvestigated bombings and official suppression with fire hoses and dogs:

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was always associated with peaceful protest and not beloved of many Black Nationalist leaders, warned whites that opposition to civil rights and even the cautions of alleged allies to take a much slower approach would have dire consequences:

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand why public demonstrations are taking place. The Negro has many pent up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides -and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: "Get rid of your discontent." Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action.....I had hoped that the white moderate would see this need. Perhaps I was too optimistic; perhaps I expected too much. I suppose I should have realized that few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent and determined action. I am thankful, however, that some of our white brothers in the South have grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it. They are still all too few in quantity, but they are big in quality

- A Letter From a Birmingham Jail

Even in his far less scathing I Have a Dream address, he spoke of this (in the much less quoted early section of the speech):

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. They have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.

In both works, Dr. King speaks passionately for nonviolent protest and for recognizing the sincere efforts of whites to assist the struggle. But he also clearly warns the nation that there is a limit to how long he can keep exhorting "soul force" in response to the repeated legal, moral and physical injustices suffered by American blacks a full century after Emancipation.

I think that when talking about and even condemning the forms of militancy and nationalism that were embraced by many African American activists, first a century ago and again in the 1950s and 1960s, it is desperately important to keep this context in mind. Consider yourself a young black person in 1966 who had just witnessed the passage of the Civil Rights Act, but still saw the resistence to it, who had experienced the history outlined here and whose parents and grandparents had experienced the dislocation and violence outlined above, and I cannot help but wonder if any one of us can truly say we would not be, at a minimum, sympathetic to some of the radicalism that existed outside of King's movement.

As I hinted at in my previous post, quite a lot of this reminds me of my own Jewish background. The Jews of Europe of my great and great-great grandparents' generations looked around themselves and the experiences of 1900 years of Diaspora and drew a stark conclusion: they could not trust their fate any more to the tender mercies of Europeans and Zionism was born as a political movement, not merely as an earnest wish concluding the Passover Seder. The conclusion to a young black person in the 1910s through the 1960s that American blacks could not trust that white people had their interests at heart is depressing, bitter...and defensible.

Today, black nationalism is a far less influential movement, but there are elements that were espoused by figures like Malcolm X that seem both necessary and sensible. The idea of self-help and community based action is a principle that almost every successful American immigrant group has followed in the first and into the second generation...namely, that community-based finance and entrepreneurialism are successful strategies for moving from working poverty to success. Given that millions of black families were essentially internal immigrants during the 1920s and 1930s the fact that this element of Black Nationalism did not gain great strength in parallel with the civil rights movement is a tragically lost opportunity that should be ripe for wide support today.

For discussion: Granting it's association with radical ideology, many deeply flawed figures and ideas that are rightly criticized as bigotry, does that mean there is nothing that can be turned positive in 2011 from the long history of the Black Nationalism movement in the United States and any of its cultural legacies...such as Kwanzaa?

Comments

[ninboydean.livejournal.com]

Oh there's certainly a fundamental problem with any ethno-nationalism. But when ethno-nationalism is a response to far more power ethnocentric policies (i.e., a racial history of slavery and the perpetuation of poverty engendered thereof) it needs to be taken in context.

Its far more pressing, in other words, to confront extant, white-nationalist tendencies in our prevailing social order.

[dv8nation.livejournal.com]

So who's #2 on that list? Is there a full list with what order such folks should be dealt with? I'd like to see that.

[mybodymycoffin.livejournal.com]

Oh there's certainly a fundamental problem with any ethno-nationalism. But when ethno-nationalism is a response to far more power ethnocentric policies (i.e., a racial history of slavery and the perpetuation of poverty engendered thereof) it needs to be taken in context.

This and meus_ovatio's comment: /post

[mijopo.livejournal.com]

At the very least it gave rise to the dialectic process that spawned MLK. Without the radical and frightening ideologies in some elements of black nationalism, there would have been far less motivation to embrace the compromise that King seemed to represent in contrast. Desegregation was no cake walk, but I suspect that without the radical elements of black nationalism it would have been far more difficult.

But your conclusion that the black nationalism movement contained "many deeply flawed figures and ideas that are rightly criticized as bigotry" and the question you ask moves a bit quickly for me. You seem to be painting the entire movement with the more obviously objectionable views like Farrakhan's anti-semitism. But I think you need to do a better job showing that the black nationalism movement was in fact an obviously morally flawed movement, as the phrasing of your last paragraph suggests, rather than an essential and justifiable response. Might we not argue that black nationalism was in fact a justly fought war rather than some clearly objectionable movement from which we might still identify a few glimmers of positive light if we search hard enough?

To what extent does the context in which it arose and the extent of the injustices justify some of the alleged bigotry or at least make it more understandable. Leaders in the black nationalist move said many things that I don't agree with, but I'm a bit hesitant to accuse them of the same kind of moral failings that we associate with the KKK, etc.

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

I'm receptive to the notion that I overstated the negative case -- when asking people to consider either context for or positives that may have come from a movement surrounded with controversy, I think it makes sense to acknowledge legitimate negatives...but it is very possible to overstate them.

What I am trying to do here:

1) I tried to spark some discussion on ideas from Black Nationalism that may still be with us culturally today.

2) Admit that Black Nationalism has had and still does have figures whose work is either problematic at best or outright bigoted at worst

3) Raise a case that radicalism in the context of young people born in the 1930s and 1940s is potentially justified...given what they witnessed and experienced before they were radicalized

4) Note that other figures like Dr. King knew that black militantism was inevitable and could be either harnessed as positive or negative.

5) Note that some like Malcolm X came to temper their arguments and regret their more extreme positions

6) Note the similarity between Black Nationalism and other self determinism movements that our nation looks upon as justified -- i.e. Zionism

7) That elements of Black Nationalism like self help and community based economics, while often posited in Marxist terms, are actually necessary and, frankly, fairly conservative answers

8) Pose to the community what positives can be seen as coming from the movement today

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

That King ever represented compromise is solidly something in hindsight. In his own lifetime he was considered an extreme radical disrupting decent traditions about keeping the races to their own kind. This got doubled when he started advocating in favor of the Great Society and against the Vietnam War. Malcolm X and King *did* co-operate, yes, but King was no moderate.

[meus-ovatio.livejournal.com]

It's quite ok to be a violent movement when you're being denied the right to vote or have representation.

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

You don't like to waste words, do you?

if not a ballot...

[onefatmusicnerd.livejournal.com]

Vote with a bullet.

[mrsilence.livejournal.com]

Are you talking about the American revolution, or the civil rights movement?

I can't quite tell, but I expect others will helpfully step up to tell me how vast the difference is.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I think that it's important to realize that "black nationalism" in the USA is different from Pan-Africanism in Africa. The latter never had any real political pull because it frankly is as hard to get all Africans to pull in the same cause as it is to get all Asians, North Americans, or Europeans to do that. In North America Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X filled a void that prevented, say, another Nat Turner-type showing up.

The key difference between Garveyism/60s NOI and now is that then blacks *were* denied rights that had been legally theirs since the 1860s, of which only one US POTUS tried to actually enforce them until LBJ came along (the guy in my icon). They were angry for a damned good reason, where the Ku Kluxer types tried and failed to live up to the Bourbon Legacy (however, had they succeeded, MLK and X would both be seen as damned radicals as opposed to the heroes we see them as now).

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

They were angry for a damned good reason

Well, yah -- I could be accused on this forum of overusing the images of the Tulsa that I keep whipping out but it is amazing how often discussions of what is or is not justified in American radicalism happen without an inkling that anyone remembers not just the existence of the Klan but the actual series of racial pogroms aimed at blacks.

That may have been almost 100 years ago NOW, but for a radical in the 1950s that was his PARENTS.

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

to me, black nationalism in the U.S. is currentl about as important as homosexual terrorism.

Yes it was a movement with importance for a while, and I think terribly misguided. Yes, I agree that the initial idea of Kwanzaa was fairly misguided. I understand where they're coming from but I think that overall it was the wrong way to go about things. Not the right response.

No it does not mean it currently has no value, any more than the U.S. having slavery in the past means the U.S. has no value now.

[dwer.livejournal.com]

in college, I was in a play called "Purlie Victorious", about a former slave who returns to the farm he was enslaved at to buy the barn he slept in to make a church. I played the part of the old plantation owner, who had owned the slaves and many of the freed slaves who still lived and worked on the farm. I was one of two white characters in the play, out of about 20, and as the cast coalesced, we took to eating meals with each-other. I grew up in NYC, so a small college in central Ohio was a pretty different experience for me, and one day I asked one of my black cast mates, "why do the black kids all sit together all the time?"

She looked at me, and shot back "why do all you white people?"

And I started to say something inane, like "well, there are so many of us, we can't HELP but sit together," but then (in a rare moment of comprehension) I shut up and looked around, and realized, just for a moment, what it was like to be surrounded. All the time. And when I re-read Malcolm X later that year, I understood a lot more of it.

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

You'll like the link to the Studio 360 show. Set aside an hour and listen -- the lack of understanding of Malcolm X outside of the snippets of him people memorize to basically take pot shots at radicalism is pretty amazing to me. It's like the people who if they were alive in 1963 would have screamed that King was a communist using one sentence of one speech to try to claim what he would or would not have stood for.

Sheesh.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

that Kawanzaa is CURRENTLY celebrated as a Black Nationalist demonstration and that Black Nationalism is inherently evil.


I know one beautiful person who celebrates Kwanzaa. They grew up celebrating it. Childhood memories of celebration and warmth are what come to mind when the word is uttered. So, they celebrate it. This same person is more likely to improve urban planning or math scores of students than to participate in violence.

How can that be considered evil? Haters gonna hate.

any one of us can truly say we would not be, at a minimum, sympathetic to some of the radicalism that existed outside of King's movement

I'm sympathetic.

Light those candles. All yall.

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

How can that be considered evil?

I actually studied with a rabbi 20 years ago who made a very cogent argument that the Maccabees were actually reactionaries against the Syrians whose "defilement" of the Temple was mostly cosmopolitanism...that would make Hannukah a celebration of narrowness over the Hellenistic ideal of world culture.

He was a former Vice President of the American Jewish Congress to. In retrospect, it was a hell of an argument that our perspectives change once we get away from the origins in history.

[paedraggaidin.livejournal.com]

This is coming from someone who despises all forms of racism and thinks nationalism is by far the worst "-ism" ever to afflict humanity...but while I can never sympathize with violence or enabling violence, for any reason short of actual self-defense or defense of another, I can see why black radicalism is still around. Note that the American economy was tanking under Bush, the national debt was exploding under Bush, all sorts of examples of crazy government intrusion on the rights and liberties of private citizens (Patriot Act? No-fly lists? Domestic surveillance? Openly racist treatment of Middle Easterners and Muslims by government agents? Security measures that even the Israelis think are ineffective?) started under Bush and yet when do all the more racist elements of the so-called Tea Party begin coming out of the woodwork and screaming for blood?

When the black guy is elected president.

This is why I cannot take the "new" populist rage at the government seriously; if these people were truly serious about limiting government, they would have acted while Bush was president. But, no, they wait until the black guy is elected.

So, is it any wonder that organizations like the Black Panthers are still around causing trouble?

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

I'm going to come back from making dinner to find you've sparked a 50 reply thread, aren't I?

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

'When the black guy is elected president. '

I was going to actually explain to you why you're wrong but I doubt you even care what others believe since you're so sure you know what they really believe.

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

You're new here so I'll grant you some leeway. We've been over this topic a few times. The Tea Party started under Bush for the reasons you stated, but it got rolling with more people after Obama was elected because of his continuation and worsening of Bush's policies with no indication of relief as was expected. Yes, some small fraction of the Tea Party people are likely racist. It doesn't matter as that doesn't affect the message that the government needs to be fixed.

[anadinboy.livejournal.com]

islam is the new black

[paedraggaidin.livejournal.com]

Cheese is the new Jesus.

[mrsilence.livejournal.com]

You know, an interesting thing I've learned about workplaces is that there is *always* a scapegoat.

In addition to the traditional role of taking the blame for anything unexplained or which can be shifted onto them by others, the scapegoat gets abused, neglected and is deliberately unloved by the rest of the group. As a result the scapegoat is constantly stressed out, tends to make mistakes, while facing ridiculously high levels of expectation which they have been stripped of the ability to achieve. Meanwhile the rest of the group tut-tuts and shake their heads and says the scapegoat would be treated exactly the same, accorded the same privileges and be as successful if only they could be a team player and work as hard as everyone else does.

I also happen to think inter-race/ethnic politics in a country work precisely the same way.

[harry-beast.livejournal.com]

can activists for African Americans by the mid-1960s be fairly criticized from our position in 2011 as unjustified is turning to radical doctrines?
Of course they can. Limiting historical discussion to politically correct pablum, apart from being cowardly, ignorant and anti-intellectual, prevents any meaningful understanding of that era and any possibility of healing the wounds of the past. Any useful examination and discussion must be open to all possible conclusions, as long as they are backed by evidence and well argued.

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

I don't recall arguing from "politically correct pablum".

I do recall arguing that most of our current villification of anything coming out of the Black Nationalist movement doesn't seem to take any time to examine what experiences actually radicalized the participants of the movement in the 1960s.