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PREFACE 2001: DEMOCRACY

MATTERS IN RACE

MATTERS

BLACK people in the United States
differ from all other modern people owing
to the unprecedented levels of unregulated
and unrestrained violence directed at
them. No other people have been taught
systematically to hate themselves—
psychic violence—reinforced by the
powers of state and civic coercion—
physical violence—for the primary
purpose of controlling their minds and
exploiting their labor for nearly four
hundred years. The unique combination of
American terrorism—Jim Crow and
lynching—as well as American barbarism

—slave trade and slave labor—bears
witness to the distinctive American
assault on black humanity. This vicious
ideology and practice of white supremacy
has left its indelible mark on all spheres
of American life—from the prevailing
crimes of Amerindian reservations to the
discriminatory realities against Spanish-
speaking Latinos to racial stereotypes
against Asians. Yet the fundamental litmus
test for American democracy—its
economy, government, criminal justice
system, education, mass media, and
culture—remains: how broad and intense
are the arbitrary powers used and
deployed against black people. In this
sense, the problem of the twenty-first
century remains the problem of the color
line.

The basic aim of a democratic regime
is to curb the use of arbitrary powers—
especially of government and economic
institutions—against its citizens. Based on
this uncontroversial criterion, the history
of American democracy in regard to black
people from 1776 to 1965 was a colossal
failure. This also holds for red, brown,
and yellow peoples. For one generation—
thirty-five years—we have embarked on a
multiracial democracy with significant
breakthroughs and glaring silences.

Racial progress is undeniable in
America. Never before have we had such
a colorful menagerie of professionals in
business, education, politics, sports, and
the labor movement. Glass ceilings have
been pierced—not smashed—by
extraordinary persons of color. Overt

forms of discrimination have been
attacked and forced to become more
covert.

Yet the legacy of white supremacy
lingers—often in the face of the very
denials of its realities. The most visible
examples are racial profiling, drug
convictions (black people consume 12
percent of illegal drugs in America yet
suffer nearly 70 percent of its
convictions!), and death-row executions.
And the less visible ones are
unemployment levels, infant mortality
rates, special education placements, and
psychic depression treatments.

The most immediate consequence of the
recent experience of multiracial
democracy is increasing class division

and distance in American society and
black communities. This is so primarily
because the advent of the multiracial
American regime coincided with
escalating levels of wealth inequality. The
new inclusion of people of color within
the professional slices of American
society occurred alongside the expansion
of unaccountable corporate power in the
economy and government and the
unleashing of arbitrary police power in
poor communities of color, especially
black, brown, and red. The result is black-
middle class achievements that constitute
black progress alongside devastated black
working and poor communities that yield
unprecedented increases in prison
populations and overlooked victims of
police abuse. Decrepit schools,

inadequate health care, unavailable
childcare, and too few jobs with a living
wage set the stage for this social misery.

Democracy matters in race matters
because class and gender matter in
American society and black life. Wealth
inequality (the top 1 percent have wealth
equivalent to the bottom 95 percent, or 48
percent of the financial net wealth in the
country!) tips the balance against fair
opportunity in education, employment, and
other crucial life-chances. Corporate
power—with its plutocratic, patriarchal,
and pigmentocratic realities—lessens the
abilities of citizens and workers to have a
meaningful voice in shaping their destiny.
Police power—disproportionately used
against poor communities of color—
requires just and fair regulation if it is not

to be viewed as illegitimate and arbitrary.

The major culprit of democratic
possibilities here and abroad is the ever-
expanding market culture that puts
everything and everyone up for sale. The
expansion of corporate power is driven by
this pervasive commercialization and
commodification for two basic reasons.
First, market activities of buying and
selling, advertising and promoting weaken
nonmarket activities of caring and sharing,
nurturing and connecting. Short-term
stimulation and instant titillation edge out
quality relations and substantive
community. Second, private aims trump
public aspirations. Individual success—
sometimes at any cost by any means—
downplays fair and just transactions so
workers’ and citizens’ power is weakened.

And no democracy can survive, no matter
how strong its markets are, without a
serious public life and commitment to
fairness and justice.

The kind of structural transformation
we need is best represented by the forces
of Ralph Nader, Al Sharpton, and Dolores
Huerta. We have seen stirrings of this
multiracial alliance of concerned citizens
and neglected workers in Seattle,
Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Harlem, and
San Antonio. But I believe black
progressives will play a disproportionate
role.

The impact of the market culture on
black life has been devastating. As
Stanley Crouch rightly has noted, fifty
years ago black communities were the

most civilized and humane in America—
highly nurturing, caring, loving, and self-
respecting behind the walls of American
apartheid. The market invasion, including
the ugly drug invasion, has transformed
too many black neighborhoods into hoods,
black civic communities into black uncivil
combat zones. This transformation results
from the double impact of strong market
forces and vicious white supremacist (and
male supremacist, heterosexist)
stereotypes that disproportionately shape
black perceptions and practice. Needless
to say, this holds for American society as
a whole. But for a hated and hunted
people whose prize possessions have
been subversive memory, personal
integrity, and self-respect, to become
captive to historical amnesia,

materialisticobsessions, and personal
accommodation for acceptance at any
costs yields black nihilism and collective
suicide.

The major tragedy of black America in
the past decade or so is the low quality of
black leadership and the relative
inattention to the deep crisis of black
youth. To put it bluntly, we simply do not
have enough black leaders who love and
respect black people enough to tell them
the truth—and trust them with the truth. We
have too many black leaders who give in
too quickly and sell out too easily. And,
like Wednesday night at the Apollo
Theater, most black folk know who is for
real, committed, and serious, and who is
not. But too often, the choice for high-
quality leadership is limited. And we find

ourselves between a rock and a hard
place.

This is especially so in regard to black
youth. With roughly 40 percent of black
children living in poverty and almost 10
percent of all black young adult men in
prison, we face a crisis of enormous
proportions. Yet this crisis is not even a
blip on the national radar screen of
American politics. This is a shame and a
disgrace—and black leaders must bear
some of the responsibility. How can black
youth respect black leaders when their
plight and predicament is so flagrantly
ignored by the mainstream—a mainstream
that black leaders speak to and influence?
With few exceptions—Al Sharpton,
Marian Wright Edelman, the Black
Radical Congress, the NAACP’s ACT-SO

programs for young people, and a few
others—black leadership tends to
downplay the black youth realities at the
expense of black professional
advancement. Again, this priority is an
issue of class and gender in black
America. And it is now coming back to
haunt black leaders.

As we enter the twenty-first century, we
must connect the urgent black domestic
issues to pressing class and gender issues
in the corporate globalization around the
world. As Danny Glover constantly
reminds us, environmental, consumers’,
and workers’ protections in our
increasingly interdependent world of
capitalist markets are crucial if race
matters are to be enhanced. If pro-
democracy movements weaken—and

citizens and workers become more feeble
—race matters will explode. And we
know the ugly cycle this will yield. We
must do better—but only if we muster the
vision, courage, and will to do so.

PREFACE 1993

For the sake of one’s children, in
order to minimize the bill they must
pay, one must be careful not to take

refuge in any delusion—and the
value placed on the color of the skin

is always and everywhere and
forever a delusion. I know that what I
am asking is impossible. But in our

time, as in every time, the impossible
is the least that one can demand—

and one is, after all, emboldened by
the spectacle of human history in

general, and American Negro history
in particular, for it testifies to nothing
less than the perpetual achievement

of the impossible.

. . . And here we are, at the center
of the arc, trapped in the gaudiest,

most valuable, and most improbable
water wheel the world has ever seen.
Everything now, we must assume, is

in our hands; we have no right to
assume otherwise. If we—and now I
mean the relatively conscious whites
and the relatively conscious blacks,
who must, like lovers, insist on, or

create, the consciousness of the
others—do not falter in our duty now,
we may be able, handful that we are,

to end the racial nightmare, and
achieve our country, and change the
history of the world. If we do not

now dare everything, the fulfillment
of that prophecy, recreated from the

Bible in song by a slave, is uopon us:

GOD GAVE NOAH THE
RAINBOW SIGN, NO MORE

WATER, THE FIRE NEXT TIME!

JAMES BALDWIN, The Fire
Next Time (1963)

THIS past September my wife, Elleni,
and I made our biweekly trek to New York
City from Princeton. I was in good spirits.
My morning lecture on the first half of
Plato’s Republic in my European Cultural
Studies course had gone well. And my
afternoon lecture on W. E. B. Du Bois’s
The Souls of Black Folk in my Afro-
American Cultural Studies course had left
me exhausted yet exhilarated. Plato’s
powerful symbolism of Socrates’ descent
to the great port of Piraeus—the

multicultural center of Greek trade and
commerce and the stronghold of Athenian
democracy—still rang in my ears. And Du
Bois’s prescient pronouncement—”The
problem of the twentieth century is the
problem of the color line”— haunted me.
In a mysterious way, this classic twosome
posed the most fundamental challenges to
my basic aim in life: to speak the truth to
power with love so that the quality of
everyday life for ordinary people is
enhanced and white supremacy is stripped
of its authority and legitimacy. Plato’s
profound—yet unpersuasive— critique of
Athenian democracy as inevitably
corrupted by the ignorance and passions
of the masses posed one challenge, and Du
Bois’s deep analysis of the intransigence
of white supremacy in the American

democratic experiment posed another.

As we approached Manhattan, my
temperature rose, as it always does when
I’m in a hurry near the Lincoln Tunnel.
How rare it is that I miss the grinding
gridlock—no matter the day or hour. But
this time I drove right through and
attributed my good luck to Elleni. As we
entered the city, we pondered whether we
would have enough time to stop at
Sweetwater’s (our favorite place to relax)
after our appointments. I dropped my wife
off for an appointment on 60th Street
between Lexington and Park avenues. I
left my car—a rather elegant one—in a
safe parking lot and stood on the corner of
60th Street and Park Avenue to catch a
taxi. I felt quite relaxed since I had an
hour until my next engagement. At 5:00

P.M. I had to meet a photographer who
would take the picture for the cover of this
book on the roof of an apartment building
in East Harlem on 115th Street and 1st
Avenue. I waited and waited and waited.
After the ninth taxi refused me, my blood
began to boil. The tenth taxi refused me
and stopped for a kind, well-dressed
smiling female fellow citizen of European
descent. As she stepped in the cab, she
said, “This is really ridiculous, is it not?”

Ugly racial memories of the past
flashed through my mind. Years ago, while
driving from New York to teach at
Williams College, I was stopped on fake
charges of trafficking cocaine. When I told
the police officer I was a professor of
religion, he replied “Yeh, and I’m the
Flying Nun. Let’s go, nigger!” I was

stopped three times in my first ten days in
Princeton for driving too slowly on a
residential street with a speed limit of
twenty-five miles per hour. (And my son,
Clifton, already has similar memories at
the tender age of fifteen.) Needless to say,
these incidents are dwarfed by those like
Rodney King’s beating or the abuse of
black targets of the FBI’s COINTELPRO
efforts in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet the
memories cut like a merciless knife at my
soul as I waited on that godforsaken
corner. Finally I decided to take the
subway. I walked three long avenues,
arrived late, and had to catch my moral
breath as I approached the white male
photographer and white female cover
designer. I chose not to dwell on this
everyday experience of black New

Yorkers. And we had a good time talking,
posing, and taking pictures.

When I picked up Elleni, I told her of
my hour spent on the corner, my tardy
arrival, and the expertise and enthusiasm
of the photographer and designer. We
talked about our fantasy of moving to
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia—her home and the
site of the most pleasant event of my life. I
toyed with the idea of attending the last
day of the revival led by the Rev.
Jeremiah Wright of Chicago at Rev. Wyatt
T. Walker’s Canaan Baptist Church of
Christ in Harlem. But we settled for
Sweetwater’s. And the ugly memories
faded in the face of soulful music, soulful
food, and soulful folk.

As we rode back to Princton, above the

soothing black music of Van Harper’s
Quiet Storm on WBLS, 107.5 on the radio
dial, we talked about what race matters
have meant to the American past and of
how much race matters in the American
present. And I vowed to be more vigilant
and virtuous in my efforts to meet the
formidable challenges posed by Plato and
Du Bois. For me, it is an urgent question
of power and morality; for others, it is an
everyday matter of life and death.

INTRODUCTION: RACE

MATTERS

Since the beginning of the nation,
white Americans have suffered from

a deep uncertainty as to who they
really are. One of the ways that has

been used to simplify the answer has
been to seize upon the presence of
Black Americans and use them as a

marker, a symbol of limits, a
metaphor for the “outsider.” Many

whites could look at the social
position of blacks and feel that color
formed an easy and reliable gauge
for determining to what extent one
was or was not American. Perhaps

that is why one of the first epithets
that many European immigrants

learned when they got off the boat
was the term “nigger”—it made them
feel instantly American. But this is

tricky magic. Despite his racial
difference and social status,

something indisputably American
about Negroes not only raised doubts
about the white man’s value system
but aroused the troubling suspicion

that whatever else the true American
is, he is also somehow black.

RALPH ELLISON, “What
America Would

Be Like without Blacks”
(1970)

WHAT happened in Los Angeles in
April of 1992 was neither a race riot nor a
class rebellion. Rather, this monumental
upheaval was a multiracial, trans-class,
and largely male display of justified
social rage. For all its ugly, xenophobic
resentment, its air of adolescent carnival,
and its downright barbaric behavior, it
signified the sense of powerlessness in
American society. Glib attempts to reduce
its meaning to the pathologies of the black
underclass, the criminal actions of
hoodlums, or the political revolt of the
oppressed urban masses miss the mark. Of
those arrested, only 36 percent were
black, more than a third had full-time jobs,
and most claimed to shun political
affiliation. What we witnessed in Los
Angeles was the consequence of a lethal

linkage of economic decline, cultural
decay, and political lethargy in American
life. Race was the visible catalyst, not the
underlying cause.

The meaning of the earthshaking events
in Los Angeles is difficult to grasp
because most of us remain trapped in the
narrow framework of the dominant liberal
and conservative views of race in
America, which with its worn-out
vocabulary leaves us intellectually
debilitated, morally disempowered, and
personally depressed. The astonishing
disappearance of the event from public
dialogue is testimony to just how painful
and distressing a serious engagement with
race is. Our truncated public discussions
of race suppress the best of who and what
we are as a people because they fail to

confront the complexity of the issue in a
candid and critical manner. The
predictable pitting of liberals against
conservatives, Great Society Democrats
against self-help Republicans, reinforces
intellectual parochialism and political
paralysis.

The liberal notion that more government
programs can solve racial problems is
simplistic—precisely because it focuses
solely on the economic dimension. And
the conservative idea that what is needed
is a change in the moral behavior of poor
black urban dwellers (especially poor
black men, who, they say, should stay
married, support their children, and stop
committing so much crime) highlights
immoral actions while ignoring public
responsibility for the immoral

circumstances that haunt our fellow
citizens.

The common denominator of these
views of race is that each still sees black
people as a “problem people,” in the
words of Dorothy I. Height, president of
the National Council of Negro Women,
rather than as fellow American citizens
with problems. Her words echo the
poignant “unasked question” of W. E. B.
Du Bois, who, in The Souls of Black Folk
(1903), wrote:

They approach me in a half-
hesitant sort of way, eye me
curiously or compassionately,
and then instead of saying
directly, How does it feel to be
a problem? they say, I know an

excellent colored man in my
town. . . . Do not these Southern
outrages make your blood boil?
At these I smile, or am
interested, or reduce the boiling
to a simmer, as the occasion
may require. To the real
question, How does it feel to be
a problem? I answer seldom a
word.

Nearly a century later, we confine
discussions about race in America to the
“problems” black people pose for whites
rather than consider what this way of
viewing black people reveals about us as
a nation.

This paralyzing framework encourages
liberals to relieve their guilty consciences

by supporting public funds directed at “the
problems”; but at the same time, reluctant
to exercise principled criticism of black
people, liberals deny them the freedom to
err. Similarly, conservatives blame the
“problems” on black people themselves—
and thereby render black social misery
invisible or unworthy of public attention.

Hence, for liberals, black people are to
be “included” and “integrated” into “our”
society and culture, while for
conservatives they are to be “well
behaved” and “worthy of acceptance” by
“our” way of life. Both fail to see that the
presence and predicaments of black
people are neither additions to nor
defections from American life, but rather
constitutive elements of that life.

10 engage in a serious discussion of
race in America, we must begin not with
the problems of black people but with the
flaws of American society—flaws rooted
in historic inequalities and longstanding
cultural stereotypes. How we set up the
terms for discussing racial issues shapes
our perception and response to these
issues. As long as black people are
viewed as a “them,” the burden falls on
blacks to do all the “cultural” and “moral”
work necessary for healthy race relations.
The implication is that only certain
Americans can define what it means to be
American—and the rest must simply “fit
in.”

The emergence of strong black-
nationalist sentiments among blacks,
especially among young people, is a

revolt against this sense of having to “fit
in.” The variety of black-nationalist
ideologies, from the moderate views of
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas
in his youth to those of Louis Farrakhan
today, rest upon a fundamental truth: white
America has been historically weakwilled
in ensuring racial justice and has
continued to resist fully accepting the
humanity of blacks. As long as double
standards and differential treatment
abound—as long as the rap performer Ice-
T is harshly condemned while former Los
Angeles Police Chief Daryl F. Gates’s
antiblack comments are received in polite
silence, as long as Dr. Leonard Jeffries’s
anti-Semitic statements are met with
vitriolic outrage while presidential
candidate Patrick J. Buchanan’s anti-

Semitism receives a genteel response—
black nationalisms will thrive.

Afrocentrism, a contemporary species
of black nationalism, is a gallant yet
misguided attempt to define an African
identity in a white society perceived to be
hostile. It is gallant because it puts black
doings and sufferings, not white anxieties
and fears, at the center of discussion. It is
misguided because—out of fear of cultural
hybridization and through silence on the
issue of class, retrograde views on black
women, gay men, and lesbians, and a
reluctance to link race to the common
good—it reinforces the narrow
discussions about race.

To establish a new framework, we need
to begin with a frank acknowledgment of

the basic humanness and Americanness of
each of us. And we must acknowledge that
as a people—E Pluribus Unum—we are
on a slippery slope toward economic
strife, social turmoil, and cultural chaos. If
we go down, we go down together. The
Los Angeles upheaval forced us to see not
only that we are not connected in ways we
would like to be but also, in a more
profound sense, that this failure to connect
binds us even more tightly together. The
paradox of race in America is that our
common destiny is more pronounced and
imperiled precisely when our divisions
are deeper. The Civil War and its legacy
speak loudly here. And our divisions are
growing deeper. Today, eighty-six percent
of white suburban Americans live in
neighborhoods that are less than 1 percent

black, meaning that the prospects for the
country depend largely on how its cities
fare in the hands of a suburban electorate.
There is no escape from our interracial
interdependence, yet enforced racial
hierarchy dooms us as a nation to
collective paranoia and hysteria—the
unmaking of any democratic order.

The verdict in the Rodney King case
which sparked the incidents in Los
Angeles was perceived to be wrong by the
vast majority of Americans. But whites
have often failed to acknowledge the
widespread mistreatment of black people,
especially black men, by law enforcement
agencies, which helped ignite the spark.
The verdict was merely the occasion for
deep-seated rage to come to the surface.
This rage is fed by the “silent” depression

ravaging the country—in which real
weekly wages of all American workers
since 1973 have declined nearly 20
percent, while at the same time wealth has
been upwardly distributed.

The exodus of stable industrial jobs
from urban centers to cheaper labor
markets here and abroad, housing policies
that have created “chocolate cities and
vanilla suburbs” (to use the popular
musical artist George Clinton’s
memorable phrase), white fear of black
crime, and the urban influx of poor
Spanish-speaking and Asian immigrants—
all have helped erode the tax base of
American cities just as the federal
government has cut its supports and
programs. The result is unemployment,
hunger, homelessness, and sickness for

millions.

And a pervasive spiritual
impoverishment grows. The collapse of
meaning in life—the eclipse of hope and
absence of love of self and others, the
breakdown of family and neighborhood
bonds— leads to the social deracination
and cultural denudement of urban
dwellers, especially children. We have
created rootless, dangling people with
little link to the supportive networks—
family, friends, school—that sustain some
sense of purpose in life. We have
witnessed the collapse of the spiritual
communities that in the past helped
Americans face despair, disease, and
death and that transmit through the
generations dignity and decency,
excellence and elegance.

The result is lives of what we might
call “random nows,” of fortuitous and
fleeting moments preoccupied with
“getting over”— with acquiring pleasure,
property, and power by any means
necessary. (This is not what Malcolm X
meant by this famous phrase.) Post-
modern culture is more and more a market
culture dominated by gangster mentalities
and self-destructive wantonness. This
culture engulfs all of us—yet its impact on
the disadvantaged is devastating, resulting
in extreme violence in everyday life.
Sexual violence against women and
homicidal assaults by young black men on
one another are only the most obvious
signs of this empty quest for pleasure,
property, and power.

Last, this rage is fueled by a political

atmosphere in which images, not ideas,
dominate, where politicians spend more
time raising money than debating issues.
The functions of parties have been
displaced by public polls, and politicians
behave less as thermostats that determine
the climate of opinion than as
thermometers registering the public mood.
American politics has been rocked by an
unleashing of greed among opportunistic
public officials—who have followed the
lead of their counterparts in the private
sphere, where, as of 1989, 1 percent of the
population owned 37 percent of the
wealth and 10 percent of the population
owned 86 percent of the wealth—leading
to a profound cynicism and pessimism
among the citizenry.

And given the way in which the

Republican Party since 1968 has appealed
to popular xenophobic images—playing
the black, female, and homophobic cards
to realign the electorate along race, sex,
and sexual-orientation lines—it is no
surprise that the notion that we are all part
of one garment of destiny is discredited.
Appeals to special interests rather than to
public interests reinforce this polarization.
The Los Angeles upheaval was an
expression of utter fragmentation by a
powerless citizenry that includes not just
the poor but all of us.

WHAT is to be done? How do we
capture a new spirit and vision to meet the
challenges of the post-industrial city, post-
modern culture, and post-party politics?

First, we must admit that the most
valuable sources for help, hope, and
power consist of ourselves and our
common history. As in the ages of Lincoln,
Roosevelt, and King, we must look to new
frameworks and languages to understand
our multilayered crisis and overcome our
deep malaise.

Second, we must focus our attention on
the public square—the common good that
undergirds our national and global
destinies. The vitality of any public square
ultimately depends on how much we care
about the quality of our lives together. The
neglect of our public infrastructure, for
example—our water and sewage systems,
bridges, tunnels, highways, subways, and
streets—reflects not only our myopic
economic policies, which impede

productivity, but also the low priority we
place on our common life.

The tragic plight of our children clearly
reveals our deep disregard for public
well-being. About one out of every five
children in this country lives in poverty,
including one out of every two black
children and two out of every five
Hispanic children. Most of our children—
neglected by overburdened parents and
bombarded by the market values of profit-
hungry corporations—are ill-equipped to
live lives of spiritual and cultural quality.
Faced with these facts, how do we expect
ever to constitute a vibrant society?

One essential step is some form of
large-scale public intervention to ensure
access to basic social goods—housing,

food, health care, education, child care,
and jobs. We must invigorate the common
good with a mixture of government,
business, and labor that does not follow
any existing blueprint. After a period in
which the private sphere has been
sacralized and the public square gutted,
the temptation is to make a fetish of the
public square. We need to resist such
dogmatic swings.

Last, the major challenge is to meet the
need to generate new leadership. The
paucity of courageous leaders—so
apparent in the response to the events in
Los Angeles—requires that we look
beyond the same elites and voices that
recycle the older frameworks. We need
leaders—neither saints nor sparkling
television personalities—who can situate

themselves within a larger historical
narrative of this country and our world,
who can grasp the complex dynamics of
our peoplehood and imagine a future
grounded in the best of our past, yet who
are attuned to the frightening obstacles that
now perplex us. Our ideals of freedom,
democracy, and equality must be invoked
to invigorate all of us, especially the
landless, propertyless, and luckless. Only
a visionary leadership that can motivate
“the better angels of our nature,” as
Lincoln said, and activate possibilities for
a freer, more efficient, and stable America
—only that leadership deserves
cultivation and support.

This new leadership must be grounded
in grass-roots organizing that highlights
democratic accountability. Whoever our

leaders will be as we approach the
twenty-first century, their challenge will
be to help Americans determine whether a
genuine multiracial democracy can be
created and sustained in an era of global
economy and a moment of xenophobic
frenzy.

Let us hope and pray that the vast
intelligence, imagination, humor, and
courage of Americans will not fail us.
Either we learn a new language of
empathy and compassion, or the fire this
time will consume us all.

CHAPTER ONE

NIHILISM IN BLACK AMERICA

We black folk, our history and our
present being, are a mirror of all the
manifold experiences of America.
What we want, what we represent,
what we endure is what America is.
If we black folk perish, America will
perish. If America has forgotten her
past, then let her look into the mirror
of our consciousness and she will

see the living past living in the
present, for our memories go hack,

through our black folk of today,
through the recollections of our black

parents, and through the tales of
slavery told by our black

grandparents, to the time when none
of us, black or white, lived in this

fertile land. The differences between
black folk and white folk are not

blood or color, and the ties that bind
us are deeper than those that separate
us. The common road of hope which
we all traveled has brought us into a

stronger kinship than any words,
laws, or legal claims.

RICHARD WRIGHT, 12
Million Black Voices (1941)

RECENT discussions about the plight
of African Americans—especially those
at the bottom of the social ladder—tend to

divide into two camps. On the one hand,
there are those who highlight the
structural constraints on the life chances
of black people. Their viewpoint involves
a subtle historical and sociological
analysis of slavery, Jim Crowism, job and
residential discrimination, skewed
unemployment rates, inadequate health
care, and poor education. On the other
hand, there are those who stress the
behavioral impediments on black upward
mobility. They focus on the waning of the
Protestant ethic—hard work, deferred
gratification, frugality, and responsibility
—in much of black America.

Those in the first camp—the liberal
structuralists—call for full employment,
health, education, and child-care
programs, and broad affirmative action

practices. In short, a new, more sober
version of the best of the New Deal and
the Great Society: more government
money, better bureaucrats, and an active
citizenry. Those in the second camp—the
conservative behaviorists—promote self-
help programs, black business expansion,
and nonpreferential job practices. They
support vigorous “free market” strategies
that depend on fundamental changes in
how black people act and live. To put it
bluntly, their projects rest largely upon a
cultural revival of the Protestant ethic in
black America.

Unfortunately, these two camps have
nearly suffocated the crucial debate that
should be taking place about the prospects
for black America. This debate must go
far beyond the liberal and conservative

positions in three fundamental ways. First,
we must acknowledge that structures and
behavior are inseparable, that institutions
and values go hand in hand. How people
act and live are shaped—though in no way
dictated or determined—by the larger
circumstances in which they find
themselves. These circumstances can be
changed, their limits attenuated, by
positive actions to elevate living
conditions.

Second, we should reject the idea that
structures are primarily economic and
political creatures—an idea that sees
culture as an ephemeral set of behavioral
attitudes and values. Culture is as much a
structure as the economy or politics; it is
rooted in institutions such as families,
schools, churches, synagogues, mosques,

and communication industries (television,
radio, video, music). Similarly, the
economy and politics are not only
influenced by values but also promote
particular cultural ideals of the good life
and good society.

Third, and most important, we must
delve into the depths where neither
liberals nor conservatives dare to tread,
namely, into the murky waters of despair
and dread that now flood the streets of
black America. To talk about the
depressing statistics of unemployment,
infant mortality, incarceration, teenage
pregnancy, and violent crime is one thing.
But to face up to the monumental eclipse
of hope, the unprecedented collapse of
meaning, the incredible disregard for
human (especially black) life and property

in much of black America is something
else.

The liberal/conservative discussion
conceals the most basic issue now facing
black America: the nihilistic threat to its
very existence. This threat is not simply a
matter of relative economic deprivation
and political powerlessness—though
economic wellbeing and political clout
are requisites for meaningful black
progress. It is primarily a question of
speaking to the profound sense of
psychological depression, personal
worthlessness, and social despair so
widespread in black America.

The liberal structuralists fail to grapple
with this threat for two reasons. First,
their focus on structural constraints relates

almost exclusively to the economy and
politics. They show no understanding of
the structural character of culture. Why?
Because they tend to view people in
egoistic and rationalist terms according to
which they are motivated primarily by
self-interest and self-preservation.
Needless to say, this is partly true about
most of us. Yet, people, especially
degraded and oppressed people, are also
hungry for identity, meaning, and self-
worth.

The second reason liberal structuralists
overlook the nihilistic threat is a sheer
failure of nerve. They hesitate to talk
honestly about culture, the realm of
meanings and values, because doing so
seems to lend itself too readily to
conservative conclusions in the narrow

way Americans discuss race. If there is a
hidden taboo among liberals, it is to resist
talking too much about values because
such discussions remove the focus from
structures and especially because they
obscure the positive role of government.
But this failure by liberals leaves the
existential and psychological realities of
black people in the lurch. In this way,
liberal structuralists neglect the battered
identities rampant in black America.

As for the conservative behaviorists,
they not only misconstrue the nihilistic
threat but inadvertently contribute to it.
This is a serious charge, and it rests upon
several claims. Conservative behaviorists
talk about values and attitudes as if
political and economic structures hardly
exist. They rarely, if ever, examine the

innumerable cases in which black people
do act on the Protestant ethic and still
remain at the bottom of the social ladder.
Instead, they highlight the few instances in
which blacks ascend to the top, as if such
success is available to all blacks,
regardless of circumstances. Such a vulgar
rendition of Horatio Alger in blackface
may serve as a source of inspiration to
some—a kind of model for those already
on the right track. But it cannot serve as a
substitute for serious historical and social
analysis of the predicaments of and
prospects for all black people, especially
the grossly disadvantaged ones.

Conservative behaviorists also discuss
black culture as if acknowledging one’s
obvious victimization by white
supremacist practices (compounded by

sexism and class condition) is taboo. They
tell black people to see themselves as
agents, not victims. And on the surface,
this is comforting advice, a nice clich6 for
downtrodden people. But inspirational
slogans cannot substitute for substantive
historical and social analysis. While black
people have never been simply victims,
wallowing in self-pity and begging for
white giveaways, they have been—and
are—victimized. Therefore, to call on
black people to be agents makes sense
only if we also examine the dynamics of
this victimization against which their
agency will, in part, be exercised. What is
particularly naive and peculiarly vicious
about the conservative behavioral outlook
is that it tends to deny the lingering effect
of black history—a history inseparable

from though not reducible to victimization.
In this way, crucial and indispensable
themes of self-help and personal
responsibility are wrenched out of
historical context and contemporary
circumstances—as if it is all a matter of
personal will.

This ahistorical perspective contributes
to the nihilistic threat within black
America in that it can be used to justify
right-wing cutbacks for poor people
struggling for decent housing, child care,
health care, and education. As I pointed
out above, the liberal perspective is
deficient in important ways, but even so
liberals are right on target in their critique
of conservative government cutbacks for
services to the poor. These ghastly
cutbacks are one cause of the nihilist

threat to black America.

THE proper starting point for the
crucial debate about the prospects for
black America is an examination of the
nihilism that increasingly pervades black
communities. Nihilism is to be
understood here not as a philosophic
doctrine that there are no rational
grounds for legitimate standards or
authority; it is, far more, the lived
experience of coping with a life of
horrifying meaninglessness,
hopelessness, and (most important)
lovelessness. The frightening result is a
numbing detachment from others and a
self-destructive disposition toward the
world. Life without meaning, hope, and
love breeds a coldhearted, mean-spirited

outlook that destroys both the individual
and others.

Nihilism is not new in black America.
The first African encounter with the New
World was an encounter with a distinctive
form of the Absurd. The initial black
struggle against degradation and
devaluation in the enslaved circumstances
of the New World was, in part, a struggle
against nihilism. In fact, the major enemy
of black survival in America has been and
is neither oppression nor exploitation but
rather the nihilistic threat—that is, loss of
hope and absence of meaning. For as long
as hope remains and meaning is
preserved, the possibility of overcoming
oppression stays alive. The self-fulfilling
prophecy of the nihilistic threat is that
without hope there can be no future, that

without meaning there can be no struggle.

The genius of our black foremothers
and forefathers was to create powerful
buffers to ward off the nihilistic threat, to
equip black folk with cultural armor to
beat back the demons of hopelessness,
meaninglessness, and lovelessness. These
buffers consisted of cultural structures of
meaning and feeling that created and
sustained communities; this armor
constituted ways of life and struggle that
embodied values of service and sacrifice,
love and care, discipline and excellence.
In other words, traditions for black
surviving and thriving under usually
adverse New World conditions were
major barriers against the nihilistic threat.
These traditions consist primarily of black
religious and civic institutions that

sustained familial and communal networks
of support. If cultures are, in part, what
human beings create (out of antecedent
fragments of other cultures) in order to
convince themselves not to commit
suicide, then black foremothers and
forefathers are to be applauded. In fact,
until the early seventies black Americans
had the lowest suicide rate in the United
States. But now young black people lead
the nation in suicides.

What has changed? What went wrong?
The bitter irony of integration? The
cumulative effects of a genocidal
conspiracy? The virtual collapse of rising
expectations after the optimistic sixties?
None of us fully understands why the
cultural structures that once sustained
black life in America are no longer able to

fend off the nihilistic threat. I believe that
two significant reasons why the threat is
more powerful now than ever before are
the saturation of market forces and market
moralities in black life and the present
crisis in black leadership. The recent
market-driven shattering of black civil
society—black families, neighborhoods,
schools, churches, mosques—leaves more
and more black people vulnerable to daily
lives endured with little sense of self and
fragile existential moorings.

Black people have always been in
America’s wilderness in search of a
promised land. Yet many black folk now
reside in a jungle ruled by a cutthroat
market morality devoid of any faith in
deliverance or hope for freedom. Contrary
to the superficial claims of conservative

behaviorists, these jungles are not
primarily the result of pathological
behavior. Rather, this behavior is the
tragic response of a people bereft of
resources in confronting the workings of
U.S. capitalist society. Saying this is not
the same as asserting that individual black
people are not responsible for their
actions— black murderers and rapists
should go to jail. But it must be
recognized that the nihilistic threat
contributes to criminal behavior. It is a
threat that feeds on poverty and shattered
cultural institutions and grows more
powerful as the armors to ward against it
are weakened.

BUT why is this shattering of black
civil society occurring? What has led to
the weakening of black cultural

institutions in asphalt jungles? Corporate
market institutions have contributed
greatly to their collapse. By corporate
market institutions I mean that complex set
of interlocking enterprises that have a
disproportionate amount of capital,
power, and exercise a disproportionate
influence on how our society is run and
how our culture is shaped. Needless to
say, the primary motivation of these
institutions is to make profits, and their
basic strategy is to convince the public to
consume. These institutions have helped
create a seductive way of life, a culture of
consumption that capitalizes on every
opportunity to make money. Market
calculations and cost-benefit analyses
hold sway in almost every sphere of U.S.
society.

The common denominator of these
calculations and analyses is usually the
provision, expansion, and intensification
of pleasure. Pleasure is a multivalent
term; it means different things to many
people. In the American way of life
pleasure involves comfort, convenience,
and sexual stimulation. Pleasure, so
defined, has little to do with the past and
views the future as no more than a
repetition of a hedonistically driven
present. This market morality stigmatizes
others as objects for personal pleasure or
bodily stimulation. Conservative
behaviorists have alleged that traditional
morality has been undermined by radical
feminists and the cultural radicals of the
sixties. But it is clear that corporate
market institutions have greatly

contributed to undermining traditional
morality in order to stay in business and
make a profit. The reduction of
individuals to objects of pleasure is
especially evident in the culture industries
—television, radio, video, music—in
which gestures of sexual foreplay and
orgiastic pleasure flood the marketplace.

Like all Americans, African Americans
are influenced greatly by the images of
comfort, convenience, machismo,
femininity, violence, and sexual
stimulation that bombard consumers.
These seductive images contribute to the
predominance of the marketinspired way
of life over all others and thereby edge out
nonmarket values—love, care, service to
others—handed down by preceding
generations. The predominance of this

way of life among those living in poverty-
ridden conditions, with a limited capacity
to ward off self-contempt and self-hatred,
results in the possible triumph of the
nihilistic threat in black America.

A MAJOR contemporary strategy for
holding the nihilistic threat at bay is a
direct attack on the sense of worthlessness
and self-loathing in black America. This
angst resembles a kind of collective
clinical depression in significant pockets
of black America. The eclipse of hope and
collapse of meaning in much of black
America is linked to the structural
dynamics of corporate market institutions
that affect all Americans. Under these
circumstances black existential angst
derives from the lived experience of
ontological wounds and emotional scars

inflicted by white supremacist beliefs and
images permeating U.S. society and
culture. These beliefs and images attack
black intelligence, black ability, black
beauty, and black character daily in subtle
and not-so-subtle ways. Toni Morrison’s
novel, The Bluest Eye, for example,
reveals the devastating effect of pervasive
European ideals of beauty on the self-
image of young black women. Morrison’s
exposure of the harmful extent to which
these white ideals affect the black self-
image is a first step toward rejecting these
ideals and overcoming the nihilistic self-
loathing they engender in blacks.

The accumulated effect of the black
wounds and scars suffered in a white-
dominated society is a deep-seated anger,
a boiling sense of rage, and a passionate

pessimism regarding America’s will to
justice. Under conditions of slavery and
Jim Crow segregation, this anger, rage,
and pessimism remained relatively muted
because of a well-justified fear of brutal
white retaliation. The major breakthroughs
of the sixties—more psychically than
politically—swept this fear away. Sadly,
the combination of the market way of life,
poverty-ridden conditions, black
existential angst, and the lessening of fear
of white authorities has directed most of
the anger, rage, and despair toward fellow
black citizens, especially toward black
women who are the most vulnerable in our
society and in black communities. Only
recently has this nihilistic threat—and its
ugly inhumane outlook and actions—
surfaced in the larger American society.

And its appearance surely reveals one of
the many instances of cultural decay in a
declining empire.

WHAT is to be done about this
nihilistic threat? Is there really any hope,
given our shattered civil society, market-
driven corporate enterprises, and white
supremacism? If one begins with the threat
of concrete nihilism, then one must talk
about some kind of politics of conversion.
New models of collective black
leadership must promote a version of this
politics. Like alcoholism and drug
addiction, nihilism is a disease of the
soul. It can never be completely cured,
and there is always the possibility of
relapse. But there is always a chance for
conversion—a chance for people to
believe that there is hope for the future

and a meaning to struggle. This chance
rests neither on an agreement about what
justice consists of nor on an analysis of
how racism, sexism, or class
subordination operate. Such arguments
and analyses are indispensable. But a
politics of conversion requires more.
Nihilism is not overcome by arguments or
analyses; it is tamed by love and care.
Any disease of the soul must be conquered
by a turning of one’s soul. This turning is
done through one’s own affirmation of
one’s worth—an affirmation fueled by the
concern of others. A love ethic must be at
the center of a politics of conversion.

A love ethic has nothing to do with
sentimental feelings or tribal connections.
Rather it is a last attempt at generating a
sense of agency among a downtrodden

people. The best exemplar of this love
ethic is depicted on a number of levels in
Toni Morrison’s great novel Beloved.
Self-love and love of others are both
modes toward increasing self-valuation
and encouraging political resistance in
one’s community. These modes of
valuation and resistance are rooted in a
subversive memory—the best of one’s
past without romantic nostalgia—and
guided by a universal love ethic. For my
purposes here, Beloved can be construed
as bringing together the loving yet critical
affirmation of black humanity found in the
best of black nationalist movements, the
perennial hope against hope for trans-
racial coalition in progressive
movements, and the painful struggle for
self-affirming sanity in a history in which

the nihilistic threat seems insurmountable.

The politics of conversion proceeds
principally on the local level—in those
institutions in civil society still vital
enough to promote self-worth and self-
affirmation. It surfaces on the state and
national levels only when grassroots
democratic organizations put forward a
collective leadership that has earned the
love and respect of and, most important,
has proved itself accountable to these
organizations. This collective leadership
must exemplify moral integrity, character,
and democratic statesmanship within itself
and within its organizations.

Like liberal structuralists, the advocates
of a politics of conversion never lose
sight of the structural conditions that shape

the sufferings and lives of people. Yet,
unlike liberal structuralism, the politics of
conversion meets the nihilistic threat
head-on. Like conservative behaviorism,
the politics of conversion openly
confronts the self-destructive and
inhumane actions of black people. Unlike
conservative behaviorists, the politics of
conversion situates these actions within
inhumane circumstances (but does not
thereby exonerate them). The politics of
conversion shuns the limelight—a
limelight that solicits status seekers and
ingratiates egomaniacs. Instead, it stays on
the ground among the toiling everyday
people, ushering forth humble freedom
fighters—both followers and leaders—
who have the audacity to take the nihilistic
threat by the neck and turn back its deadly

assaults.

CHAPTER TWO

THE PITFALLS OF RACIAL

REASONING

Insistence on patriarchal values,
on equating black liberation with
black men gaining access to male

privilege that would enable them to
assert power over black women, was

one of the most significant forces
undermining radical struggle.

Thorough critiques of gender would
have compelled leaders of black

liberation struggles to envision new
strategies and to talk about black

subjectivity in a visionary manner.

BELL HOOKS, Yearning: Race,
Gender, and

Cultural Politics
(1990)

THE most depressing feature of the
Clarence Thomas Anita Hill hearings was
neither the mean-spirited attacks of the
Republicans nor the spineless silences of
the Democrats—both reveal the
predictable inability of most white
politicians to talk candidly about race and
gender. Rather what was most disturbing
was the low level of political discussion
in black America about these hearings—a
crude discourse about race and gender that
bespeaks a failure of nerve of black

leadership.

This failure of nerve already was
manifest in the selection and confirmation
process of Clarence Thomas. Bush’s
choice of Thomas caught most black
leaders off guard. Few had the courage to
say publicly that this was an act of cynical
tokenism concealed by outright lies about
Thomas being the most qualified
candidate regardless of race. Thomas had
an undistinguished record as a student
(mere graduation from Yale Law School
does not qualify one for the Supreme
Court); he left thirteen thousand age
discrimination cases dying on the vine for
lack of investigation in his turbulent eight
years at the EEOC; and his performance
during his short fifteen months as an
appellate court judge was mediocre. The

very fact that no black leader could utter
publicly that a black appointee for the
Supreme Court was unqualified shows
how captive they are to white racist
stereotypes about black intellectual talent.
The point here is not simply that if
Thomas were white they would have no
trouble shouting this fact from the
rooftops. The point is also that their
silence reveals that black leaders may
entertain the possibility that the racist
stereotype may be true. Hence their
attempt to cover Thomas’s mediocrity with
silence. Of course, some privately admit
his mediocrity while pointing out the
mediocrity of Justice Souter and other
members of the Court—as if white
mediocrity were a justification of black
mediocrity. No double standards here, the

argument goes, if a black man is
unqualified one can defend and excuse
him by appealing to other unqualified
white judges. This chimes well with a
cynical tokenism of the lowest common
denominator—with little concern for the
goal of shattering the racist stereotype or
for furthering the public interest of the
nation. It also renders invisible highly
qualified black judges who deserve
serious consideration for selection to the
Court.

How did much of black leadership get
in this bind? Why did so many of them
capitulate to Bush’s cynical strategy?
First, Thomas’s claim to racial authenticity
—his birth in Jim Crow Georgia, his
childhood as the grandson of a black
sharecropper, his undeniably black

phenotype degraded by racist ideals of
beauty, and his gallant black struggle for
achievement in racist America. Second,
the complex relation of this claim to racial
authenticity to the increasing closing-ranks
mentality in black America. Escalating
black nationalist sentiments—the notion
that America’s will to racial justice is
weak and therefore black people must
close ranks for survival in a hostile
country—rests principally upon claims to
racial authenticity. Third, the way in
which black nationalist sentiments
promote and encourage black cultural
conservatism, especially black patriarchal
(and homophobic) power. The idea of
black people closing ranks against hostile
white Americans reinforces black male
power exercised over black women (e.g.,

to protect, regulate, subordinate, and
hence usually, though not always, to use
and abuse women) in order to preserve
black social order under circumstances of
white literal attack and symbolic assault.
(This process is discussed in more detail
in chapter 7.)

Most black leaders got lost in this
thicket of reasoning and hence got caught
in a vulgar form of racial reasoning: black
authenticity —> black closing-ranks
mentality —> black male subordination of
black women in the interests of the black
community in a hostile white racist
country. Such a line of racial reasoning
leads to such questions as: “Is Thomas
really black?” “Is he black enough to be
defended?” “Is he just black on the
outside?” In fact, these kinds of questions

were asked, debated, and answered
throughout black America in barber shops,
beauty salons, living rooms, churches,
mosques, and schoolrooms.

Unfortunately, the very framework of
racial reasoning was not called into
question. Yet as long as racial reasoning
regulates black thought and action,
Clarence Thomases will continue to haunt
black America—as Bush and other
conservatives sit back, watch, and
prosper. How does one undermine the
framework of racial reasoning? By
dismantling each pillar slowly and
systematically. The fundamental aim of
this undermining and dismantling is to
replace racial reasoning with moral
reasoning, to understand the black
freedom struggle not as an affair of skin

pigmentation and racial phenotype but
rather as a matter of ethical principles and
wise politics, and to combat the black
nationalist attempt to subordinate the
issues and interests of black women by
linking mature black self-love and self-
respect to egalitarian relations within and
outside black communities. The failure of
nerve of black leadership is its refusal to
undermine and dismantle the framework of
racial reasoning.

Let us begin with the claim to racial
authenticity—a claim Bush made about
Thomas, Thomas made about himself in
the hearings, and black nationalists make
about themselves. What is black
authenticity? Who is really black? First,
blackness has no meaning outside of a
system of race-conscious people and

practices. After centuries of racist
degradation, exploitation, and oppression
in America, being black means being
minimally subject to white supremacist
abuse and being part of a rich culture and
community that has struggled against such
abuse. All people with black skin and
African phenotype are subject to potential
white supremacist abuse. Hence, all black
Americans have some interest in resisting
racism—even if their interest is confined
solely to themselves as individuals rather
than to larger black communities. Yet how
this “interest” is defined and how
individuals and communities are
understood vary. Hence any claim to black
authenticity—beyond that of being a
potential object of racist abuse and an heir
to a grand tradition of black struggle—is

contingent on one’s political definition of
black interest and one’s ethical
understanding of how this interest relates
to individuals and communities in and
outside black America. In short, blackness
is a political and ethical construct.
Appeals to black authenticity ignore this
fact; such appeals hide and conceal the
political and ethical dimension of
blackness. This is why claims to racial
authenticity trump political and ethical
argument—and why racial reasoning
discourages moral reasoning. Every claim
to racial authenticity presupposes
elaborate conceptions of political and
ethical relations of interests, individuals,
and communities. Racial reasoning
conceals these presuppositions behind a
deceptive cloak of racial consensus—yet

racial reasoning is seductive because it
invokes an undeniable history of racial
abuse and racial struggle. This is why
Bush’s claims to Thomas’s black
authenticity, Thomas’s claims about his
own black authenticity, and black
nationalist claims about black authenticity
all highlight histories of black abuse and
black struggle.

But if claims to black authenticity are
political and ethical conceptions of the
relation of black interests, individuals,
and communities, then any attempt to
confine black authenticity to black
nationalist politics or black male interests
warrants suspicion. For example, black
leaders failed to highlight the problematic
statements Clarence Thomas made about
his sister, Emma Mae, regarding her

experience with the welfare system. In
front of a conservative audience in San
Francisco, Thomas implied she was a
welfare cheat dependent on state support.
Yet, like most black women in American
history, Emma Mae is a hard-working
person. She was sensitive enough to take
care of her sick aunt even though she was
unable to work for a short period of time.
After she left welfare, she worked two
jobs—until 3:00 in the morning! Thomas’s
statements reveal his own lack of integrity
and character. But the failure of black
leaders to highlight his statements
discloses a conception of black
authenticity confined to black male
interests, individuals, and communities. In
short, the refusal by most black leaders to
give weight to the interests of black

women was already apparent before Anita
Hill appeared on the scene.

The claims to black authenticity that
feed on the closing-ranks mentality of
black people are dangerous precisely
because this closing of ranks is usually
done at the expense of black women. It
also tends to ignore the divisions of class
and sexual orientation in black America—
divisions that require attention if all black
interests, individuals, and communities
are to be taken into consideration.
Thomas’s conservative Republican
polities do not promote a closing-ranks
mentality; instead Thomas claims black
authenticity for self-promotion, to gain
power and prestige. All his professional
life he has championed individual
achievement and race-free standards. Yet

when it looked as though the Senate would
not confirm his appointment to the
Supreme Court, he played the racial card
of black victimization and black solidarity
at the expense of Anita Hill. Like his
sister, Emma Mae, Anita Hill could be
used and abused for his own self-
interested conception of black authenticity
and racial solidarity.

Thomas played this racial card with
success—first with appeals to his
victimization in Jim Crow Georgia and
later to his victimization by a “hi-tech
lynching”—primarily because of the deep
cultural conservatism in white and black
America. In white America, cultural
conservatism takes the form of a chronic
racism, sexism, and homophobia. Hence,
only certain kinds of black people deserve

high positions, that is, those who accept
the rules of the game played by white
America. In black America, cultural
conservatism takes the form of a inchoate
xenophobia (e.g., against whites, Jews,
and Asians), systemic sexism, and
homophobia. Like all conservatisms
rooted in a quest for order, the pervasive
disorder in white and, especially, black
America fans and fuels the channeling of
rage toward the most vulnerable and
degraded members of the community. For
white America, this means primarily
scapegoating black people, women, gay
men, and lesbians. For black America,
this means principally attacking black
women and black gay men and lesbians. In
this way, black nationalist and black male-
centered claims to black authenticity

reinforce black cultural conservatism. The
support of Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of
Islam for Clarence Thomas—despite
Farrakhan’s critique of Republican Party
racist and conservative policies—
highlights this fact. It also shows how
racial reasoning leads different and
disparate viewpoints in black America to
the same dead end—with substantive
ethical principles and savvy wise politics
left out.

The undermining and dismantling of the
framework of racial reasoning—
especially the basic notions of black
authenticity, closed-ranks mentality, and
black cultural conservatism—lead toward
a new framework for black thought and
practice. This new framework should be a
prophetic one of moral reasoning with its

fundamental ideas of a mature black
identity, coalition strategy, and black
cultural democracy. Instead of cathartic
appeals to black authenticity, a prophetic
viewpoint bases mature black self-love
and self-respect on the moral quality of
black responses to undeniable racist
degradation in the American past and
present. These responses assume neither a
black essence that all black people share
nor one black perspective to which all
black people should adhere. Rather, a
prophetic framework encourages moral
assessment of the variety of perspectives
held by black people and selects those
views based on black dignity and decency
that eschew putting any group of people or
culture on a pedestal or in the gutter.
Instead, blackness is understood to be

either the perennial possibility of white
supremacist abuse or the distinct styles
and dominant modes of expression found
in black cultures and communities. These
styles and modes are diverse—yet they do
stand apart from those of other groups
(even as they are shaped by and shape
those of other groups). And all such styles
and modes stand in need of ethical
evaluation. Mature black identity results
from an acknowledgment of the specific
black responses to white supremacist
abuses and a moral assessment of these
responses such that the humanity of black
people does not rest on deifying or
demonizing others.

Instead of a closing-ranks mentality, a
prophetic framework encourages a
coalition strategy that solicits genuine

solidarity with those deeply committed to
antiracist struggle. This strategy is neither
naive nor opportunistic; black suspicion
of whites, Latinos, Jews, and Asians runs
deep for historical reasons. Yet there are
slight though significant antiracist
traditions among whites, Asians, and
especially Latinos, Jews, and indigenous
people that must not be cast aside. Such
coalitions are important precisely because
they not only enhance the plight of black
people but also because they enrich the
quality of life in America.

Last, a prophetic framework replaces
black cultural conservatism with black
cultural democracy. Instead of
authoritarian sensibilities that subordinate
women or degrade gay men and lesbians,
black cultural democracy promotes the

equality of black women and men and the
humanity of black gay men and lesbians. In
short, black cultural democracy rejects the
pervasive patriarchy and homophobia in
black American life.

If most black leaders had adopted a
prophetic framework of moral reasoning
rather than a narrow framework of racial
reasoning, the debate over the Clarence
Thomas / Anita Hill hearings would have
proceeded in a quite different manner in
black America. For example, both Thomas
and Hill would be viewed as two black
Republican conservative supporters of
some of the most vicious policies to
besiege black working and poor
communities since Jim and Jane Crow
segregation. Both Thomas and Hill
supported an unprecedented redistribution

of wealth from working people to well-to-
do people in the form of regressive
taxation, deregulation policies, cutbacks
and slowdowns in public service
programs, take-backs at the negotiation
table between workers and management,
and military buildups at the Pentagon.
Both Thomas and Hill supported the
unleashing of unbridled capitalist market
forces on a level never witnessed in the
United States before that have devastated
black working and poor communities.
These market forces took the principal
form of unregulated corporative and
financial expansion and intense
entrepreneurial activity. This tremendous
ferment in big and small businesses—
including enormous bonanzas in
speculation, leverage buyouts and

mergers, as well as high levels of
corruption and graft—contributed to a
new kind of culture of consumption in
white and black America. Never before
has the seductive market way of life held
such sway in nearly every sphere of
American life. This market way of life
promotes addictions to stimulation and
obsessions with comfort and convenience.
Addictions and obsessions—centered
primarily around bodily pleasures and
status rankings—constitute market
moralities of various sorts. The common
denominator is a rugged and ragged
individualism and rapacious hedonism in
quest of a perennial “high” in body and
mind.

In the hearings, the image of Clarence
Thomas that emerged was one of an

exemplary hedonist, a consumer of
pornography, captive to a stereotypical
self-image of the powerful black man who
revels in sexual prowess in a racist
society. Anita Hill appeared as the
exemplary careerist addicted to job
promotion and captive to the stereotypical
self-image of the sacrificial black woman
who suffers silently and alone. There was
reason to suspect that Thomas was not
telling the whole truth. He was silent
about Roe v. Wade, his intentions in the
antiabortion essay on Lewis Lehrmann,
and the contours of his conservative
political philosophy. Furthermore, his
obdurate stonewalling in regard to his
private life was disturbing. There also
should be little doubt that Anita Hill’s
decision to testify was a break from her

careerist ambitions. On the one hand, she
strikes me as a person of integrity and
honesty. On the other hand, she indeed put
a premium on job advancement—even at
painful personal cost. Yet her speaking out
disrupted this pattern of behavior and she
found herself supported only by people
who opposed the very conservative
Republican policies she otherwise
championed, namely, progressive
feminists, liberals, and some black folk.
How strange she must feel being a hero to
her former foes. One wonders whether
Judge Bork supported her as fervently as
she did him a few years ago.

A prophetic framework of moral
reasoning would have liberated black
leaders from the racial guilt of opposing a
black man for the highest court in the land

and of the feeling that one had to choose
between a black woman and a black man.
Like the Black Congressional Caucus
(minus one?), black people could have
simply opposed Thomas based on
qualifications and principle. And one
could have chosen between two black
right-wing figures based on their sworn
testimonies in light of the patterns of their
behavior in the recent past. Similarly,
black leaders could have avoided being
duped by Thomas’s desperate and vulgar
appeals to racial victimization by a white
male Senate committee who handled him
gently (no questions about his private
life). Like Senator Hollings, who knows
racial intimidation when he sees it (given
his past experiences with it), black
leaders could have seen through the

rhetorical charade and called a moral
spade a moral spade.

Unfortunately, most black leaders
remained caught in a framework of racial
reasoning—even when they opposed
Thomas and/or supported Hill. Rarely did
we have a black leader highlight the moral
content of a mature black identity, accent
the crucial role of coalition strategy in the
struggle for justice, or promote the ideal
of black cultural democracy. Instead, the
debate evolved around glib formulations
of a black “role model” based on mere
pigmentation, an atavistic defense of
blackness that mirrors the increasing
xenophobia in American life, and circled
around a silence about the ugly
authoritarian practices in black America
that range from sexual harassment to

indescribable violence against women.
Hence a grand opportunity for substantive
discussion and struggle over race and
gender was missed in black America and
the larger society. And black leadership
must share some of the blame. As long as
black leaders remain caught in a
framework of racial reasoning, they will
not rise above the manipulative language
of Bush and Thomas—just as the state of
siege (the death, disease, and destruction)
raging in much of black America creates
more urban wastelands and combat zones.
Where there is no vision, the people
perish; where there is no framework of
moral reasoning, the people close ranks in
a war of all against all. The growing
gangsterization of America results in part
from a market-driven racial reasoning that

links the White House to the ghetto
projects. In this sense, George Bush,
David Duke, and many ganster rap artists
speak the same language from different
social locations—only racial reasoning
can save us. Yet I hear a cloud of
witnesses from afar—Sojourner Truth,
Wendell Phillips, Emma Goldman, A.
Phillip Randolph, Ella Baker, Myles
Horton, Fannie Lou Hamer, Michael
Harrington, Abraham Joshua Heschel,
Tom Hayden, Harvey Milk, Robert
Moses, Barbara Ehrenreich, Martin Luther
King, Jr., and many anonymous others who
championed the struggle for freedom and
justice in a prophetic framework of moral
reasoning. They understood that the
pitfalls of racial reasoning are too costly
in mind, body, and soul—especially for a

downtrodden and despised people like
black Americans. The best of our
leadership recognized this valuable truth
—and more must do so in the future if
America is to survive with any moral
sense.

CHAPTER THREE

THE CRISIS OF BLACK

LEADERSHIP

You don’t stick a knife in a man’s
hack nine inches and then pull it out

six inches and say you’re making
progress.

No matter how much respect, no
matter how much recognition, whites

show towards me, as far as I’m
concerned, as long as it is not shown

to every one of our people in this
country, it doesn’t exist for me.

MALCOLM X (1964)

THERE has not been a time in the
history of black people in this country
when the quantity of politicians and
intellectuals was so great, yet the quality
of both groups has been so low. Just when
one would have guessed that black
America was flexing its political and
intellectual muscles, rigor mortis seems
to have set in. How do we account for the
absence of the Frederick Douglasses,
Sojourner Truths, Martin Luther King, Jrs.,
Malcolm Xs, and Fannie Lou Hamers in
our time? Why hasn’t black America
produced intellectuals of the caliber of W.
E. B. Du Bois, Anna Cooper, E. Franklin
Frazier, Oliver Cox, and Ralph Ellison in
the past few decades?

A serious response to these perplexing
questions requires subtle inquiry into the
emergence of the new black middle class
—its content and character, aspirations
and anxieties, orientations and
opportunities. Black America has had a
variety of different “middle classes.” Free
negroes in the pre—Civil War period;
educators, artisans, and shopkeepers
during the Reconstruction period; business
persons and black college professors in
the years of Jim Crow laws; and
prominent athletes, entertainers, and white
collar personnel after World War II all
serve as examples of black middle-class
status prior to the passing of the Civil
Rights Bill in 1964 and the Voting Rights
Bill of 1965. As E. Franklin Frazier
pointed out in his classic Black

Bourgeoisie (1957), these various forms
of black middle-class status never
constituted more than 5 percent of
African-Americans before the Civil
Rights era. In the last two decades, this
percentage jumped to well over 25
percent. Yet this leap in quantity has not
been accompanied by a leap in quality.
The present-day black middle class is not
simply different than its predecessors—it
is more deficient and, to put it strongly,
more decadent. For the most part, the
dominant outlooks and lifestyles of today’s
black middle class discourage the
development of high quality political and
intellectual leaders. Needless to say, this
holds for the country as a whole. Yet much
of what is bad about the United States, that
which prevents the cultivation of quality

leadership, is accentuated among black
middle-class Americans.

THE new black middle class came of
age in the 1960s during an unprecedented
American economic boom and in the hub
of a thriving mass culture. The economic
boom made luxury goods and convenient
services available to large numbers of
hard-working Americans for the first time.
American mass culture presented models
of the good life principally in terms of
conspicuous consumption and hedonistic
indulgence. It is important to note that
even the intensely political struggles of the
sixties presupposed a perennial economic
boom and posited models of the good life
projected by U.S. mass culture. Long-term
financial self-denial and sexual asceticism
was never at the center of a political

agenda in the sixties.

The civil rights movement permitted
significant numbers of black Americans to
benefit from the American economic boom
—to get a small, yet juicy piece of the
expanding American pie. And for most of
those who had the education, skills, and
ingenuity to get a piece, mass culture (TV,
radio, films) dictated what they should do
with it—gain peace of mind and pleasure
of body from what they could buy. Like
any American group achieving
contemporary middle-class station for the
first time, black entree into the culture of
consumption made status an obsession and
addiction to stimulation a way of life. For
example, well-to-do black parents no
longer sent their children to Howard,
Morehouse, and Fisk “to serve the race”

(though often for indirect self-serving
ends), but rather to Harvard, Yale, and
Princeton “to get a high-paying job” (for
direct selfish reasons).

One reason quality leadership is on the
wane in black America is the gross
deterioration of personal, familial, and
communal relations among African-
Americans. These relations—though
always fragile and difficult to sustain—
constitute a crucial basis for the
development of a collective and critical
consciousness and a moral commitment to
and courageous engagement with causes
beyond that of one’s self and family.
Presently, black communities are in
shambles, black families are in decline,
and black men and women are in conflict
(and sometimes combat). In this way, the

new class divisions produced by black
inclusion (and exclusion) from the
economic boom and the consumerism and
hedonism promoted by mass culture have
resulted in new kinds of personal turmoil
and existential meaninglessness in black
America. There are few, if any, communal
resources to help black people cope with
this situation.

QUALITY leadership is neither the
product of one great individual nor the
result of odd historical accidents. Rather,
it comes from deeply bred traditions and
communities that shape and mold talented
and gifted persons. Without a vibrant
tradition of resistance passed on to new
generations, there can be no nurturing of a
collective and critical consciousness—
only professional conscientiousness

survives. Where there is no vital
community to hold up precious ethical and
religious ideals, there can be no coming to
a moral commitment—only personal
accomplishment is applauded. Without a
credible sense of political struggle, there
can be no shouldering of a courageous
engagement—only cautious adjustment is
undertaken. If you stop to think in this way
about the source of leadership, it becomes
clear why there is such a lack of quality
leadership in black America today. This
absence is primarily a symptom of black
distance from a vibrant tradition of
resistance, from a vital community bonded
by its ethical ideals, and from a credible
sense of political struggle. Presently,
black middle-class life is principally a
matter of professional conscientiousness,

personal accomplishment, and cautious
adjustment.

Black Political Leadership
Black political leadership reveals the

tame and genteel face of the black middle
class. The black dress suits with white
shirts worn by Malcolm X and Martin
Luther King, Jr., signified the seriousness
of their deep commitment to black
freedom, whereas today the expensive
tailored suits of black politicians
symbolize their personal success and
individual achievement. Malcolm and
Martin called for the realization that black
people are somebodies with which
America has to reckon, whereas black
politicians tend to turn our attention to

their somebodiness owing to their
“making it” in America.

This crude and slightly unfair
comparison highlights two distinctive
features of black political leaders in the
post—Civil Rights era: the relative lack
of authentic anger and the relative absence
of genuine humility. What stood out most
strikingly about Malcolm X, Martin Luther
King, Jr., Ella Baker, and Fannie Lou
Hamer was that they were almost always
visibly upset about the condition of black
America. When one saw them speak or
heard their voices, they projected on a gut
level that the black situation was urgent, in
need of immediate attention. One even
gets the impression that their own stability
and sanity rested on how soon the black
predicament could be improved.

Malcolm, Martin, Ella, and Fannie were
angry about the state of black America,
and this anger fueled their boldness and
defiance.

In stark contrast, most present-day
black political leaders appear too hungry
for status to be angry, too eager for
acceptance to be bold, too self-invested in
advancement to be defiant. And when they
do drop their masks and try to get mad
(usually in the presence of black
audiences), their bold rhetoric is more
performance than personal, more play-
acting than heartfelt. Malcolm, Martin,
Ella, and Fannie made sense of the black
plight in a poignant and powerful manner,
whereas most contemporary black
political leaders’ oratory appeals to black
people’s sense of the sentimental and

sensational.

Similarly, Malcolm, Martin, Ella, and
Fannie were examples of humility. Yes,
even Malcolm’s aggressiveness was
accompanied by a common touch and
humble disposition toward ordinary black
people. Humility is the fruit of inner
security and wise maturity. To be humble
is to be so sure of one’s self and one’s
mission that one can forego calling
excessive attention to one’s self and status.
And, even more pointedly, to be humble is
to revel in the accomplishments or
potentials of others—especially those
with whom one identifies and to whom
one is linked organically. The relative
absence of humility in most black political
leaders today is a symptom of the status-
anxiety and personal insecurity pervasive

in black middle-class America. In this
context, even a humble vesture is viewed
as a cover for some sinister motive or
surreptitious ambition.

Present-day black political leaders can
be grouped under three types: race-
effacing managerial leaders, race-
identifying protest leaders, and race-
transcending prophetic leaders. The first
type is growing rapidly. The Thomas
Bradleys and Wilson Goodes of black
America have become a model for many
black leaders trying to reach a large white
constituency and keep a loyal black one.
This type survives on sheer political
savvy and thrives on personal diplomacy.
This kind of candidate is the lesser of two
evils in a political situation where the
only other electoral choice is a

conservative (usually white) politician.
Yet this type of leader tends to stunt
progressive development and silence the
prophetic voices in the black community
by casting the practical mainstream as the
only game in town.

The second type of black political
leader—race-identifying protest leaders
—often view themselves in the tradition
of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr.,
Ella Baker, and Fannie Lou Hamer. Yet
they are usually self-deluded. They
actually operate much more in the
tradition of Booker T. Washington, by
confining themselves to the black turf,
vowing to protect their leadership status
over it, and serving as power brokers with
powerful nonblack (usually white
economic or political elites, though in

Louis Farrakhan’s case it may be Libyan
elites) to “enhance” this black turf. It is
crucial to remember that even in the
fifties, Malcolm X’s vision and practice
were international in scope, and that after
1964 his project was transracial—though
grounded in the black turf. King never
confined himself to being solely the leader
of black America—even though the white
press attempted to do so. And Fannie Lou
Hamer led the National Welfare Rights
Organization, not the Black Welfare Rights
Organization. In short, race-identifying
protest leaders in the post—Civil Rights
era function as figures who white
Americans must appease so that the plight
of the black poor is overlooked and
forgotten. When such leaders move
successfully into elected office—as with

Marion Barry—they usually become
managerial types with large black
constituencies, flashy styles, flowery
rhetoric, and Booker T. Washington—like
patronage operations within the public
sphere.

Race-transcending prophetic leaders
are rare in contemporary black America.
Harold Washington was one. The Jesse
Jackson of 1988 was attempting to be
another—yet the opportunism of his past
weighed heavily on him. To be an elected
official and prophetic leader requires
personal integrity and political savvy,
moral vision and prudential judgment,
courageous defiance and organizational
patience. The present generation has yet to
produce such a figure. We have neither an
Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., nor a Ronald

Dellums. This void sits like a festering
sore at the center of the crisis of black
leadership—and the predicament of the
disadvantaged in the United States and
abroad worsens.

Black Intellectual
Leadership

Black intellectual leadership discloses
the cynical and ironic face of the black
middle class. The Victorian three-piece
suit—with a clock and chain in the vest—
worn by W. E. B. Du Bois not only
represented the age that shaped and
molded him; it also dignified his sense of
intellectual vocation, a sense of rendering
service by means of critical intelligence

and moral action. The shabby clothing
worn by most black intellectuals these
days may be seen as symbolizing their
utter marginality behind the walls of
academe and their sense of impotence in
the wider world of American culture and
politics. For Du Bois, the glorious life of
the mind was a highly disciplined way of
life and an intensely demanding way of
struggle that facilitated transit between his
study and the streets; whereas present-day
black scholars tend to be mere
academicians, narrowly confined to
specialized disciplines with little sense of
the broader life of the mind and hardly any
engagement with battles in the streets.

Black intellectuals are affected by the
same processes as other American
intellectuals, such as the

professionalization and specialization of
knowledge, the bureaueratization of the
academy, the proliferation of arcane
jargon in the various disciplines, and the
marginalization of humanistic studies. Yet
the quality of black intellectual work has
suffered more so than that of others. There
are two basic reasons why.

First, the academic system of rewards
and status, prestige and influence, puts a
premium on those few black scholars who
imitate the dominant paradigms elevated
by fashionable Northeastern seaboard
institutions of higher learning. If one is
fortunate enough to be a “spook who sits
by the door,” eavesdrops on the
conversation among the prominent and
prestigious, and reproduces their jargon in
relation to black subject matter, one’s

academic career is secure. This system
not only demoralizes aspiring careerists
stuck in the provinces far from the exciting
metropolis; it also stifles intellectual
creativity, especially among those for
whom the dominant paradigms are
problematic. Yet the incredible expansion
of the Academy in the past few decades—
including the enormous federal dollars
that support both private and public
universities and colleges—has made the
Academy a world in itself and a caretaker
of nearly all intellectual talent in
American society. Therefore, even the
critiques of dominant paradigms in the
Academy are academic ones; that is, they
reposition viewpoints and figures within
the context of professional politics inside
the Academy rather than create linkages

between struggles inside and outside of
the Academy. In this way, the Academy
feeds on critiques of its own paradigms.
These critiques simultaneously legitimate
the Academy (enhancing its self-image as
a promoter of objective inquiry and
relentless criticism) and empty out the
more political and worldly substance of
radical critiques. This is especially so for
critiques that focus on the way in which
paradigms generated in the Academy help
authorize the Academy. In this way,
radical critiques, including those by black
scholars, are usually disarmed.

Second, many black scholars
deliberately distance themselves so far
from the mainstream Academy that they
have little to sustain them as scholars.
American intellectual life has few places

or pockets to support serious scholarly
work outside of the Academy and
foundations—especially for those in the
social sciences and humanities. The major
intellectual alternatives to the Academy
are journalism, self-support communities
(Bohemia and feminist groups), or self-
supporting writers (such as Gore Vidal,
Norman Mailer, or John Updike).
Unfortunately, some frustrated and
disgusted black intellectuals revert to
isolated groups and insulated
conversations that reproduce the very
mediocrity that led them to reject the
Academy. In this way, mediocrity of
various forms and in different contexts
suffocates much of black intellectual life.
So, despite the larger numbers of black
scholars relative to the past (though still a

small percentage in relation to white
scholars), black intellectual life is a rather
depressing scene. With few periodicals
available for cross-disciplinary exchange,
few organs that show interest in this
situation, and few magazines that focus on
analyses of black culture and its relation
to American society, infrastructures for
black intellectual activity are feeble.

Like black politicians, black scholars
fall into three basic types—race-
distancing elitists, race-embracing rebels,
and racetranscending prophets. The first
type are dominant at the more exclusive
universities and colleges. They often view
themselves as the “talented tenth” who
have a near monopoly on the sophisticated
and cultured gaze of what is wrong with
black America. They revel in severe

denigration of much black behavior yet
posit little potential or possibility in Afro-
America. At times, their criticism is
incisive—yet it often denigrates into a
revealing self-hatred. They tend to
distance themselves from black America
by ironically calling attention to their own
cantankerous marginality. They pontificate
about standards of excellence, complexity
of analysis, and subtlety of inquiry—yet
usually spin out mediocre manuscripts,
flat establishmentarian analyses, and
uncreative inquiry. Even so, they prosper
—though often at the cost of minimal
intellectual respect by their white
colleagues in the Academy. The mean-
spirited writings of a fellow progressive
like Adolph Reed, Jr., are an example.

The second type of black intellectual,

the race-embracing rebels, often view
themselves in the tradition of W. E. B. Du
Bois. Yet they are usually wrong. In fact,
they fall much more into the tradition of
those old stereotypical black college
professors who thrived on being “big fish
in a little pond.” That is, race-embracing
rebels express their resentment of the
white Academy (including its subtle
racism) by reproducing similar
hierarchies headed by themselves, within
a black context. They rightly rebel against
the tribal insularity and snobbish civility
of the white academy (and the first type of
black scholars), yet, unlike Du Bois, their
rebellion tends to delimit their literary
productivity and sap their intellectual
creativity. Hence, rhetoric becomes a
substitute for analysis, stimulatory rapping

a replacement for serious reading, and
uncreative publications an expression of
existential catharsis. Much, though not all,
of Afrocentric thought fits this bill.

There are few race-transcending
prophets on the current black intellectual
scene. James Baldwin was one. He was
self-taught and self-styled, hence beholden
to no white academic patronage system.
He was courageous and prolific, a
political intellectual when the engaged
leftist Amiri Baraka was a petit bourgeois
Bohemian poet named Leroi Jones and the
former Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver
became a right-wing Republican. He was
unswerving in his commitment to fusing
the life of the mind (including the craft of
writing) with the struggle for justice and
human dignity regardless of the fashions of

the day or the price he had to pay. With the
exception of Toni Morrison, the present
generation has yet to produce such a
figure. We have neither an Oliver Cox nor
a St. Claire Drake. This vacuum continues
to aggravate the crisis of black leadership
—and the plight of the wretched of the
earth deteriorates.

What Is to Be Done?
The nihilistic threat to black America is

inseparable from a crisis in black
leadership. This crisis is threefold. First,
at the national level, the courageous yet
problematic example of Jesse Jackson
looms large. On the one hand, his
presidential campaigns based on a
progressive multiracial coalition were the

major left-liberal response to Reagan’s
conservative policies. For the first time
since the last days of Martin Luther King,
Jr.—with the grand exception of Harold
Washington—the nearly de facto
segregation in U.S. progressive politics
was confronted and surmounted. On the
other hand, Jackson’s televisual style
resists grass-roots organizing and, most
important, democratic accountability. His
brilliance, energy, and charisma sustain
his public visibility—but at the expense of
programmatic follow-through. We are
approaching the moment in which this
style exhausts its progressive potential.

Other national nonelectoral black
leaders—like Benjamin Hooks of the
NAACP and John Jacobs of the National
Urban League—rightly highlight the

traditional problems of racial
discrimination, racial violence, and slow
racial progress. Yet their preoccupation
with race—the mandate from their
organizations— downplays the crucial
class, environmental, patriarchal, and
homophobic determinants of black life
changes. Black politicians—especially
new victors like Mayor David Dinkins of
New York City and Governor Douglas
Wilder of Virginia—are participants in a
larger, lethargic electoral system riddled
with decreasing revenues, loss of public
confidence, self-perpetuating mediocrity,
and pervasive corruption. Like most
American elected officials, few black
politicians can sidestep these seductive
traps. For all of these reasons, black
leadership at the national level tends to

lack a moral vision that can organize (not
just periodically energize), subtle
analyses that enlighten (not simply
intermittently awaken), and exemplary
practices that uplift (not merely convey
status that awes) black people.

Second, this relative failure creates
vacuums to be rilled by bold and defiant
black nationalist figures with even
narrower visions, one-note racial
analyses, and sensationalist practices.
Louis Farrakhan, the early Al Sharpton
(prior to 1991), and others vigorously
attempt to be protest leaders in this
myopic mode—a mode often, though not
always, reeking of immoral xenophobia.
This kind of black leadership is not only
symptomatic of black alienation and
desperation in a country more and more

indifferent or hostile to the quality of life
among black working and poor people; it
also reinforces the fragmentation of U.S.
progressive efforts that could reverse this
deplorable plight. In this way, black
nationalist leaders often inadvertently
contribute to the very impasse they are
trying to overcome: inadequate social
attention and action to change the plight of
America’s “invisible people,” especially
disadvantaged black people.

Third, this crisis of black leadership
contributes to political cynicism among
black people; it encourages the idea that
we cannot really make a difference in
changing our society. This cynicism—
already promoted by the larger political
culture— dampens the fire of engaged
local activists who have made a

difference. These activists are engaged in
protracted grass-roots organization in
principled coalitions that bring power and
pressure to bear on specific issues. And
they are people who have little interest in
being in the national limelight, such as the
Industrial Areas Foundation efforts of
BUILD in Baltimore or Harlem initiatives
in Manhattan.

Without such activists there can be no
progressive politics. Yet state, regional,
and national networks are also required
for an effective progressive politics. That
is why locally based collective (and
especially multigendered) models of black
leadership are needed. These models must
shun the idea of one black national leader;
they also should put a premium on critical
dialogue and democratic accountability in

black organizations.

THE crisis in black leadership can be
remedied only if we candidly confront its
existence. We need national forums to
reflect, discuss, and plan how best to
respond. It is neither a matter of a new
Messiah figure emerging, nor of another
organization appearing on the scene.
Rather, it is a matter of grasping the
structural and institutional processes that
have disfigured, deformed, and devastated
black America such that the resources for
nurturing collective and critical
consciousness, moral commitment, and
courageous engagement are vastly
underdeveloped. We need serious
strategic and tactical thinking about how
to create new models of leadership and
forge the kind of persons to actualize these

models. These models must not only
question our silent assumptions about
black leadership—such as the notion that
black leaders are always middle class—
but must also force us to interrogate iconic
figures of the past. This includes
questioning King’s sexism and
homophobia and the relatively
undemocratic character of his
organization, and examining Malcolm’s
silence on the vicious role of priestly
versions of Islam in the modern world.

But one point is beyond dispute: The
time is past for black political and
intellectual leaders to pose as the voice
for black America. Gone are the days
when black political leaders jockey for
the label “president of black America,” or
when black intellectuals pose as the

“writers of black America.” The days of
brokering for the black turf—of nosing as
the Head Negro in Charge (H.N.I.C.)—are
over. To be a serious black leader is to be
a race-transcending prophet who critiques
the powers that be (including the black
component of the Establishment) and who
puts forward a vision of moral
regeneration and political insurgency for
the purpose of fundamental social change
for all who suffer from socially induced
misery. For the moment, we reflect and
regroup with a vow that the 1990s will
make the 1960s look like a tea party.

CHAPTER FOUR

DEMYSTIFYING THE NEW

BLACK CONSERVATISM

It is, Indeed, one of the basic
moral blindspots of American

conservatism that its intellectual and
leadership energy have never been

focussed in a proactive way on
America’s racial-caste legacy. This

represents a fundamental moral crisis
of modern American conservatism . .
. American conservatives typically
ignored the authoritarian and violent

racial-caste practices and values

arrayed against black Americans in
southern states where the vast

majority of blacks live. On the other
hand, American conservatives have,

throughout this century, often
embraced freedom movements

elsewhere in the world—in Europe,
Latin America, East Asia—but

always firmly resisting a proactive
embrace of the black American civil

rights movement as a bona fide
freedom movement fully worthy of
their support. So it is in the shadow
of this dismal record of mainstream
American conservatism vis-a-vis

black Americans’ long and arduous
quest for equality of status that new
black conservatives have emerged.

MARTIN KILSON, “Anatomy
of Black

Conservatism” (1992)

THE publication of Thomas Sowell’s
Race and Economics in 1975 marked the
rise of a novel phenomenon in the United
States: a visible and aggressive black
intellectual conservative assault on
traditional black liberal ideas. The
promotion of conservative perspectives is
not new in African-American history. The
preeminent black conservative of this
century, George S. Schuyler, published a
witty and acerbic column in the influential
black newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier
for decades, and his book Black and
Conservative is a minor classic in
African-American letters. Similarly, the

reactionary essays (some of which
appeared in Readers’ Digest) and
Republican Party allegiance of the most
renowned African-American woman of
letters, Zora Neale Hurston, are often
overlooked by her contemporary feminist
and womanist followers. Yet Sowell’s
book still signified something new—a bid
for conservative hegemony in black
political and intellectual leadership in the
post-Civil Rights era.

This bid, as yet, has been highly
unsuccessful though it has generated much
attention from the American media, whose
interest is most clearly evident in the
hoopla surrounding the recent works of
Shelby Steele, Stephen Carter, and Stanley
Crouch. The new black conservatism is a
response to the crisis of liberalism in

Afro-America. This crisis, exemplified
partly by the rise of Reaganism and the
collapse of left politics, has created an
intellectual space that conservative voices
of various colors now occupy.

In this context, the writings of my friend
and fellow Christian Glenn Loury warrant
attention in that he attempts to distance
himself from mainstream conservatism,
while targeting his critiques at black
liberalism; that is, he is a neo-
conservative who wants to dislodge
traditional liberalism among black
Americans. In his forthcoming book, Free
at Last, he puts forward three basic
charges against black liberal thinkers.
First, he holds that black liberals adhere
to a victim-status conception of black
people that results in blaming all personal

failings of black people on white racism.
Second, he claims that black liberals
harbor a debilitating loyalty to the race
that blinds them to the pathological and
dysfunctional aspects of black behavior.
Third, Loury argues that black liberals
truncate intellectual discourse regarding
the plight of poor black people by
censoring critical perspectives which air
the “dirty linen” of the black community—
that is, they dub neoconservatives like
Loury as “Uncle Toms” and thereby fail to
take his views seriously in an intellectual
manner.

Loury’s charges are noteworthy in that
the hegemony of black liberalism—
especially among black academic and
political elites—does impose restraints on
the quality and scope of black intellectual

exchange. Furthermore, the more vulgar
forms of black liberalism, for example,
extreme environmentalism, tend to
downplay or ignore the personal
responsibility of black people regarding
their behavior toward one another and
others.

Unfortunately, and ironically, Loury
deploys the very rhetorical strategies he
denounces in his liberal adversaries. For
example, he casts black conservatives and
neo-conservatives like himself as victims
—victims whose own failings to gain a
fair hearing and broad following in Afro-
America he attributes to a black liberal
conspiracy to discredit them in an ad
hominem manner. Yet surely the black
community is not so gullible, manipulable,
and downright callous. It may simply be

that the real merits of the case put forward
by the new black conservatives are
unconvincing and unpersuasive.

In addition, Loury’s rejection of blind
loyalty to the race is laudable, yet he
replaces it with a similarly blind loyalty
to the nation. In fact, his major criticism of
black liberals and left-liberals is that they
put the black community out of step with
present-day conservative America
because they adopt an excessively
adversarial stance to the rest of the
country. This criticism amounts not to a
deepening and enriching of black
intellectual exchange but rather to a
defense of new kinds of restrictions in the
name of a neo-nationalism already
rampant in America—a neo-nationalism
that smothers and suffocates the larger

American intellectual scene. In this way,
Loury’s neo-conservatism enacts the very
“discourse truncation” he claims to be
opposing in his foes. His frequent
characterizations of left-liberal views as
“anachronistic,” “discredited,” and
“idiosyncratic,” without putting forth
arguments to defend such claims,
exemplify this “discourse truncation.”

Loury’s halfway-house position
between the black conservatism of
Thomas Sowell and traditional black
liberalism is symptomatic of the crisis of
purpose and direction among African-
American political and intellectual elites.
Three fundamental processes in American
society and culture since 1973 set the
context for grasping this crisis: the eclipse
of U.S. economic predominance in the

world; the structural transformation of the
American economy; and the moral
breakdown of communities throughout the
country, especially among the black
working poor and very poor.

The symbolic event in the decline of
American economic hegemony was the oil
crisis, which resulted principally from the
solidarity of the OPEC nations. Increasing
economic competition from Japan, West
Germany, and other nations ended an era
of unquestioned U.S. economic power.
The resultant slump in the American
economy undermined the Keynesian
foundation of postwar American
liberalism, that is, economic growth
accompanied by state regulation and
intervention on behalf of disadvantaged
citizens.

The impact of the economic recession
on African-Americans was immense. Not
surprisingly, it more deeply affected the
black working poor and very poor than the
expanding black middle class. Issues of
sheer survival loomed large for the
former, while the latter continued to seize
opportunities in education, business, and
politics. Most middle-class blacks
consistently supported the emergent black
political class—the black officials elected
at the national, state, and local levels—
primarily to ensure black upward social
mobility. But a few began to feel
uncomfortable about how their white
middle-class peers viewed them. Mobility
by means of affirmative action breeds
tenuous self-respect and questionable peer
acceptance for middle-class blacks. The

new black conservatives voiced these
feelings in the forms of attacks on
affirmative action programs (despite the
fact that they had achieved their positions
by means of such programs).

The importance of this quest for
middle-class respectability based on merit
rather than politics cannot be
overestimated in the new black
conservatism. The need of black
conservatives to gain the respect of their
white peers deeply shapes certain
elements of their conservatism. In this
regard, they simply want what most
people want, to be judged by the quality of
their skills, not the color of their skin. But
the black conservatives overlook the fact
that affirmative action policies were
political responses to the pervasive

refusal of most white Americans to judge
black Americans on that basis.

The new black conservatives assume
that without affirmative action programs,
white Americans will make choices on
merit rather than on race. Yet they have
adduced no evidence for this. Most
Americans realize that job-hiring choices
are made both on reasons of merit and on
personal grounds. And it is this personal
dimension that is often influenced by
racist perceptions. Therefore the pertinent
debate regarding black hiring is never
“merit vs. race” but whether hiring
decisions will be based on merit,
influenced by race-bias against blacks, or
on merit, influenced by race-bias, but with
special consideration for minorities and
women, as mandated by law. In light of

actual employment practices, the black
conservative rhetoric about race-free
hiring criteria (usually coupled with a call
for dismantling affirmative action
mechanisms) does no more than justify
actual practices of racial discrimination.
Black conservative claims about self-
respect should not obscure this fact, nor
should they be regarded as different from
the normal self-doubts and insecurities of
new arrivals in the American middle
class. It is worth noting that most of the
new black conservatives are first-
generation middle-class persons, who
offer themselves as examples of how well
the system works for those willing to
sacrifice and work hard. Yet, in familiar
American fashion, genuine white peer
acceptance still preoccupies—and often

escapes—them. In this regard, they are
still affected by white racism.

The eclipse of U.S. hegemony in the
world is also an important factor for
understanding black conservatives’ views
on foreign policy. Although most of the
press attention they receive has to do with
their provocative views on domestic
issues, I would suggest that the
widespread support black conservatives
received from conservatives in the Reagan
and Bush administrations and Jewish neo-
conservatives has much to do with their
views on U.S. foreign policies. Though
black conservatives rightly call attention
to the butchery of bureaucratic elites in
Africa, who rule in the name of a variety
of ideologies, they reserve most of their
energies for supporting U.S. intervention

in Central America and the U.S.
substantive aid to Israel. Their relative
silence regarding the U.S. policy of
“constructive engagement” with South
Africa is also revealing.

The black conservatives’ stance is
significant in light of the dramatic shift
that has occurred in black America
regarding America’s role in the world. A
consequence of the civil rights movement
and the black power ideology of the
sixties was a growing identification of
black Americans with other oppressed
peoples around the world. This has had
less to do with a common skin color and
more to do with shared social and
political experience. Many blacks
sympathize with Polish workers and
Northern Irish Catholics (despite

problematic Polish-black and Irish-black
relations in places like Chicago and
Boston), and more and more blacks are
cognizant of how South Africa oppresses
its native peoples, how Chile and South
Korea repress their citizens, and how
Israel mistreats the Palestinians. In fact,
the radical consequences for domestic
issues of this growing black international
consciousness—usually dubbed anti-
Americanism by the vulgar right—
frightens the new black conservatives,
who find themselves viewed in many
black communities as mere apologists for
pernicious U.S. foreign policies.

We can further understand the rise of the
new black conservatives by highlighting
the structural transformation of the U.S.
economy. The contraction of the

manufacturing sector and the expansion of
the service sector of the labor market has
narrowed job opportunities for semi-
skilled and unskilled workers. Coupled
with the decline of industrial jobs, which
were a major source of black employment,
is the most crucial transformation in the
U.S. economy affecting black Americans
in the past four decades; this is the
mechanization of southern agriculture.
Forty years ago, 50 percent of all black
teenagers had agricultural jobs, and more
than 90 percent of those workers lived in
the South. As these jobs disappeared, the
black unemployment problem in urban
centers mushroomed. The recent
deindustrialization of northeastern and
midwestern cities has exacerbated this
problem. And with the added competition

for jobs resulting from the entrance of new
immigrants and white women into the
labor market, semi-skilled and unskilled
black workers have found it increasingly
difficult, if not impossible, to find
employment. By 1980, 15 percent of all
black men between the ages of twenty-five
and forty-six reported to the Census
Bureau that they had earned nothing
whatsoever the previous year. Often the
only option for young blacks is military
enlistment. (Indeed, the U.S. army is
nearly one-third black.)

The new black conservatives have
rightly perceived that the black liberal
leadership has not addressed these
changes in the economy. Obviously, the
idea that racial discrimination is the sole
cause of the predicament of the black

working poor and very poor is specious.
And the idea that the courts and
government can significantly improve the
plight of blacks by enforcing laws already
on the books is even more spurious. White
racism, though pernicious and potent,
cannot fully explain the socioeconomic
position of the majority of black
Americans.

The crisis of black liberalism is the
result of its failure to put forward a
realistic response to the changes in the
economy. The new black conservatives
have highlighted this crisis by trying to
discredit the black liberal leadership,
arguing that the NAACP, the National
Urban League, the Black Congressional
Caucus, and most black elected officials
are guided by outdated and ineffective

viewpoints. The overriding aim of the
new black conservatives is to undermine
the position of black liberals and replace
them with black Republicans (or even
conservative black Democrats), who
downplay governmental regulation and
stress market mechanisms and success-
oriented values in black communities.

Yet the new black conservatives have
been unable to convince black Americans
that conservative ideology and the
policies of the Reagan and Bush
administrations are morally acceptable
and politically advantageous. The vast
depoliticization and electoral
disengagement of blacks suggests that they
are indeed disenchanted with black
liberals and distrustful of American
political processes; and a downtrodden

and degraded people with limited options
may be ready to try any alternative.
Nevertheless, black Americans have
systematically rejected the arguments of
the new black conservatives. This is not
because blacks are duped by liberal black
politicians nor because blacks worship
the Democratic Party. Rather, it is because
most blacks conclude that while racial
discrimination is not the sole cause of
their plight, it certainly is one cause. Thus,
most black Americans view the new black
conservative assault on the black liberal
leadership as a step backward rather than
forward. Black liberalism indeed is
inadequate, but black conservatism is
unacceptable. This negative reaction to
black conservatives by most blacks partly
explains the relative reluctance of some of

the new black conservatives to engage in
public debates in the black community,
and their contrasting eagerness to do so in
the mass media, where a few go as far as
to portray themselves as courageous,
embattled critics of a black liberal
establishment—even while their salaries,
honorariums, and travel expenses are
payed by well-endowed conservative
foundations and corporations.

The new black conservatives have had
their most salutary effect on public
discourse by highlighting the breakdown
of the moral fabric in the country and
especially in black working poor and very
poor communities. Black organizations
like Rev. Jesse Jackson’s PUSH have
focused on this issue in the past, but the
new black conservatives have been

obsessed by it, and thereby have given it
national attention. Unfortunately, they
view this urgent set of problems in
primarily individualistic terms and fail to
take seriously the historical background
and social context of the current crisis.

The black conservatives claim that the
decline of values such as patience,
deferred gratification, and self-reliance
have resulted in the high crime rates, the
increasing number of unwed mothers, and
the relatively uncompetitive academic
performances of black youth. And
certainly these sad realities must be
candidly confronted. But nowhere in their
writings do the new black conservatives
examine the pervasiveness of sexual and
military images used by the mass media
and deployed by the advertising industry

in order to entice and titillate consumers.
Black conservatives thus overlook the
degree to which market forces of
advanced capitalist processes thrive on
sexual and military images. Even a neo-
liberal like Daniel Bell, in stark contrast
to black conservatives, highlights the
larger social and cultural forces, for
example, consumerism and hedonism,
which undermine the Protestant ethic and
its concomitant values. Yet Bell also tends
to downplay the contribution of American
capitalism to this process.

Since the end of the postwar economic
boom, certain strategies have been
intensified to stimulate consumption,
especially strategies aimed at American
youth that project sexual activity as instant
fulfillment and violence as the locus of

machismo identity. This market activity
has contributed greatly to the
disorientation and confusion of American
youth, and those with less education and
fewer opportunities bear the brunt of this
cultural chaos. Ought we to be surprised
that black youths isolated from the labor
market, marginalized by decrepit urban
schools, devalued by alienating ideals of
Euro-American beauty, and targeted by an
unprecedented drug invasion exhibit high
rates of crime and teenage pregnancy?

My aim is not to provide excuses for
black behavior or to absolve blacks of
personal responsibility. But when the new
black conservatives accent black behavior
and responsibility in such a way that the
cultural realities of black people are
ignored, they are playing a deceptive and

dangerous intellectual game with the lives
and fortunes of disadvantaged people. We
indeed must criticize and condemn
immoral acts of black people, but we must
do so cognizant of the circumstances into
which people are born and under which
they live. By overlooking these
circumstances, the new black
conservatives fall into the trap of blaming
black poor people for their predicament. It
is imperative to steer a course between
the Scylla of environmental determinism
and the Charybdis of a blaming-the-
victims perspective.

The ideological blinders of the new
black conservatives are clearly evident in
their attempt to link the moral breakdown
of poor black communities to the
expansion of the welfare state. For

instance, in Sowell’s work, the preeminent
structural element of political-economic
life relevant to the plight of the black poor
is the negative role of the state and the
positive role of the market. A provocative
—and slightly unfair—question to this
descendant of slaves sold at the auction
block is, Can the market do any wrong?

The new black conservatives claim that
transfer payments to the black needy
engender a mentality of dependence which
undercuts the value of self-reliance and of
the solidity of the black poor family. They
fail to see that the welfare state was an
historic compromise between progressive
forces seeking broad subsistence rights
and conservative forces arguing for
unregulated markets. Therefore it should
come as no surprise that the welfare state

possesses many flaws. The reinforcing of
“dependent mentalities” and the unsettling
of the family are two such flaws. But
simply to point out these rather obvious
shortcomings does not justify cutbacks in
the welfare state. In the face of high black
unemployment, these cutbacks will not
promote self-reliance or strong black
families but will only produce even more
black cultural disorientation and more
devastated black households. This is so
because without jobs or incentives to be
productive citizens the black poor become
even more prone toward criminality,
drugs, and alcoholism—the major
immediate symptoms of the pervasive
black communal and cultural chaos.

On the practical and political level, the
only feasible alternative to the welfare

state is to create more jobs for poor
people—something the private sector is
simply uninterested in doing, for it is not
in its economic interests to do so. Thus,
the market rationality of the private sector
relegates poor people to subsistence
levels of living and/or unemployment. In
the realities of contemporary American
politics, to attack the welfare state without
linking this attack to a credible jobs
program (one that is more than likely
supported by the public sector) is to
reduce the already limited options of
black poor people. To go as far as some
new black conservatives have done and
support the elimination of nearly every
federal benefit program for the nonelderly
poor (as put forward in Charles Murray’s
Losing Ground [1984]), is to serve as

ideological accomplices to social policies
that have genocidal effects on the black
poor. The welfare state cannot win a war
on poverty, yet it does sustain some boats
that would otherwise sink, given the high
rate of unemployment.

Yet even effective jobs programs do not
fully address the cultural decay and moral
disintegration of poor black communities.
Like America itself, these communities
are in need of cultural revitalization and
moral regeneration. There is widespread
agreement on this need by all forms of
black leadership, but neither black
liberals nor the new black conservatives
adequately speak to this need.

At present, the major institutional
bulwarks against the pervasive

meaninglessness and despair in Afro-
America are intermediate institutions such
as Christian churches, Muslim mosques,
and character-building schools. They all
are fighting an uphill battle; they cannot
totally counter the powerful influence on
black people, especially black youths, of
the sexual and violent images purveyed by
mass media. Yet those intermediate
institutions that affirm the humanity of
black people, accent their capacities and
potentialities, and foster the character and
excellence requisite for productive
citizenship, are beacons of hope in the
midst of the cultural and moral crisis. (My
appeal to the positive role of such
intermediate associations differs from that
of the black conservatives. I view this
role as both oppositional to and

transformative of prevailing class
subordination of American capitalist
social relations, whereas they view this
role as supportive of such class
subordination. In this sense, private
voluntary institutions constitute a central
terrain of ideological and political
contestation for myself and black
conservatives—with conflicting aims and
goals.)

What then are we to make of the new
black conservatives? First, I would
suggest that the narrowness of their
viewpoints reflects the narrowness of the
liberal perspective with which they are
obsessed. In fact, a lack of broad vision
and subtle analysis, and a refusal to
acknowledge the crucial structural
features of the black poor situation,

characterizes both black liberals and
conservatives. The positions of both
groups reflects a fight within the black
middleclass elite. This parochialism is
itself a function of the highly limited
alternatives available in contemporary
American politics.

Second, the emergence of the new black
conservatives signifies a healthy
development to the degree that it calls
attention to the failures of black liberalism
and thereby encourages black politicians
and activists to entertain more progressive
solutions to the larger problems of social
injustice and class inequality. Finally,
more visible attacks of the new black
conservatives on the black liberal
leadership regarding U.S. foreign policy
may force black intellectual exchange to

focus on the relation of the plight of the
Third World to that of poor black (brown,
red, yellow, and white) people. Given the
rapacious pro-Americanism in foreign
affairs in American intellectual life, this
focus would be salutary.

Perhaps the widening of the split
between black liberal elites and black
conservative critics will lead to a more
principled and passionate political
discourse in and about black America.
Such a discourse would promote more
rational debates among conservative,
liberal, and leftist voices concerning
strategies to enhance the life-chances of
the black poor. The few valuable insights
of the new black conservatives can be
incorporated into a broader progressive
perspective that utterly rejects their

unwarranted conclusions and repugnant
policies. I suspect that such a dialogue
would unmask the new black
conservatives as renegades from and
critics of a moribund black liberalism
who have seen some of the limits of this
liberalism, but are themselves unable and
unwilling to move beyond it. Hence, the
new black conservatives settle for earlier
historic versions of classical liberalism in
a postliberal society and postmodern
culture.

CHAPTER FIVE

BEYOND AFFIRMATIVE

ACTION: EQUALITY AND
IDENTITY

Institutionalized rejection of
difference is an absolute necessity in

a profit economy which needs
outsiders as surplus people. As

members of such an economy, we
have all been programmed to

respond to the human differences
between us with fear and loathing
and to handle that difference in one

of three ways: ignore it, and if that is
not possible, copy it if we think it is
dominant, or destroy it if we think it

is subordinate. But we have no
patterns for relating across our

human differences as equals. As a
result, those differences have been

misnamed and misused in the service
of separation and confusion.

AUDRE LORDE, Sister
Outsider (1984)

THE fundamental crisis in black
America is twofold: too much poverty and
too little self-love. The urgent problem of
black poverty is primarily due to the
distribution of wealth, power, and income
—a distribution influenced by the racial

caste system that denied opportunities to
most “qualified” black people until two
decades ago.

The historic role of American
progressives is to promote redistributive
measures that enhance the standard of
living and quality of life for the have-nots
and have-too-littles. Affirmative action
was one such redistributive measure that
surfaced in the heat of battle in the 1960s
among those fighting for racial equality.
Like earlier de facto affirmative action
measures in the American past—contracts,
jobs, and loans to select immigrants
granted by political machines; subsidies to
certain farmers; FHA mortgage loans to
specific home buyers; or GI Bill benefits
to particular courageous Americans—
recent efforts to broaden access to

America’s prosperity have been based
upon preferential policies. Unfortunately,
these policies always benefit middle-class
Americans disproportionately. The
political power of big business in big
government circumscribes redistributive
measures and thereby tilts these measures
away from the have-nots and have-too-
littles.

Every redistributive measure is a
compromise with and concession from the
caretakers of American prosperity—that
is, big business and big government.
Affirmative action was one such
compromise and concession achieved
after the protracted struggle of American
progressives and liberals in the courts and
in the streets. Visionary progressives
always push for substantive redistributive

measures that make opportunities
available to the have-nots and have-too-
littles, such as more federal support to
small farmers, or more FHA mortgage
loans to urban dwellers as well as
suburban home buyers. Yet in the
American political system, where the
powers that be turn a skeptical eye toward
any program aimed at economic
redistribution, progressives must secure
whatever redistributive measures they
can, ensure their enforcement, then extend
their benefits if possible.

If I had been old enough to join the fight
for racial equality in the courts, the
legislatures, and the board rooms in the
1960s (I was old enough to be in the
streets), I would have favored—as I do
now—a class-based affirmative action in

principle. Yet in the heat of battle in
American politics, a redistributive
measure in principle with no power and
pressure behind it means no redistributive
measure at all. The prevailing
discriminatory practices during the sixties,
whose targets were working people,
women, and people of color, were
atrocious. Thus, an enforceable race-
based— and later gender-based—
affirmative action policy was the best
possible compromise and concession.

Progressives should view affirmative
action as neither a major solution to
poverty nor a sufficient means to equality.
We should see it as primarily playing a
negative role—namely, to ensure that
discriminatory practices against women
and people of color are abated. Given the

history of this country, it is a virtual
certainty that without affirmative action
racial and sexual discrimination would
return with a vengeance. Even if
affirmative action fails significantly to
reduce black poverty or contributes to the
persistence of racist perceptions in the
workplace, without affirmative action
black access to America’s prosperity
would be even more difficult to obtain and
racism in the workplace would persist
anyway.

This claim is not based on any cynicism
toward my white fellow citizens; rather, it
rests upon America’s historically weak
will toward racial justice and substantive
redistributive measures. This is why an
attack on affirmative action is an attack on
redistributive efforts by progressives

unless there is a real possibility of
enacting and enforcing a more wide-
reaching class-based affirmative action
policy.

In American politics, progressives must
not only cling to redistributive ideals, but
must also fight for those policies that—out
of compromise and concession—
imperfectly conform to those ideals.
Liberals who give only lip service to
these ideals, trash the policies in the name
of realpolitik, or reject the policies as
they perceive a shift in the racial
bellwether, give up precious ground too
easily. And they do so even as the sand is
disappearing under our feet on such issues
as regressive taxation, layoffs or
takebacks from workers, and cutbacks in
health and child care.

Affirmative action is not the most
important issue for black progress in
America, but it is part of a redistributive
chain that must be strengthened if we are
to confront and eliminate black poverty. If
there were social democratic
redistributive measures that wiped out
black poverty, and if racial and sexual
discrimination could be abated through the
good will and meritorious judgments of
those in power, affirmative action would
be unnecessary. Although many liberal and
progressive citizens view affirmative
action as a redistributive measure whose
time is over or whose life is no longer
worth preserving, I question their view
because of the persistence of
discriminatory practices that increase
black social misery, and the warranted

suspicion that good will and fair judgment
among the powerful does not loom as
large toward women and people of color.

IF the elimination of black poverty is a
necessary condition of substantive black
progress, then the affirmation of black
humanity, especially among black people
themselves, is a sufficient condition of
such progress. Such affirmation speaks to
the existential issues of what it means to
be a degraded African (man, woman, gay,
lesbian, child) in a racist society. How
does one affirm oneself without reenacting
negative black stereotypes or overreacting
to white supremacist ideals?

The difficult and delicate quest for
black identity is integral to any talk about
racial equality. Yet it is not solely a

political or economic matter. The quest
for black identity involves self-respect
and self-regard, realms inseparable from,
yet not identical to, political power and
economic status. The flagrant self-loathing
among black middle-class professionals
bears witness to this painful process.
Unfortunately, black conservatives focus
on the issue of self-respect as if it were
the one key that would open all doors to
black progress. They illustrate the fallacy
of trying to open all doors with one key:
they wind up closing their eyes to all
doors except the one the key fits.

Progressives, for our part, must take
seriously the quest for self-respect, even
as we train our eye on the institutional
causes of black social misery. The issues
of black identity—both black selflove and

self-contempt—sit alongside black
poverty as realities to confront and
transform. The uncritical acceptance of
self-degrading ideals, that call into
question black intelligence, possibility,
and beauty not only compounds black
social misery but also paralyzes black
middle-class efforts to defend broad
redistributive measures.

This paralysis takes two forms: black
bourgeois preoccupation with white peer
approval and black nationalist obsession
with white racism.

The first form of paralysis tends to
yield a navel-gazing posture that conflates
the identity crisis of the black middle
class with the state of siege raging in
black working-poor and very poor

communities. That unidimensional view
obscures the need for redistributive
measures that significantly affect the
majority of blacks, who are working
people on the edge of poverty.

The second form of paralysis precludes
any meaningful coalition with white
progressives because of an undeniable
white racist legacy of the modern Western
world. The anger this truth engenders
impedes any effective way of responding
to the crisis in black America. Broad
redistributive measures require principled
coalitions, including multiracial alliances.
Without such measures, black America’s
sufferings deepen. White racism indeed
contributes to this suffering. Yet an
obsession with white racism often comes
at the expense of more broadly based

alliances to affect social change and
borders on a tribal mentality. The more
xenophobic versions of this viewpoint
simply mirror the white supremacist
ideals we are opposing and preclude any
movement toward redistrihutive goals.

How one defines oneself influences
what analytical weight one gives to black
poverty. Any progressive discussion about
the future of racial equality must speak to
black poverty and black identity. My
views on the necessity and limits of
affirmative action in the present moment
are informed by how substantive
redistributive measures and human
affirmative efforts can be best defended
and expanded.

CHAPTER SIX

ON BLACK-JEWISH

RELATIONS

For If there are no waving
flags and marching songs at the
barricades as Walter marches

out with his little battalion, it is
not because the battle lacks

nobility. On the contrary, he has
picked up in his way, still

imperfect and wobbly in his
small view of human destiny,
what I believe Arthur Miller

once called “the golden thread

of history.” He becomes, in
spite of those who are too
intrigued with despair and

hatred of man to see it, King
Oedipus refusing to tear out his
eyes, but attacking the Oracle
instead. He is that last Jewish

patriot manning his rifle at
Warsaw; he is that young girl

who swam into sharks to save a
friend a few weeks ago; he is
Anne Frank, still believing in
people; he is the nine small
heroes of Little Rock; he is

Michelangelo creating David
and Beethoven bursting forth

with the Ninth Symphony. He is
all those things because he has
finally reached out in his tiny

moment and caught that sweet
essence which is human dignity,
and it shines like the old star-
touched dream that it is in his

eyes.

LORRAINE HANSBERRY,
“An Author’s

Reflections: Walter
Lee Younger,

Willy Loman and He Who Must
Live” (1959)

RECENT debates on the state of black-
Jewish relations .have generated more
heat than light. Instead of critical dialogue
and respectful exchange, we have
witnessed several bouts of vulgar name-
calling and self-righteous finger-pointing.

Battles conducted on the editorial pages,
like the one between Henry Louis Gates,
Jr., the eminent Harvard professor, and
John Henrik Clarke, the distinguished pan-
African scholar, in the New York Times
and the City Sun, respectively, do not take
us very far in understanding black-Jewish
relations.

Black anti-Semitism and Jewish
antiblack racism are real, and both are as
profoundly American as cherry pie. There
was no golden age in which blacks and
Jews were free of tension and friction. Yet
there was a better age when the common
histories of oppression and degradation of
both groups served as a springboard for
genuine empathy and principled alliances.
Since the late sixties, black-Jewish
relations have reached a nadir. Why is this

so?

In order to account for this sad state of
affairs we must begin to unearth the truth
behind each group’s perceptions of the
other (and of itself). For example, few
blacks recognize and acknowledge one
fundamental fact of Jewish history: a
profound hatred of Jews sits at the center
of medieval and modern European
cultures. Jewish persecutions under the
Byzantines, Jewish massacres during the
Crusades, Jewish expulsions in England
(1290), France (1306), Spain (1492),
Portugal (1497), Frankfurt (1614), and
Vienna (1670), and Jewish pogroms in the
Ukraine (1648, 1768), Odessa (1871), and
throughout Russia—especially after 1881
culminating in Kishinev (1903)—
constitute the vast historical backdrop to

current Jewish preoccupations with self-
reliance and the Jewish anxiety of group
death. Needless to say, the Nazi attempt at
Judeocide in the 1930s and 1940s
reinforced this preoccupation and anxiety.

The European hatred of Jews rests on
religious and social grounds—Christian
myths of Jews as Christ-killers and
resentment over the disproportionate
presence of Jews in certain commercial
occupations. The religious bigotry feeds
on stereotypes of Jews as villainous
transgressors of the sacred; the social
bigotry, on alleged Jewish conspiratorial
schemes for power and control. Ironically,
the founding of the state of Israel—the
triumph of the quest for modern Jewish
self-determination—came about less from
Jewish power and more from the

consensus of the two superpowers, the
United States and USSR, to secure a
homeland for a despised and degraded
people after Hitler’s genocidal attempt.

The history of Jews in America for the
most part flies in the face of this tragic
Jewish past. The majority of Jewish
immigrants arrived in America around the
turn of the century (1881—1924). They
brought a strong heritage that put a
premium on what had ensured their
survival and identity—institutional
autonomy, rabbinical learning, and
business zeal. Like other European
immigrants, Jews for the most part became
complicitous with the American racial
caste system. Even in “Christian” America
with its formidable anti-Semitic barriers,
and despite a rich progressive tradition

that made Jews more likely than other
immigrants to feel compassion for
oppressed blacks, large numbers of Jews
tried to procure a foothold in America by
falling in step with the widespread
perpetuation of antiblack stereotypes and
the garnering of white-skin privilege
benefits available to nonblack Americans.
It goes without saying that a profound
hatred of African people (as seen in
slavery, lynching, segregation, and
second-class citizenship) sits at the center
of American civilization.

The period of genuine empathy and
principled alliances between Jews and
blacks (1910-67) constitutes a major
pillar of American progressive politics in
this century. These supportive links begin
with W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Crisis and

Abraham Cahan’s Jewish Daily Forward
and are seen clearly between Jewish
leftists and A. Philip Randolph’s numerous
organizations, between Elliot Cohen’s
Commentary and the early career of
James Baldwin, between prophets like
Abraham Joshua Heschel and Martin
Luther King, Jr., or between the
disproportionately Jewish Students for a
Democratic Society (SDS) and the Student
Non-Violent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC). Presently, this inspiring period
of blackJewish cooperation is often
downplayed by blacks and romanticized
by Jews. It is downplayed by blacks
because they focus on the astonishingly
rapid entree of most Jews into the middle
and upper middle classes during this brief
period—an entree that has spawned both

an intense conflict with the more slowly
growing black middle class and a social
resentment from a quickly growing black
impoverished class. Jews, on the other
hand, tend to romanticize this period
because their present status as upper
middle dogs and some top dogs in
American society unsettles their historic
self-image as progressives with a
compassion for the underdog.

In the present era, blacks and Jews are
in contention over two major issues. The
first is the question of what constitutes the
most effective means for black progress in
America. With over half of all black
professionals and managers being
employed in the public sphere, and those
in the private sphere often gaining entree
owing to regulatory checks by the EEOC,

attacks by some Jews on affirmative
action are perceived as assaults on black
livelihood. And since a disproportionate
percentage of poor blacks depend on
government support to survive, attempts to
dismantle public programs are viewed by
blacks as opposition to black survival.
Visible Jewish resistance to affirmative
action and government spending on social
programs pits some Jews against black
progress. This opposition, though not as
strong as that of other groups in the
country, is all the more visible to black
people because of past Jewish support for
black progress. It also seems to reek of
naked group interest, as well as a
willingness to abandon compassion for the
underdogs of American society.

The second major area of contention

concerns the meaning and practice of
Zionism as embodied in the state of Israel.
Without a sympathetic understanding of the
deep historic sources of Jewish fears and
anxieties about group survival, blacks
will not grasp the visceral attachment of
most Jews to Israel. Similarly, without a
candid acknowledgement of blacks’ status
as permanent underdogs in American
society, Jews will not comprehend what
the symbolic predicament and literal
plight of Palestinians in Israel means to
blacks. Jews rightly point out that the
atrocities of Africa elites on oppressed
Africans in Kenya, Uganda, and Ethiopia
are just as bad or worse than those
perpetrated on Palestinians by Israeli
elites. Some also point out—rightly—that
deals and treaties between Israel and

South Africa are not so radically different
from those between some black African,
Latin American, and Asian countries and
South Africa. Still, these and other Jewish
charges of black double standards with
regard to Israel do not take us to the heart
of the matter. Blacks often perceive the
Jewish defense of the state of Israel as a
second instance of naked group interest,
and, again, an abandonment of substantive
moral deliberation. At the same time,
Jews tend to view black critiques of Israel
as black rejection of the Jewish right to
group survival, and hence as a betrayal of
the precondition for a black-Jewish
alliance. What is at stake here is not
simply black-Jewish relations, but, more
importantly, the moral content of Jewish
and black identities and of their political

consequences.

The ascendance of the conservative
Likud party in Israel in 1977 and the
visibility of narrow black nationalist
voices in the eighties helped solidify this
impasse. When mainstream American
Jewish organizations supported the
inhumane policies of Begin and Shamir,
they tipped their hats toward cold-hearted
interest group calculations. When black
nationalist spokesmen like Farrakhan and
Jeffries excessively targeted Jewish
power as subordinating black and brown
peoples they played the same mean-
spirited game. In turning their heads from
the ugly truth of Palestinian subjugation,
and in refusing to admit the falsity of the
alleged Jewish conspiracies, both sides
failed to define the moral character of

their Jewish and black identities.

The present impasse in black-Jewish
relations will be overcome only when
self-critical exchanges take place within
and across black and Jewish communities
not simply about their own group interest
but also, and, more importantly, about
what being black or Jewish mean in
ethical terms. This kind of reflection
should not be so naive as to ignore group
interest, but it should take us to a higher
moral ground where serious discussions
about democracy and justice determine
how we define ourselves and our politics
and help us formulate strategies and
tactics to sidestep the traps of tribalism
and chauvinism.

The vicious murder of Yankel

Rosenbaum in Crown Heights in the
summer of 1991 bore chilling testimony to
a growing black anti-Semitism in this
country. Although this particular form of
xenophobia from below does not have the
same institutional power of those racisms
that afflict their victims from above, it
certainly deserves the same moral
condemnation. Furthermore, the very
ethical character of the black freedom
struggle largely depends on the open
condemnation by its spokespersons of any
racist attitude or action.

In our present moment, when a neo-
Nazi like David Duke can win 55 percent
of the white vote (and 69 percent of the
white “born-again” Protestant vote) in
Louisiana, it may seem misguided to
highlight anti-Semitic behavior of black

people—the exemplary targets of racial
hatred in America. Yet I suggest that this
focus is crucial precisely because we
black folk have been in the forefront of the
struggle against American racism. If these
efforts fall prey to anti-Semitism, then the
principled attempt to combat racism
forfeits much of its moral credibility—and
we all lose. To put it bluntly, if the black
freedom struggle becomes simply a
powerdriven war of all against all that
pits xenophobia from below against
racism from above, then David Duke’s
project is the wave of the future—and a
racial apocalypse awaits us. Despite
Duke’s resounding defeat, we witness
increasing racial and sexual violence,
coupled with growing economic
deprivation, that together provide the raw

ingredients for such a frightening future.

Black people have searched
desperately for allies in the struggle
against racism—and have found Jews to
be disproportionately represented in the
ranks of that struggle. The desperation that
sometimes informs the antiracist struggle
arises out of two conflicting historical
forces: America’s historically weak will
to racial justice and an all-inclusive
moral vision of freedom and justice for
all. Escalating black anti-Semitism is a
symptom of this desperation gone sour; it
is the bitter fruit of a profound self-
destructive impulse, nurtured on the vines
of hopelessness and concealed by empty
gestures of black unity. The images of
black activists yelling “Where is Hitler
when we need him?” and “Heil Hitler,”

juxtaposed with those of David Duke
celebrating Hitler’s birthday, seem to feed
a single fire of intolerance, burning on
both ends of the American candle, that
threatens to consume us all.

BLACK anti-Semitism rests on three
basic pillars. First, it is a species of anti-
whitism. Jewish complicity in American
racism—even though it is less extensive
than the complicity of other white
Americans—reinforces black perceptions
that Jews are identical to any other group
benefitting from white-skin privileges in
racist America. This view denies the
actual history and treatment of Jews. And
the particular interactions of Jews and
black people in the hierarchies of business
and education cast Jews as the public face
of oppression for the black community,

and thus lend evidence to this mistaken
view of Jews as any other white folk.

Second, black anti-Semitism is a result
of higher expectations some black folk
have of Jews. This perspective holds
Jews to a moral standard different from
that extended to other white ethnic groups,
principally owing to the ugly history of
anti-Semitism in the world, especially in
Europe and the Middle East. Such double
standards assume that Jews and blacks are
“natural” allies, since both groups have
suffered chronic degradation and
oppression at the hands of racial and
ethnic majorities. So when Jewish
neoconservatism gains a high public
profile at a time when black people are
more and more vulnerable, the charge of
“betrayal” surfaces among black folk who

feel let down. Such utterances resonate
strongly in a black Protestant culture that
has inherited many stock Christian anti-
Semitic narratives of Jews as Christ-
killers. These infamous narratives
historically have had less weight in the
black community, in stark contrast to the
more obdurate white Christian varieties of
anti-Semitism. Yet in moments of
desperation in the black community, they
tend to reemerge, charged with the
rhetoric of Jewish betrayal.

Third, black anti-Semitism is a form of
underdog resentment and envy, directed at
another underdog who has “made it” in
American society. The remarkable upward
mobility of American Jews— rooted
chiefly in a history and culture that places
a premium on higher education and self-

organization—easily lends itself to myths
of Jewish unity and homogeneity that have
gained currency among other groups,
especially among relatively unorganized
groups like black Americans. The high
visibility of Jews in the upper reaches of
the academy, journalism, the entertainment
industry, and the professions—though less
so percentage-wise in corporate America
and national political office—is viewed
less as a result of hard work and success
fairly won, and more as a matter of
favoritism and nepotism among Jews.
Ironically, calls for black solidarity and
achievement are often modeled on myths
of Jewish unity—as both groups respond
to American xenophobia and racism. But
in times such as these, some blacks view
Jews as obstacles rather than allies in the

struggle for racial justice.

These three elements of black anti-
Semitism—which also characterize the
outlooks of some other ethnic groups in
America— have a long history among
black people. Yet the recent upsurge of
black anti-Semitism exploits two other
prominent features of the political
landscape identified with the American
Jewish establishment: the military status
of Israel in the Middle East (especially in
its enforcement of the occupation of the
West Bank and Gaza); and the visible
conservative Jewish opposition to what is
perceived to be a major means of black
progress, namely, affirmative action. Of
course, principled critiques of U.S.
foreign policy in the Middle East, of
Israeli denigration of Palestinians, or

attacks on affirmative action transcend
anti-Semitic sensibilities. Yet vulgar
critiques do not—and often are shot
through with such sensibilities, in white
and black America alike. These vulgar
critiques—usually based on sheer
ignorance and a misinformed thirst for
vengeance—add an aggressive edge to
black anti-Semitism. And in the rhetoric of
a Louis Farrakhan or a Leonard Jeffries,
whose audiences rightly hunger for black
self-respect and oppose black
degradation, these critiques misdirect
progressive black energies arrayed
against unaccountable corporate power
and antiblack racism, steering them
instead toward Jewish elites and antiblack
conspiracies in Jewish America. This
displacement is disturbing not only

because it is analytically and morally
wrong; it also discourages any effective
alliances across races.

The rhetoric of Farrakhan and Jeffries
feeds on an undeniable history of black
denigration at the hands of Americans of
every ethnic and religious group. The
delicate issues of black self-love and
black self-contempt are then viewed in
terms of white putdown and Jewish
conspiracy. The precious quest for black
selfesteem is reduced to immature and
cathartic gestures that bespeak an
excessive obsession with whites and
Jews. There can be no healthy conception
of black humanity based on such
obsessions. The best of black culture, as
manifested, for example, in jazz or the
prophetic black church, refuses to put

whites or Jews on a pedestal or in the
gutter. Rather, black humanity is affirmed
alongside that of others, even when those
others have at times dehumanized blacks.
To put it bluntly, when black humanity is
taken for granted and not made to prove
itself in white culture, whites, Jews, and
others are not that important; they are
simply human beings, just like black
people. If the best of black culture wanes
in the face of black anti-Semitism, black
people will become even more isolated as
a community and the black freedom
struggle will be tarred with the brush of
immorality.

For example, most Americans wrongly
believe that the black community has been
silent in the face of Yankel Rosenbaum’s
murder. This perception exists because the

moral voices in black America have been
either ignored or drowned out by the more
sensationalist and xenophobic ones. The
major New York City newspapers and
periodicals seem to have little interest in
making known to the public the moral
condemnations voiced by Reverend Gary
Simpson of Concord Baptist Church in
Brooklyn (with ten thousand black
members), Reverend James Forbes of
Riverside Church (with three thousand
members), Reverend Carolyn Knight of
Philadelphia Baptist Church in Harlem,
Reverend Susan Johnson of Mariners
Baptist Church in Manhattan, Reverend
Mark Taylor of the Church of the Open
Door in Brooklyn, Reverend Victor Hall
of Calvary Baptist Church in Queens, and
many more. Black anti-Semitism is not

caused by media hype—yet it does sell
more newspapers and turn our attention
away from those black prophetic energies
that give us some hope.

MY fundamental premise is that the
black freedom struggle is the major buffer
between the David Dukes of America and
the hope for a future in which we can
begin to take justice and freedom for all
seriously. Black anti-Semitism—along
with its concomitant xenophobias, such as
patriarchal and homophobic prejudices—
weakens this buffer. In the process, it
plays into the hands of the old-style
racists, who appeal to the worst of our
fellow citizens amid the silent depression
that plagues the majority of Americans.
Without some redistribution of wealth and
power, downward mobility and

debilitating poverty will continue to drive
people into desperate channels. And
without principled opposition to
xenophobias from above and below, these
desperate channels will produce a cold-
hearted and mean-spirited America no
longer worth fighting for or living in.

CHAPTER SEVEN

BLACK SEXUALITY: THE

TABOO SUBJECT

“Here,” she said, “in this here
place, we flesh; flesh that weeps,

laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet
in grass. Love it. Love it hard.

Yonder they do not love your flesh.
They despise it. They don’t love your
eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out.

No more do they love the skin on
your back. Yonder they flay it. And O

my people they do not love your
hands. Those they only use, tie, bind,

chop off and leave empty. Love your
hands! Love them. Raise them up and
kiss them. Touch others with them,
pat them together, stroke them on

your face ’cause they don’t love that
either. You got to love it, You! . . .

This is flesh I’m talking about here.
Flesh that needs to be loved.”

TONI MORRISON, Beloved
(1987)

AMERICANS are obsessed with sex
and fearful of black -sexuality. The
obsession has to do with a search for
stimulation and meaning in a fast-paced,
market-driven culture; the fear is rooted in
visceral feelings about black bodies
fueled by sexual myths of black women

and men. The dominant myths draw black
women and men either as threatening
creatures who have the potential for
sexual power over whites, or as harmless,
desexed underlings of a white culture.
There is Jezebel (the seductive temptress),
Sapphire (the evil, manipulative bitch), or
Aunt Jemima (the sexless, long-suffering
nurturer). There is Bigger Thomas (the
mad and mean predatory craver of white
women), Jack Johnson, the super
performer—be it in athletics,
entertainment, or sex—who excels others
naturally and prefers women of a lighter
hue), or Uncle Tom (the spineless, sexless
—or is it impotent?—sidekick of whites).
The myths offer distorted, dehumanized
creatures whose bodies—color of skin,
shape of nose and lips, type of hair, size of

hips—are already distinguished from the
white norm of beauty and whose feared
sexual activities are deemed disgusting,
dirty, or funky and considered less
acceptable.

Yet the paradox of the sexual politics of
race in America is that, behind closed
doors, the dirty, disgusting, and funky sex
associated with black people is often
perceived to be more intriguing and
interesting, while in public spaces talk
about black sexuality is virtually taboo.
Everyone knows it is virtually impossible
to talk candidly about race without talking
about sex. Yet most social scientists who
examine race relations do so with little or
no reference to how sexual perceptions
influence racial matters. My thesis is that
black sexuality is a taboo subject in white

and black America and that a candid
dialogue about black sexuality between
and within these communities is requisite
for healthy race relations in America.

The major cultural impact of the 1960s
was not to demystify black sexuality but
rather to make black bodies more
accessible to white bodies on an equal
basis. The history of such access up to that
time was primarily one of brutal white
rape and ugly white abuse. The Afro-
Americanization of white youth—given
the disproportionate black role in popular
music and athletics—has put white kids in
closer contact with their own bodies and
facilitated more humane interaction with
black people. Listening to Motown
records in the sixties or dancing to hip hop
music in the nineties may not lead one to

question the sexual myths of black women
and men, but when white and black kids
buy the same billboard hits and laud the
same athletic heroes the result is often a
shared cultural space where some humane
interaction takes place.

This subterranean cultural current of
interracial interaction increased during the
1970s and 1980s even as racial
polarization deepened on the political
front. We miss much of what goes on in the
complex development of race relations in
America if we focus solely on the racial
card played by the Republican Party and
overlook the profound multicultural mix of
popular culture that has occurred in the
past two decades. In fact, one of the
reasons Nixon, Reagan, and Bush had to
play a racial card, that is, had to code

their language about race, rather than
simply call a spade a spade, is due to the
changed cultural climate of race and sex
in America. The classic scene of Senator
Strom Thurmond—staunch segregationist
and longtime opponent of interracial sex
and marriage— strongly defending Judge
Clarence Thomas—married to a white
woman and an alleged avid consumer of
white pornography— shows how this
change in climate affects even reactionary
politicians in America.

Needless to say, many white Americans
still view black sexuality with disgust.
And some continue to view their own
sexuality with disgust. Victorian morality
and racist perceptions die hard. But more
and more white Americans are willing to
interact sexually with black Americans on

an equal basis—even if the myths still
persist. I view this as neither cause for
celebration nor reason for lament.
Anytime two human beings find genuine
pleasure, joy, and love, the stars smile and
the universe is enriched. Yet as long as
that pleasure, joy, and love is still
predicated on myths of black sexuality, the
more fundamental challenge of humane
interaction remains unmet. Instead, what
we have is white access to black bodies
on an equal basis—but not yet the
demythologizing of black sexuality.

This demythologizing of black sexuality
is crucial for black America because
much of black self-hatred and self-
contempt has to do with the refusal of
many black Americans to love their own
black bodies—especially their black

noses, hips, lips, and hair. Just as many
white Americans view black sexuality
with disgust, so do many black Americans
—but for very different reasons and with
very different results. White supremacist
ideology is based first and foremost on the
degradation of black bodies in order to
control them. One of the best ways to
instill fear in people is to terrorize them.
Yet this fear is best sustained by
convincing them that their bodies are ugly,
their intellect is inherently
underdeveloped, their culture is less
civilized, and their future warrants less
concern than that of other peoples. Two
hundred and forty-four years of slavery
and nearly a century of institutionalized
terrorism in the form of segregation,
lynchings, and second-class citizenship in

America were aimed at precisely this
devaluation of black people. This white
supremacist venture was, in the end, a
relative failure—thanks to the courage and
creativity of millions of black people and
hundreds of exceptional white folk like
John Brown, Elijah Lovejoy, Myles
Horton, Russell Banks, Anne Braden, and
others. Yet this white dehumanizing
endeavor has left its toll in the psychic
scars and personal wounds now inscribed
in the souls of black folk. These scars and
wounds are clearly etched on the canvass
of black sexuality.

How does one come to accept and
affirm a body so despised by one’s fellow
citizens? What are the ways in which one
can rejoice in the intimate moments of
black sexuality in a culture that questions

the aesthetic beauty of one’s body? Can
genuine human relationships flourish for
black people in a society that assaults
black intelligence, black moral character,
and black possibility?

These crucial questions were addressed
in those black social spaces that affirmed
black humanity and warded off white
contempt—especially in black families,
churches, mosques, schools, fraternities,
and sororities. These precious black
institutions forged a mighty struggle
against the white supremacist
bombardment of black people. They
empowered black children to learn against
the odds and supported damaged black
egos so they could keep fighting; they
preserved black sanity in an absurd
society in which racism ruled unabated;

and they provided opportunities for black
love to stay alive. But these grand yet
flawed black institutions refused to engage
one fundamental issue: black sexuality.
Instead, they ran from it like the plague.
And they obsessively condemned those
places where black sexuality was
flaunted: the streets, the clubs, and the
dance-halls.

Why was this so? Primarily because
these black institutions put a premium on
black survival in America. And black
survival required accommodation with
and acceptance from white America.
Accommodation avoids any sustained
association with the subversive and
transgressive—be it communism or
miscegenation. Did not the courageous yet
tragic lives of Paul Robeson and Jack

Johnson bear witness to this truth? And
acceptance meant that only “good” negroes
would thrive—especially those who left
black sexuality at the door when they
“entered” and “arrived.” In short,
struggling black institutions made a
Faustian pact with white America: avoid
any substantive engagement with black
sexuality and your survival on the margins
of American society is, at least, possible.

White fear of black sexuality is a basic
ingredient of white racism. And for whites
to admit this deep fear even as they try to
instill and sustain fear in blacks is to
acknowledge a weakness—a weakness
that goes down to the bone. Social
scientists have long acknowledged that
interracial sex and marriage is the most
perceived source of white fear of black

people—just as the repeated castrations of
lynched black men cries out for serious
psychocultural explanation.

Black sexuality is a taboo subject in
America principally because it is a form
of black power over which whites have
little control—yet its visible
manifestations evoke the most visceral of
white responses, be it one of seductive
obsession or downright disgust. On the
one hand, black sexuality among blacks
simply does not include whites, nor does
it make them a central point of reference.
It proceeds as if whites do not exist, as if
whites are invisible and simply don’t
matter. This form of black sexuality puts
black agency center stage with no white
presence at all. This can be uncomfortable
for white people accustomed to being the

custodians of power.

On the other hand, black sexuality
between blacks and whites proceeds
based on underground desires that
Americans deny or ignore in public and
over which laws have no effective
control. In fact, the dominant sexual myths
of black women and men portray whites
as being “out of control”—seduced,
tempted, overcome, overpowered by
black bodies. This form of black sexuality
makes white passivity the norm—hardly
an acceptable self-image for a white-run
society.

Of course, neither scenario fully
accounts for the complex elements that
determine how any particular relationship
involving black sexuality actually takes

place. Yet they do accent the crucial link
between black sexuality and black power
in America. In this way, to make black
sexuality a taboo subject is to silence talk
about a particular kind of power black
people are perceived to have over whites.
On the surface, this “golden” side is one in
which black people simply have an upper
hand sexually over whites given the
dominant myths in our society.

Yet there is a “brazen” side—a side
perceived long ago by black people. If
black sexuality is a form of black power
in which black agency and white passivity
are interlinked, then are not black people
simply acting out the very roles to which
the racist myths of black sexuality confine
them? For example, most black churches
shunned the streets, clubs, and dance-halls

in part because these black spaces seemed
to confirm the very racist myths of black
sexuality to be rejected. Only by being
“respectable” black folk, they reasoned,
would white America see their good
works and shed its racist skin. For many
black church folk, black agency and white
passivity in sexual affairs was neither
desirable nor tolerable. It simply
permitted black people to play the role of
the exotic “other”—closer to nature
(removed from intelligence and control)
and more prone to be guided by base
pleasures and biological impulses.

Is there a way out of this Catch-22
situation in which black sexuality either
liberates black people from white control
in order to imprison them in racist myths
or confines blacks to white

“respectability” while they make their
own sexuality a taboo subject? There
indeed are ways out, but there is no one
way out for all black people. Or, to put it
another way, the ways out for black men
differ vastly from those for black women.
Yet, neither black men nor black women
can make it out unless both get out since
the degradation of both are inseparable
though not identical.

Black male sexuality differs from black
female sexuality because black men have
different self-images and strategies of
acquiring power in the patriarchal
structures of white America and black
communities. Similarly, black male
heterosexuality differs from black male
homosexuality owing to the self-
perceptions and means of gaining power

in the homophobic institutions of white
America and black communities. The
dominant myth of black male sexual
prowess makes black men desirable
sexual partners in a culture obsessed with
sex. In addition, the Afro-Americanization
of white youth has been more a male than
a female affair given the prominence of
male athletes and the cultural weight of
male pop artists. This process results in
white youth—male and female—imitating
and emulating black male styles of
walking, talking, dressing, and
gesticulating in relation to others. One
irony of our present moment is that just as
young black men are murdered, maimed,
and imprisoned in record numbers, their
styles have become disproportionately
influential in shaping popular culture. For

most young black men, power is acquired
by stylizing their bodies over space and
time in such a way that their bodies reflect
their uniqueness and provoke fear in
others. To be “bad” is good not simply
because it subverts the language of the
dominant white culture but also because it
imposes a unique kind of order for young
black men on their own distinctive chaos
and solicits an attention that makes others
pull back with some trepidation. This
young black male style is a form of self-
identification and resistance in a hostile
culture; it also is an instance of machismo
identity ready for violent encounters. Yet
in a patriarchal society, machismo identity
is expected and even exalted—as with
Rambo and Reagan. Yet a black machismo
style solicits primarily sexual encounters

with women and violent encounters with
other black men or aggressive police. In
this way, the black male search for power
often reinforces the myth of black male
sexual prowess—a myth that tends to
subordinate black and white women as
objects of sexual pleasure. This search for
power also usually results in a direct
confrontation with the order-imposing
authorities of the status quo, that is, the
police or criminal justice system. The
prevailing cultural crisis of many black
men is the limited stylistic options of self-
image and resistance in a culture obsessed
with sex yet fearful of black sexuality.

This situation is even bleaker for most
black gay men who reject the major
stylistic option of black machismo
identity, yet who are marginalized in white

America and penalized in black America
for doing so. In their efforts to be
themselves, they are told they are not
really “black men,” not machismo-
identified. Black gay men are often the
brunt of talented black comics like
Arsenio Hall and Damon Wayans. Yet
behind the laughs lurks a black tragedy of
major proportions: the refusal of white
and black America to entertain seriously
new stylistic options for black men caught
in the deadly endeavor of rejecting black
machismo identities.

The case of black women is quite
different, partly because the dynamics of
white and black patriarchy affect them
differently and partly because the
degradation of black female
heterosexuality in America makes black

female lesbian sexuality a less frightful
jump to make. This does not mean that
black lesbians suffer less than black gays
—in fact, they suffer more, principally
owing to their lower economic status. But
this does mean that the subculture of black
lesbians is fluid and the boundaries are
less policed precisely because black
female sexuality in general is more
devalued, hence more marginal in white
and black America.

The dominant myth of black female
sexual prowess constitutes black women
as desirable sexual partners—yet the
central role of the ideology of white
female beauty attenuates the expected
conclusion. Instead of black women being
the most sought after “objects of sexual
pleasure”—as in the case of black men—

white women tend to occupy this
“upgraded,” that is, degraded, position
primarily because white beauty plays a
weightier role in sexual desirability for
women in racist patriarchal America. The
ideal of female beauty in this country puts
a premium on lightness and softness
mythically associated with white women
and downplays the rich stylistic manners
associated with black women. This
operation is not simply more racist to
black women than that at work in relation
to black men; it also is more devaluing of
women in general than that at work in
relation to men in general. This means that
black women are subject to more
multilayered bombardments of racist
assaults than black men in addition to the
sexist assaults they receive from black

men. Needless to say, most black men—
especially professional ones—simply
recycle this vulgar operation along the
axis of lighter hues that results in darker
black women bearing more of the brunt
than their already devalued lighter sisters.
The psychic bouts with self-confidence,
the existential agony over genuine
desirability, and the social burden of
bearing and usually nurturing black
children under these circumstances breeds
a spiritual strength of black women
unbeknownst to most black men and nearly
all other Americans.

As long as black sexuality remains a
taboo subject, we cannot acknowledge,
examine, or engage these tragic
psychocultural facts of American life.
Furthermore, our refusal to do so limits

our ability to confront the overwhelming
realities of the AIDS epidemic in America
in general and in black America in
particular. Although the dynamics of black
male sexuality differ from those of black
female sexuality, new stylistic options of
self-image and resistance can be forged
only when black women and men do so
together. This is so not because all black
people should be heterosexual or with
black partners, but rather because all
black people—including black children of
so-called “mixed” couples—are affected
deeply by the prevailing myths of black
sexuality. These myths are part of a wider
network of white supremacist lies whose
authority and legitimacy must be
undermined. In the long run, there is
simply no way out for all of us other than

living out the truths we proclaim about
genuine humane interaction in our psychic
and sexual lives. Only by living against
the grain can we keep alive the possibility
that the visceral feelings about black
bodies fed by racist myths and promoted
by market-driven quests for stimulation do
not forever render us obsessed with
sexuality and fearful of each other’s
humanity.

CHAPTER EIGHT

MALCOLM X AND BLACK

RAGE

If ever America undergoes great
revolutions, they will 1« brought
about by the presence of the black

race on the soil of the United States,
—that is to say, they will owe their
origin, not to the equality, but to the

inequality, of conditions.

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE,
Democracy in America (1840)

I do not imagine that the white and
black races will ever live in any

country upon an equal footing. But I
believe the difficulty to be still
greater in the United States than

elsewhere. An isolated individual
may surmount the prejudices of
religion, of his country, or of his

race, and if this individual is a king
he may effect surprising changes in
society; but a whole people cannot

rise, as it were, above itself. A
despot who should subject the

Americans and their former slaves to
the same yoke, might perhaps

succeed in commingling their races;
but as long as the American

democracy remains at the head of
affairs, no one will undertake so

difficult a task; and it may be
foreseen that the freer the white
population of the United States

becomes, the more isolated will it
remain.

ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE,
Democracy in America (1835)

MALCOLM X articulated black rage in
a manner unprecedented in American
history. His style of communicating this
rage bespoke a boiling urgency and an
audacious sincerity. The substance of what
he said highlighted the chronic refusal of
most Americans to acknowledge the sheer
absurdity that confronts human beings of
African descent in this country—the
incessant assaults on black intelligence,

beauty, character, and possibility. His
profound commitment to affirm black
humanity at any cost and his tremendous
courage to accent the hypocrisy of
American society made Malcolm X the
prophet of black rage— then and now.

Malcolm X was the prophet of black
rage primarily because of his great love
for black people. His love was neither
abstract nor ephemeral. Rather, it was a
concrete connection with a degraded and
devalued people in need of psychic
conversion. This is why Malcolm X’s
articulation of black rage was not directed
first and foremost at white America.
Rather, Malcolm believed that if black
people felt the love that motivated that
rage the love would produce a psychic
conversion in black people; they would

affirm themselves as human beings, no
longer viewing their bodies, minds, and
souls through white lenses, and believing
themselves capable of taking control of
their own destinies.

In American society—especially during
Malcolm X’s life in the 1950s and early
1960s—such a psychic conversion could
easily result in death. A proud, self-
affirming black person who truly believed
in the capacity of black people to throw
off the yoke of white racist oppression and
control their own destiny usually ended up
as one of those strange fruit that Southern
trees bore, about which the great Billie
Holliday poignantly sang. So when
Malcolm X articulated black rage, he
knew he also had to exemplify in his own
life the courage and sacrifice that any truly

self-loving black person needs in order to
confront the frightening consequences of
being self-loving in American society. In
other words, Malcolm X sharply
crystallized the relation of black
affirmation of self, black desire for
freedom, black rage against American
society, and the likelihood of early black
death.

Malcolm X’s notion of psychic

conversion holds that black people must
no longer view themselves through white
lenses. He claims black people will never
value themselves as long as they subscribe
to a standard of valuation that devalues
them. For example, Michael Jackson may
rightly wish to be viewed as a person, not
a color (neither black nor white), but his
facial revisions reveal a self-measurement

based on a white yardstick. Hence,
despite the fact that he is one of the
greatest entertainers who has ever lived,
he still views himself, at least in part,
through white aesthetic lenses that devalue
some of his African characteristics.
Needless to say, Michael Jackson’s
example is but the more honest and visible
instance of a rather pervasive self-
loathing among many of the black
professional class. Malcolm X’s call for
psychic conversion often strikes horror
into this privileged group because so
much of who they are and what they do is
evaluated in terms of their wealth, status,
and prestige in American society. On the
other hand, this group often understands
Malcolm X’s claim more than others
precisely because they have lived so

intimately in a white world in which the
devaluation of black people is so often
taken for granted or unconsciously
assumed. It is no accident that the black
middle class has always had an
ambivalent relation to Malcolm X—an
open rejection of his militant strategy of
wholesale defiance of American society
and a secret embrace of his bold truth-
telling about the depths of racism in
American society. One rarely encounters a
picture of Malcolm X (as one does of
Martin Luther King, Jr.) in the office of a
black professional, but there is no doubt
that Malcolm X dangles as the skeleton in
the closet lodged in the racial memory of
most black professionals.

In short, Malcolm X’s notion of psychic
conversion is an implicit critique of W. E.

B. Du Bois’s idea of “double-
consciousness.” Du Bois wrote:

The Negro is a sort of seventh
son, born with a veil, and gifted
with second-sight in this
American world,—a world
which yields him no true self-
consciousness, but only lets him
see himself through the
revelation of the other world. It
is a peculiar sensation, this
double-consciousness, this
sense of always looking at one’s
self through the eyes of others,
of measuring one’s soul by the
tape of a world that looks on in
amused contempt and pity.

For Malcolm X this “double-
consciousness” pertains more to those
black people who live “betwixt and
between” the black and white worlds—
traversing the borders between them yet
never settled in either. Hence, they crave
peer acceptance in both, receive genuine
approval from neither, yet persist in
viewing themselves through the lenses of
the dominant white society. For Malcolm
X, this “double-consciousness” is less a
description of a necessary black mode of
being in America than a particular kind of
colonized mind-set of a special group in
black America. Du Bois’s
“doubleconsciousness” seems to lock
black people into the quest for white
approval and disappointment owing
mainly to white racist assessment,

whereas Malcolm X suggests that this
tragic syndrome can be broken through
psychic conversion. But how?

Malcolm X does not put forward a
direct answer to this question. First, his
well-known distinction between “house
negroes” (who love and protect the white
master) and “field negroes” (who hate and
resist the white master) suggests that the
masses of black people are more likely to
acquire decolonized sensibilities and
hence less likely to be “co-opted” by the
white status quo. Yet this rhetorical
device, though insightful in highlighting
different perspectives among black
people, fails as a persuasive description
of the behavior of “well-to-do” black folk
and “poor” black folk. In other words,
there are numerous instances of “field

negroes” with “house negro” mentalities
and “house negroes” with “field negro”
mentalities. Malcolm X’s often-quoted
distinction rightly highlights the propensity
among highly assimilated black
professionals to put “whiteness” (in all its
various forms) on a pedestal, but it also
tends to depict “poor” black peoples’
notions and enactments of “blackness” in
an uncritical manner. Hence his implicit
critique of Du Bois’s idea of “double-
consciousness” contains some truth yet
offers an inadequate alternative.

Second, Malcolm X’s black nationalist
viewpoint claims that the only legitimate
response to white supremacist ideology
and practice is black self-love and black
self-determination free of the tension
generated by “double-consciousness.”

This claim is both subtle and problematic.
It is subtle in that every black freedom
movement is predicated on an affirmation
of African humanity and a quest for black
control over the destinies of black people.
Yet not every form of black self-love
affirms African humanity. Furthermore not
every project of black serf-determination
consists of a serious quest for black
control over the destinies of black people.
Malcolm’s claim is problematic in that it
tends to assume that black nationalisms
have a monopoly on black self-love and
black self-determination. This fallacious
assumption confuses the issues highlighted
by black nationalisms with the various
ways in which black nationalists and
others understand these issues.

For example, the grand legacy of

Marcus Garvey forces us never to forget
that black self-love and black serf-respect
sit at the center of any possible black
freedom movement. Yet this does not mean
that we must talk about black self-love
and black self-respect in the way in which
Garvey did, that is, on an imperial model
in which black armies and navies signify
black power. Similarly, the tradition of
Elijah Muhammad compels us to
acknowledge the centrality of black self-
regard and black self-esteem, yet that does
not entail an acceptance of how Elijah
Muhammad talked about achieving this
aim, that is, by playing a game of black
supremacy that awakens us from our
captivity to white supremacy. My point
here is that a focus on the issues rightly
targeted by black nationalists and an

openness to the insights of black
nationalists does not necessarily result in
an acceptance of black nationalist
ideology. Malcolm X tended to make such
an unwarranted move—despite his
legitimate focus on black self-love, his
rich insights on black captivity to white
supremacy, and his profound notion of
psychic conversion.

MALCOLM X’s notion of psychic
conversion depends on the idea that black
spaces, in which black community,
humanity, love, care, concern, and support
flourish, will emerge from a boiling black
rage. At this point, however, Malcolm X’s
project falters. How can the boiling black
rage be contained and channeled in the
black spaces such that destructive and
self-destructive consequences are abated?

The greatness of Malcolm X is, in part,
that he raises this fundamental challenge
with a sharpness and urgency never before
posed in black America, yet he never had
a chance in his short life to grapple with
it, nor solve it in idea and deed.

The project of black separatism—to
which Malcolm X was beholden for most
of his life after his first psychic
conversion to the Nation of Islam—
suffered from deep intellectual and
organizational problems. Unlike Malcolm
X’s notion of psychic conversion, Elijah
Muhammad’s idea of religious conversion
was predicated on an obsession with
white supremacy. The basic aim of black
Muslim theology—with its distinct black
supremacist account of the origins of
white people—was to counter white

supremacy. Yet this preoccupation with
white supremacy still allowed white
people to serve as the principal point of
reference. That which fundamentally
motivates one still dictates the terms of
what one thinks and does—so the
motivation of a black supremacist doctrine
reveals how obsessed one is with white
supremacy. This is understandable in a
white racist society—but it is crippling
for a despised people struggling for
freedom, in that one’s eyes should be on
the prize, not on the perpetuator of one’s
oppression. In short, Elijah Muhammad’s
project remained captive to the supremacy
game—a game mastered by the white
racists he opposed and imitated with his
black supremacy doctrine.

Malcolm X’s notion of psychic

conversion can be understood and used
such that it does not necessarily entail
black supremacy; it simply rejects black
captivity to white supremacist ideology
and practice. Hence, as the major black
Muslim spokesperson, he had many
sympathizers but many fewer Muslim
members. Why did Malcolm X permit his
notion of psychic conversion to result in
black supremacist claims of the Nation of
Islam—claims that undermine much of the
best of his call for psychic conversion?
Malcolm X remained a devoted follower
of Elijah Muhammad until 1964 partly
because he believed the other major
constructive channels of black rage in
America—the black church and black
music—were less effective in producing
and sustaining psychic conversion than the

Nation of Islam. He knew that the
electoral political system could never
address the existential dimension of black
rage—hence he, like Elijah, shunned it.
Malcolm X also recognized, as do too few
black leaders today, that the black
encounter with the absurd in racist
American society yields a profound
spiritual need for human affirmation and
recognition. Hence, the centrality of
religion and music—those most spiritual
of human activities—in black life.

Yet, for Malcolm, much of black
religion and black music had misdirected
black rage away from white racism and
toward another world of heaven and
sentimental romance. Needless to say,
Malcolm’s conception of black
Christianity as a white man’s religion of

pie-in-the-sky and black music as soupy “I
Love You B-a-b-y” romance is wrong.
While it may be true that most—but not all
—of the black music of Malcolm’s day
shunned black rage, the case of the church-
based civil rights movement would seem
to counter his charge that black
Christianity serves as a sedative to put
people to sleep rather than to ignite them
to action. Like Elijah Muhammad (and
unlike Malcolm X), Martin Luther King,
Jr., concluded that black rage was so
destructive and self-destructive that
without a broad moral vision and political
organization, black rage would wreak
havoc on black America. His project of
nonviolent resistance to white racism was
an attempt to channel black rage in
political directions that preserved black

dignity and changed American society.
And his despair at the sight of Watts in
1965 or Detroit and Newark in 1967 left
him more and more pessimistic about the
moral channeling of black rage in
America. To King it looked as if cycles of
chaos and destruction loomed on the
horizon if these moral channels were
ineffective or unappealing to the coming
generation. For Malcolm, however, the
civil rights movement was not militant
enough. It failed to speak clearly and
directly to and about black rage.

Malcolm X also seems to have had
almost no intellectual interest in dealing
with what is distinctive about black
religion and black music: their cultural
hybrid character in which the complex
mixture of African, European, and

Amerindian elements are constitutive of
something that is new and black in the
modern world. Like most black
nationalists, Malcolm X feared the
culturally hybrid character of black life.
This fear rested upon the need for
Manichean (black/white or male/female)
channels for the direction of black rage—
forms characterized by charismatic
leaders, patriarchal structures, and
dogmatic pronouncements. To be sure,
these forms are similar to those of other
religious organizations around the world,
yet the fear of black cultural hybridity
among the Nation of Islam is significant
for its distinctive form of Manichean
theology and authoritarian arrangements.
The Manichean theology kept the white
world at bay even as it heralded dominant

modern European notions like racial
supremacy and nationalism. The
authoritarian arrangements imposed a top-
down disciplined corps of devoted
followers who contained their rage in an
atmosphere of cultural repression
(regulation of clothing worn, books and
records consumed, sexual desire, etc.) and
paternalistic protection of women.

This complex relation of cultural
hybridity and critical sensibility (or jazz
and democracy) raises interesting
questions. If Malcolm X feared cultural
hybridity, to what degree or in what sense
was he a serious democrat? Did he
believe that the cure to the egregious ills
of a racist American “democracy” was
more democracy that included black
people? Did his relative silence regarding

the monarchies he visited in the Middle
East bespeak a downplaying of the role of
democratic practices in empowering
oppressed peoples? Was his fear of
cultural hybridity partly rooted in his own
reluctance to come to terms with his own
personal hybridity, for example, his
“redness,” light skin, close white friends,
etc.?

Malcolm X’s fear of cultural hybridity
rests upon two political concerns: that
cultural hybridity downplayed the vicious
character of white supremacy and that
cultural hybridity intimately linked the
destinies of black and white people such
that the possibility of black freedom was
farfetched. His fundamental focus on the
varieties, subtleties, and cruelties of white
racism made him suspicious of any

discourse about cultural hybridity.
Furthermore, those figures who were most
eloquent and illuminating about black
cultural hybridity in the 1950s and early
1960s, for example, Ralph Ellison and
Albert Murray, were political
integrationists. Such a position seemed to
pass over too quickly the physical terror
and psychic horror of being black in
America. To put it bluntly, Malcolm X
identified much more with the mind-set of
Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas in Native
Son than with that of Ralph Ellison’s
protagonist in Invisible Man,

Malcolm X’s deep pessimism about the
capacity and possibility of white
Americans to shed their racism led him,
ironically, to downplay the past and
present bonds between blacks and whites.

For if the two groups were, as Martin
Luther King, Jr., put it, locked into “one
garment of destiny,” then the very chances
for black freedom were nil. This deep
pessimism also rendered Malcolm X
ambivalent about American democracy—
for if the majority were racist how could
the black minority ever be free? Malcolm
X’s definition of a “nigger” was “a victim
of American democracy”— had not the
Herrenvolk democracy of the United
States made black people noncitizens or
anticitizens of the Republic? Of course,
the aim of a constitutional democracy is to
safeguard the rights of the minority and
avoid the tyranny of the majority. Yet the
concrete practice of the U.S. legal system
from 1883 to 1964 promoted a tyranny of
the white majority much more than a

safeguarding of the rights of black
Americans. In fact, these tragic facts
drove Malcolm X to look elsewhere for
the promotion and protection of black
people’s rights—to institutions such as the
United Nations or the Organization of
African Unity. One impulse behind his
internationalization of the black freedom
struggle in the United States was a deep
pessimism about America’s will to racial
justice, no matter how democratic
America was or is.

In addition, Malcolm X’s fear of
cultural hybridity was linked to his own
personal hybridity (he was the grandson of
a white man), which blurred the very
boundaries so rigidly policed by white
supremacist authorities. For Malcolm X,
the distinctive feature of American culture

was not its cross-cultural syncretism but
rather the enforcement of a racial caste
system that defined any product of this
syncretism as abnormal, alien, and other
to both black and white communities. Like
Garvey, Malcolm X saw such hybridity,
for example, mulattoes, as symbols of
weakness and confusion. The very idea of
not “fitting in” the U.S. discourse of
positively valued whiteness and
negatively debased blackness meant one
was subject to exclusion and
marginalization by whites and blacks. For
Malcolm X, in a racist society, this was a
form of social death.

One would think that Malcolm X’s
second conversion, in 1964, to Orthodox
Islam might have allayed his fear of
cultural hybridity. Yet there seems to be

little evidence that he revised his
understanding of the radically culturally
hybrid character of black life.
Furthermore, his deep pessimism toward
American democracy continued after his
second conversion—though it was no
longer based on mythological grounds but
solely on the historical experience of
Africans in the modern world. It is no
accident that the nonblack persons
Malcolm X encountered who helped
change his mind about the capacity of
white people to be human were outside of
America and Europe, Muslims in the
Middle East. Needless to say, for him, the
most striking feature of these Islamic
regimes was not their undemocratic
practices but rather their acceptance of his
black humanity. This great prophet of

black rage—with all his brilliance,
courage, and conviction—remained blind
to basic structures of domination based on
class, gender, and sexual orientation in the
Middle East.

THE contemporary focus on Malcolm
X, especially among black youth, can be
understood as both the open articulation of
black rage (as in film videos and on tapes
targeted at whites, Jews, Koreans, black
women, black men, and others) and as a
desperate attempt to channel this rage into
something more than a marketable
commodity for the culture industry. The
young black generation are up against
forces of death, destruction, and disease
unprecedented in the everyday life of
black urban people. The raw reality of
drugs and guns, despair and decrepitude,

generates a raw rage that, among past
black spokespersons, only Malcolm X’s
speech approximates. Yet the issue of
psychic conversion, cultural hybridity,
black supremacy, authoritarian
organization, borders and boundaries in
sexuality, and other matters all loom large
at present—the same issues Malcolm X
left dangling at the end of his short life
spent articulating black rage and affirming
black humanity.

If we are to build on the best of
Malcolm X, we must preserve and expand
his notion of psychic conversion that
cements networks and groups in which
black community, humanity, love, care,
and concern can take root and grow (the
work of bell hooks is the best example).
These spaces—beyond the best of black

music and black religion—reject
Manichean ideologies and authoritarian
arrangements in the name of moral
visions, subtle analyses of wealth and
power, and concrete strategies of
principled coalitions and democratic
alliances. These visions, analyses, and
strategies never lose sight of black rage,
yet they focus this rage where it belongs:
on any form of racism, sexism,
homophobia, or economic injustice that
impedes the opportunities of “everyday
people” (to use the memorable phrase of
Sly and the Family Stone and Arrested
Development) to live lives of dignity and
decency. For example, poverty can be as
much a target of rage as degraded identity.

Furthermore, the cultural hybrid
character of black life leads us to highlight

a metaphor alien to Malcolm X’s
perspective—yet consonant with his
performances to audiences—namely, the
metaphor of jazz. I use the term “jazz” here
not so much as a term for a musical art
form, as for a mode of being in the world,
an improvisational mode of protean, fluid,
and flexible dispositions toward reality
suspicious of “either/or” viewpoints,
dogmatic pronouncements, or supremacist
ideologies. To be a jazz freedom fighter is
to attempt to galvanize and energize
world-weary people into forms of
organization with accountable leadership
that promote critical exchange and broad
reflection. The interplay of individuality
and unity is not one of uniformity and
unanimity imposed from above but rather
of conflict among diverse groupings that

reach a dynamic consensus subject to
questioning and criticism. As with a
soloist in a jazz quartet, quintet or band,
individuality is promoted in order to
sustain and increase the creative tension
with the group—a tension that yields
higher levels of performance to achieve
the aim of the collective project. This kind
of critical and democratic sensibility flies
in the face of any policing of borders and
boundaries of “blackness,” “maleness,”
“femaleness,” or “whiteness.” Black
people’s rage ought to target white
supremacy, but also ought to realize that
blackness per se can encompass feminists
like Frederick Douglass or W. E. B. Du
Bois. Black people’s rage should not
overlook homophobia, yet also should
acknowledge that heterosexuality per se

can be associated with so-called
“straight” anti-homophobes—just as the
struggle against black poverty can be
supported by progressive elements of any
race, gender, or sexual orientation.

Malcolm X was the first great black
spokesperson who looked ferocious white
racism in the eye, didn’t blink, and lived
long enough to tell America the truth about
this glaring hypocrisy in a bold and
defiant manner. Unlike Elijah Muhammad
and Martin Luther King, Jr., he did not
live long enough to forge his own
distinctive ideas and ways of channeling
black rage in constructive channels to
change American society. Only if we are
as willing as Malcolm X to grow and
confront the new challenges posed by the
black rage of our day will we take the

black freedom struggle to a new and
higher level. The future of this country
may well depend on it.

Epilogue
icans would not be “white”—they would
be only Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and
others engaged in class, ethnic, and gender
struggles over resources and identity.
What made America distinctly American
for them was not simply the presence of
unprecedented opportunities, but the
struggle for seizing these opportunities in
a new land in which black slavery and
racial caste served as the floor upon
which white class, ethnic, and gender
struggles could be diffused and diverted.
In other words, white poverty could be
ignored and whites’ paranoia of each other

could be overlooked primarily owing to
the distinctive American feature: the basic
racial divide of black and white peoples.
From 1776 to 1964—188 years of our
218-year history—this racial divide
would serve as a basic presupposition for
the expansive functioning of American
democracy, even as the concentration of
wealth and power remained in the hands
of a few well-to-do white men.

The era of the sixties was a watershed
period in American history because for
the first time we decided as a people to
overcome the racial divide and declare
war on poverty. Within two years, legal
barriers against black access to civil and
voting rights were erased. Within eight
years, half of America’s poor people were
lifted out of poverty. And within a decade,

the number of poor old people was more
than cut in half. Contrary to the popular
myths about the sixties, this was a brief
moment in which we bravely confronted
our most explosive issues as a people:
racial hierarchy and the maldistribution
of wealth and power. But it did not last
long. As the economy slumped, black rage
escalated and white backlash set in. And,
for nearly two decades, we witnessed a
decline in the real wages of most
Americans, a new racial divide in the
minds and streets of fellow citizens, a
massive transfer of wealth from working
people to the well-to-do, and an increase
in drugs and guns (along with fear and
violence) in American life. Many
conservative Republicans played the old
racial card to remain in office and most

liberal Democrats lacked the courage to
tell the truth about the new levels of
decline and decay engulfing us. Instead,
we as a people tolerated levels of
suffering and misery among the
disadvantaged (especially among poor
children of all colors, caught in a vicious
natural lottery!), lost faith in our money-
driven political system, and lived lives of
hedonistic evasion and narcissistic
avoidance as the racial divide expanded
and the gaps between rich, poor, and
working people increased. We now find
ourselves hungry for quick solutions and
thirsty for overnight cures for deep
economic, cultural, and political problems
that were allowed to fester for decades.
And, most sadly, we seem to lack the
patience, courage, and hope necessary to

reconstruct our public life—the very
lifeblood of any democracy.

My aim in this book is to revitalize our
public conversation about race, in light of
our paralyzing pessimism and stultifying
cynicism as a people. As a radical
democrat, I believe it is late— but maybe
not too late—to confront and overcome
the poverty and paranoia, the despair and
distrust that haunt us. Since democracy is,
as the great Reinhold Niebuhr noted, a
proximate solution to insoluble problems,
I envision neither a social Utopia nor a
political paradise. My goal is to be as
bold and defiant in my criticism of any
form of xenophobia, as honest and candid
about the need for civil responsibility and
social accountability of each one of us,
and as charitable and compassionate

toward any political perspective from
which we can gain insight and wisdom to
empower us.

In these downbeat times, we need as
much hope and courage as we do vision
and analysis; we must accent the best of
each other even as we point out the
vicious effects of our racial divide and the
pernicious consequences of our
maldistribution of wealth and power. We
simply cannot enter the twenty-first
century at each other’s throats, even as we
acknowledge the weighty forces of rac-
ism, patriarchy, economic inequality,
homophobia, and ecological abuse on our
necks. We are at a crucial crossroad in the
history of this nation—and we either hang
together by combating these forces that
divide and degrade us or we hang

separately. Do we have the intelligence,
humor, imagination, courage, tolerance,
love, respect, and will to meet the
challenge? Time will tell. None of us
alone can save the nation or the world.
But each of us can make a positive
difference if we commit ourselves to do
so.

—Cornel West
Princeton

January 1994

• Front Cover
• Preface 2001: Democracy Matters in Race Matters
• Preface 1993
• Introduction: Race Matters
• Chapter One: Nihilism in Black America
• Chapter Two: The Pitfalls of Racial Reasoning
• Chapter Three: The Crisis of Black Leadership
• Chapter Four: Demystifying the New Black Conservatism
• Chapter Five: Beyond Affirmative Action: Equality and Identity
• Chapter Six: On Black-Jewish Relations
• Chapter Seven: Black Sexuality: The Taboo Subject
• Chapter Eight: Malcolm X and Black Rage

Four questions that need to be answered.

1) Explain the following quote in your own words.

“Our truncated public discussions of race suppress the best of who and what we are as a people because they fail to confront the complexity of the issue in a candid and critical manner. The predictable pitting of liberals against conservatives , Great Society Democrats, against self-help Republicans, reinforces intellectual parochialism and political paralysis” (33-34)

2) Discuss the liberal and conservative approaches to racial issues according to West.

3) What are some of the solutions/steps West outlines to battle inequality and help improve all Americans quality of life?

4) Explain West’s final warning to the reader.

“Either we learn a new language of empathy and compassion or the fire this time will consume us all” (51)