If Black Power’s Not Gone, Where Is It? [Reader Forum]
by Channing Kennedy, colorlines.com
May 16th 2011 9:30 AM
Last week we ran a feature by journalist Reniqua Allen, “Whatever Happened to
Black Power? (And Do We Care?)”, which surveys the present and future of the
movement. Reniqua digs in deep with leaders, scholars and torch-bearers; she
doesn’t find a single answer, but does raise a lot of great questions. In an
era when systemic racism can’t snag a headline, is a sense of political urgency
impossible to recapture? Has the cultural frame turned the movement in on
itself? How can new alliances be made with the exclusionary past still so
close? It’s a comprehensive, provocative piece—and our commenters comprehend
and provoke in turn.
Here’s CUNY Law School professor and Colorlines board member Victor Goode.
Victor’s written for Colorlines about that other modern American racial
movement, the Republican Party, and the ongoing efforts to delegitimize
non-white political power and identity; we’re very glad to see him here in the
comments providing some context.
One notable accomplishment of the black power movement that is so obvious that
it escaped mention in the article is that it began with a redefinition of who
we are. With the advent of the black consciousness movement we not only
transformed ourselves from being Negro or colored to black, but this new sense
of self identity has now evolved to African-American. Our “Negro” identity was
limited and insular. Suddenly with our re-defintition we became connected with
the world and the black diaspora spanning the six continents. This was not
simply a public proclamation coming down from political leaders. It was
personal to each of us and changed how we looked because it changed how we
looked at ourselves.
What eventually evolved as a “black power movement” was more accurately a
series of political movements that began to seriously grapple with the question
of what self determination might mean given our political reality? As might be
expected, there were many answers to that question, ranging from more
conservative groups like the National Urban League that proclaimed that black
power meant more black small business development, to the more radical
revolutionary black nationalists that saw black power as a call to join the
international revolutionary struggle against racism, colonialism and
capitalism.
Needless to say any political movement that was cast under such a broad
conceptual framework was bound to fragment and dissipate over time. But I think
it would be a mistake to think of the black power movement as “over.” There is
an ebb and flow to struggle and resistance against repression. This was
certainly true when one examines the socialist movement. While it was born in
the late nineteenth century it flowed to it’s zenith with the creation of the
Soviet Union and China—neither of which continue to embrace socialism. But, is
socialism the ideology dead as a world movement? I think not, and I think there
is evidence to prove this point.
Similarly I think that the black power movement is in a phase of dormant
redefinition. Political movements respond to political conditions and while
today the cutting edge of racial oppression is different in kind, it is not so
different in effect.
In 1972, the National Black Political Convention in Gary Indiana made a failed
effort to unite the many varied factions of the black movement. Through much
rancor and disagreement the trend that eventually dominated the convention was
that of black electoral political empowerment. Today we are living with the
results of that choice, both positive and negative.
But when one looks at the historical range of the African American struggle to
redefine liberty, equality and freedom from within our own condition we see
that it covers our entire existence on the North American continent. Black
“nationalism” was simply one phase of this longer struggle. Whether the
continuation of that struggle re-claims the term “black power” remains to be
seen. But whatever form the next phase of this struggle takes it will certainly
owe much to the political seeds that were sown by the black power movements of
the 1960’s.
By the way, friends of mine who were in SNCC tell me that it was Willie Ricks,
a SNCC field organizer who first coined the phrase “black power.” Stokley
Charmichael heard about it and began incorporating it into his speeches. The
rest is history.
And superstar Colorlines commenter Tim Jones-Yelvington asks how a movement can
renew if it ignores its new people:
[…] I’m also a little leery about the twinge of adultism in sweeping
generational statement’s like Baraka’s. … I am worried about how it glosses
over the leadership roles black youth activists are taking in groups and
organizations working on school-to-prison pipeline issues, on issues affecting
Queer street youth of color, on issues of community health and safety, among
other issues, and I think it’s important to pay attention also to research
initiatives like Cathy Cohen’s Black Youth Project that are centered in the
voices and experiences of black youth and provide a more nuanced picture.
[…] As I strive to be an ally to youth as well as antiracist organizers, it
feels important to me to complicate this idea that black youth are all
disengaged. I worry sometimes that our narratives about youth apathy—which
exist in different ways in multiple communities—actually create what they are
trying to describe, because young people hear them and internalize them. I
think “movement moments,” moments of mass mobilization, critical mass, happen
in waves and it’s the hard work that small groups of young people are currently
doing that helps make those movements possible.
Original Page:
http://colorlines.com/archives/2011/05/if_the_black_power_movements_not_gone_where_is_it_reader_forum.html
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