Column: Black/Red View
May 2000

Dialogue on 'Black Power'

by John Alan

I want to engage in the philosophic dialogue on why it is imperative to revisit Stokely Carmichael's Black Power Movement and the issue of race and class started by brother Ali Khalid Abdullah in the April issue of NEWS & LETTERS. He was responding to Raya Dunayevskaya's column in the January-February issue, "Revisiting 'Black Power,' Race and Class," where she wrote: "To maintain...that there is something called a 'white psyche'...is but the reverse side of the same coin which standard bourgeois white textbooks maintain..."

First it should be noted that class divisions and the exploitation of Black labor, the objective reasons for racism in this country, were not the reasons why Carmichael called for "Black Power" in 1966 as he marched through the South with Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. in protest of the shooting of James Meredith by a white racist. Carmichael firmly believed that racism was caused by a "white psyche" ridden with guilt and fear because of historic slave revolts.

AN UNCHANGEABLE 'WHITE PSYCHE'?

Does such a social phenomenon as an innate, universal, unchangeable "white psyche" exist in any absolute way? It certainly did not during the long decades when Black and white Abolitionists were united in a common struggle to end slavery. Nor was the "white psyche" an unchangeable dimension in all the other great turning points in American history when African-American masses in motion proved to be the vanguard to radically change class and race in this country-in the struggles for the eight-hour day and the organization of industrial unions, and in the 1960s when the Black struggle for freedom initiated the youth anti-war movement and a new epoch of women's struggles for equality.

These historic moments when Blacks and whites did unite in freedom struggles didn't absolutely end the practice of racism. However, the unity of Blacks and whites in a common struggle for freedom did manifest that a concept of a "white psyche" was essentially a concept not related to the dialectics of the Notion of freedom. No concept can exist without engaging in a battle of ideas; otherwise it becomes a deterrent in the struggle to transform reality.

The prevalence of racism in American society more than 30 years after the end of the Civil Rights Movement shows the necessity of civil rights, but also the limits of such rights in a capitalist society. Civil rights alone do not mean the end of poverty nor police brutality and the legalized murder of African Americans. Nor did the civil rights revolution prevent the incarceration of thousands upon thousands of African Americans across this nation today.

The U.S. could see the birth of a new Black mass movement to gain freedom in its fullest human dimension. It could start at any time in any large Black urban community. It would begin in the same places where the urban revolts began in the middle 1960s when the Civil Rights Movement ended its main activities and cohesion, and began to fade into history, leaving behind an unfinished revolution. If this new beginning happens, its success will depend on whether it can become a catalyst for the development and the articulation of a philosophical vision of a new society which can unify all the forces of revolution in this country.

I would like to say to Ali Khalid Abdullah that a new humanist, non-racist society of freely associated labor will never be created if its philosophical foundation contains Stokely Carmichael's concept of a "white psyche." This concept is just another alienating form of racism. It derives, in essence, from the racist doctrine of white supremacy and its claim that Blacks are mentally inferior to the white race. It is merely a negative of that attitude. Any doctrine based on racism or limited to the first negation of racism is a divisive ideology not capable of transcending racism itself.

Abdullah claims that Carmichael was using the concept of a "white psyche" to develop a new Black consciousness to replace the "...old consciousness of tolerance and acceptance of white supremacy. What Ture (Stokely Carmichael) was doing was trying to develop a statement, a doctrine that would enhance Black Pride and reverse the inferior non-aggressive attitude that Blacks have long held internally toward any white authority, by using reverse psychology on the minds of the Black masses."

CONSCIOUSNESS OF LEADER, OF MASSES

Abdullah clearly implies that Carmichael thought, when he appeared on the scene during a turbulent moment of Black history-in-the-making, that he was dealing with a docile Uncle Tom type of people. This was not true. African-American history is a history of ceaseless revolts, movements and massive demonstrations against racism and exploitation, constantly placing American civilization on trial from the day it was born. Carmichael did not arrive during a quiescent period. Black masses had made their challenge to racism actively clear for ten years. 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.

Carmichael did catch the spirit of the masses when he raised the slogan, "Black Power." But even then "Black Power" proved to be an abstraction, since his concept and the masses' concept of "Black Power" were radically different. Carmichael saw "Black Power" as African Americans being organized, like other ethnic groups, to elect their own race to political positions. The Black masses in their great urban revolts of the middle 1960s were saying that politics was not enough and that we need to end a society that has poverty, police brutality and racism. Today those revolts are forgotten, but they remain the ground for a new beginning, for a new movement with the purpose of creating a new, human society.