Cedric Johnson. Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 978- … (original) (raw)
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Theoria, 2022
How do we define Black politics conceptually? What is the conceptual jurisdiction from which it is framed as distinct from other political concepts? The concept of Black politics, I argue, operates as a force of refusal of the inevitability of liberalism as the 'end of history.' It repudiates what liberal politics routinely represents as pacific, universal, rational and inclusive to the field of politics. The concept of Black politics, then, is an anamorphic signifier that destabilises dominant conceptions of liberal politics as inevitable. I make two arguments in this article: first, that liberalism is an anaemic singularity that excludes the imperial and racial assemblages in which it is implicated, and second, that the concept of Black politics is anamorphic in so far as it creates the possibility for emancipation that transcends this liberal obligation in its imperial and racial assemblages.
The Opportunity Cost of Black Activism
Research Africa Reviews Vol. 5 No. 1., 2021
In economics, the concept of opportunity cost stands for “the anticipated value of 'that which might be' if choices were made differently.” This means there is a trade-off between loss and gain in human choices of actions. But, what happens to a community when it is forced to pursue an alternative in which its gain is squarely allocated to the public good? This is the case of Black Activism in America. Its community invests their most valuable assets to pursue a set of ends in which all other communities equally benefit, while at the same time the community activists are forgoing other alternatives that could have been uniquely beneficial to them. This is what I term in this essay the opportunity cost of Black Activism. The stifling situation in America forces Blacks (as if they have no choice actually) to a primordial space where they have to utilize their political capital for the value of justice. While this act is noble, its gains are public goods; they are equally valuable and distributed to all members of society including those who chose to pursue different alternative gains of private good. If true democracy is about equality, then this arrangement is bordering on servitude. If our politics were to be framed in economic terms, we would have described this arrangement as a ‘free rider problem,’ a failure of our market economy. In an ideal setting, the public good of justice should be pursued by all members of society. The notes from The Federalist Papers made it clear that, “Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society.” In Alexis De Tocqueville’s conception of civil society’s role in enhancing good governance and democracy, ensuring and refining such a shared end should be a voluntary act within the purview of associations that are rooted in the initiative of individuals.
Revisiting the Black Struggle: Lessons for the 21st Century
Journal of Black Studies, 2002
This article critically examines the cumulative successes and failures of the African American struggle for liberation and equality, and it hints at the future direction of the Black movement in the United States. Specifically, it demonstrates how the Black movement legally dismantled direct institutional racism and why it failed to eliminate indirect institutional racism. This article also explains why the objectives of cultural self-determination and fundamentally transforming Black America were not successful. By looking at the major problems of the Black community today, this article emphasizes the need to learn critically from the past struggle and leaders in order to incorporate the best experiences in the future struggle for economic development, self-determination, and multicultural democracy. With the emerging of the 21st century, African Americans, their allies, and supporters need to critically reassess the cultural, ideological, political, and economic aspects of the past struggle to account for the successes and failures of the Black movement and to map out the future strategy of struggle, because the majority of African Americans still face serious crises. By critically and comprehensively reevaluating the process through which the African American movement was produced by social structural and conjunctural factors (i.e., politicized collective grievances, cultural memory, economic change and social transformation, international politics, migration, urban community formation, elite formation, production and dissemination of liberation knowledge, cognitive liberation, and the development of social infrastructures in forms of institution, organization, and human agency), we can identify some important insights that are necessary to develop the strategy of future struggle for this society. The Black struggle was produced by 86
The History of Black Studies, 2021
The Black Power Movement represents one of the most important and controversial social and political movements in postwar American history. This graduate redings course examines how the movement for black political self-determination during the 1960s and 1970s transformed American race relations, accelerated the pace of black elected officials nationally, erected new educational, social, political, and cultural institutions nationwide and redefined black politics, identity, and culture. We will also explore the movement’s critique of, and participation in, civil rights struggles; its reimagining of American Democracy; efforts to gain political and economic power within America society while redrawing the landscape of race relations.