June, 2000

Philosophic dialogue

On race and class

A debate on the concept of the "white psyche" has re-emerged after the reprint of Raya Dunayevskaya's "'Black Power,' Race and Class" in the January-February 2000 edition of NEWS & LETTERS. The reprint prompted a response by New Afrikan political prisoner Ali Khalid Abdullah in April and a response to his response by John Alan in the May N&L. The dialogue is an important one. The struggle for freedom has been fraught with landmines which revolve around the discord surrounding race, class and gender.

To begin a serious dialogue on the concept of the "white psyche," we must talk also about its cultural opposite, the "Black psyche." Too often in the discussion of race and class have we failed to consider both the white and Black sides of the equation, and too often have we ignored the gender issue. The dialogue is to embark upon solutions for the fundamental questions of why such diversity exists (outside the concrete realities of capitalism) and its relative impact on a "truly united" front which takes into consideration "all" peoples involved with the dialectic to make Marx's "revolution in permanence" a reality.

In her reprinted thesis Dunayevskaya wrote: "To further insist that 'whatever their political persuasion,' 'all whites' are 'part of the collective white America' so that the U.S. has '180 million racists' is to blur the class line which cuts across the race divisions as well as to muffle the philosophy of total freedom which has created a second America."

Ironically, some of the same "Black power" political leaders of the 1960s, who were quick to define "all whites" as racists, also relegated Black women in the struggle to a lesser valued status. Marcia Ann Gillespie wrote: "From the beginning the quest for African American rights, freedom, and justice has primarily been couched in patriarchal terms. Oft called a 'struggle for manhood,' it's been a quest for power in which women, with a few notable exceptions, have been and still are expected to play supporting roles. Women's rights and 'women's issues' were seen as secondary to a larger goal" (MS., January/February 1993, p. 80).

Therein lies the fundamental enemy of a united front for freedom in all human relations. If there is no consistent level of unity and "freedom" within a specific cultural entity-Black or white-the universality of the precept will always be defined by the myopic influences of white vs. Black, male vs. female, young vs. old, light-skinned Black vs. medium- or dark-skinned Black, or African American vs. the Black world outside the U.S.

After his 1964 trip to Africa, Malcolm X noted: "I think the single worst mistake of the American Black organizations, and their leaders, is that they have failed to establish direct brotherhood lines of communication between the independent nations of Africa and the American Black people." He further noted that the last thing that the American power structure wanted was for Black people to start thinking internationally:

"The system in this country cannot produce freedom for an Afro-American.... [A]ll of the countries that are emerging today from under the shackles of colonialism are turning toward socialism. I don't think it's an accident. Most of the countries that were colonial powers were capitalist countries, and the last bulwark of capitalism today is America. It's impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism. You can't have capitalism without racism."

CAPITAL AND HUMAN RELATIONS

The problems of cultural relationships are not purely racial nor purely economic, but a linked pathological concept which cannot be eradicated as a cultural singularity; it must be eradicated as a whole entity, beginning with the transmutational effects that capital has on human relationships. Nowhere are those effects seen better than in relationships between men and women, regardless of race. Karl Marx wrote:

"The infinite degradation in which man exists for himself is expressed in this relation to the WOMAN as the spoils and handmaiden of communal lust. For the secret of the relationship of man to man finds its UNAMBIGUOUS, definitive, OPEN, obvious expression in the relationship of MAN TO WOMAN, and in this way the DIRECT, NATURAL relationship between the sexes. The direct, natural, necessary relationship of man to man is the RELATIONSHIP OF MAN TO WOMAN... From the character of this relation it follows to what degree MAN as a SPECIES has become HUMAN..." (quoted in Dunayevskaya, ROSA LUXEMBURG, WOMEN'S LIBERATION, AND MARX'S PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION, pp. 80-81).

The struggle for freedom is not merely a Black, white or gender struggle; it transcends all of those. It is a human struggle, a struggle against capitalistic influences which work both sides of the spectrum-Black and white, male and female, young and old. "Over a long, insidious, and brutal process of being conquered, peoples of color have been instilled with the same racist, chauvinist, and supremacist values and attitudes which have oppressed us" (Harris and Ordona, "Racism and Cross-Racial Hostility," HACIENDO CARAS: MAKING FACE, MAKING SOUL, p. 363).

Therein lies one of the foundations of the "Black psyche." As John Alan wrote, "[Stokely] Carmichael saw 'Black Power' as African Americans being organized, like other ethnic groups, to elect their own race to political positions." As Alan also wrote, the Black masses had a different idea of what the concept meant, deciding "that politics was not enough."

There would be little argument with Abdullah's statement that the "development of SNCC and what it advocated cannot be underestimated or dismissed as inadequate merely because some of the ideas were, perhaps, off the mark. When understanding the sign of the times and the urgent need to have Black people rise up from a state of powerlessness to that of power, we must understand that things were said to motivate and stimulate the mind in order to get them to move forward." However, as Alan noted, such a presumption infers that Carmichael "was dealing with a docile Uncle Tom type of people," which was certainly not the case.

Alan further noted, "It is both dangerous and retrogressive when a leader thinks that he can arbitrarily replace the self-consciousness of masses in motion, a self-consciousness based on their experience and activity, with his own self-consciousness." To do this would be to replace one form of intellectual slavery with another, simply changing the color of the skin.

ENDANGERED BLACK MALES

This brings us to the second factor of the "Black psyche," "the endangered Black male syndrome." Robert Staples noted that, "While all Blacks-men, women and children-are burdened by the persistence of institutionalized racism, the situation of Black males has deteriorated to the point of their being called an endangered species" ("Black Male genocide: A final solution to the race problem in America," THE BLACK SCHOLAR, May-June 1987, p. 9). This theme has been expounded in various forms and fashions, often in terms of "gender equity."

There is absolutely no doubt that a war is being waged against Black males in this culture, but this is a capitalistic war of class, not one designed to annihilate a specific "species." A movement for solidarity centered on the "endangered Black species" leaves little room in the discussion for the problems affecting the Black female. Without the "whole" of the issue being equally involved in the discussion and the solutions, there is no solidarity; there can be no true freedom.

The conceptualization of race and class privilege, from a capitalistic perspective, is desensitizing-by design-when it comes to the totality of human relationships. It is easier to dominate a section of society if that element is already alienated, depersonalized and subject to factors of deculturalization from within.

In South Africa it was "masses in motion" embodied by the youth, not the sanctions of capitalistic governments, which brought down apartheid; in the former African colonies it was "masses in motion" which ended those colonial regimes; in Haiti it was "masses in motion" which ousted the French to create a Black-run nation within a hemisphere riddled with the abuses of slavery. In Marxist-Humanism it is "masses in motion" which must bring about change, not only in the abject slavery of capitalism, but in human relationships.

If there is truly a "white psyche," let us be more specific in determining its essence and reconstruct it as a "white-bourgeois-male psyche," which has no feeling of guilt and fears only one thing, a unified movement of the masses, workers, Blacks, men and women united. Institutionalized racism on a global scale; supportive of inequities with regard to race, color, creed, national origin and sexual orientation; supportive of abuses of Third World workers; union busters; environment destroyers; death penalty proponents; child labor proponents; selective sweatshop amnesia advocates; prison-industrial complex privateers; advocates of "law and order"-let us call it the "psyche of capitalism."

—Robert Taliaferro