The #BlackLivesMatter movement has brought the ever-present reality of racial injustice to the surface of the American conversation, which is fragmented and distracted while waves of social media posts drown out the conversation itself. Yet the dialogue continues, except on a taboo topic that many would prefer to have been remained buried along with the rest of the history of apartheid in the Land of the Free: the idea of "Black Power." Cue the dashikis, the clenched upraised fists, the Afro-bedecked militants. The preceding image still has the power to frighten the majority, of course, but that is hardly the point. There has never been a real reckoning in this country, and to revisit Black Power is to go on a path toward a conciliation with the past that has yet to take place.
Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton's book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America (Random House, 1967) is an intellectual landmark that remains misunderstood. Growing up in de facto segregated suburbia, it was part of the culture to naturally assume that "black power" is equivalent to "white power," which was obviously beyond the pale and racist. People like this writer absorbed through osmosis a false equivalency that placed the Black Panthers on the same moral plane as the KKK. But as the adage goes, you live and learn, and comfortable ignorance gave way to searching for an understanding of context and history. Carmichael and Hamilton anticipated what would become a popular interpretation of what Black Power represents: "It is a commentary on the fundamentally racist nature of this society that the concept of group strength for black people must be articulated -- not to mention defended." They go on to say,
No other group would submit to being led by others. Italians do not run the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. Irish do not chair Christopher Columbus Societies. Yet when black people call for black-run and all-black organizations, they are immediately classed in a category with the Ku Klux Klan.
Another familiar trope you may have heard at some point is the notion that other groups "got out of the ghetto," so why don't... Ahem: "The black community was told time and again how other immigrants finally won acceptance: that is, by following the Protestant Ethic of Work and Achievement. They worked hard; therefore, they achieved. We were not told that it was by building Irish Power, Italian Power, Polish Power or Jewish Power that these groups got themselves together and operated from a position of strength. We were not told that 'the American dream' wasn't designed for black people."
Those who have perpetrated the canard that theirs is an anti-white tract are under a delusion which would have been easily dispelled had they only read this book. They are crystal-clear: American "society does nothing meaningful about institutional racism ... because the black community has been the creation of, and dominated by, a combination of oppressive forces and special interests in the white community. ... This is not to say that every single white American consciously oppresses black people." They add, "He does not need to." Carmichael and Hamilton are talking about group interest, not condemning white people as white people. Answering the "deliberate and absurd lie" that black power is reverse racism, they say, "Racism is not merely exclusion on the basis of race but exclusion for the purpose of subjugating or maintaining subjugation" (my italics).
I.F. Stone, the radical independent journalist, is quoted at the top of the book, sharing his thoughts, seeing race relations in the United States in terms of colonialism -- as do Carmichael and Hamilton. In his biography American Radical: The Life and Times of I.F. Stone (2009), D.D. Guttenplan quoted him as exhorting "white sympathizers" to come to terms with the fact "that in any movement the leverage exerted by the moderates depends on the existence of an extremist fringe," and "that a certain amount of black nationalism is inevitable among Negroes; they cannot reach equality without the restoration of pride in themselves as Negroes," a pride which "cannot be achieved unless they learn to fight for themselves, not just as wards of white men." Following the urban riots of 1966, Stone observed, "It is not Stokely Carmichael, it is Mayor Daley and President Johnson who by their actions indoctrinate the Negro in violence." Stone was doubtful about Black Power, dismissing it as "less a program than an incantation to deal with the crippling effects of white supremacy."
There was a program, however, as the sociologist Richard Polenberg pointed out in his work One Nation Divisible (Viking, 1980). Both the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) "quickly adopted variants of the nationalist position, which, as Carmichael explained it, called for retaliation instead of nonviolence, autonomy instead of alliances with white liberals, 'liberation' instead of integration, and the raising of racial consciousness rather than its eradication." Polenberg explains that Black Power advocates
looked toward the mobilization of voters to elect black candidates, the development of self-sufficient business enterprises and cooperatives, and the creation of community-controlled schools and cultural organizations. Underlying Carmichael's version of nationalism ... was a wish to dissolve the bonds linking blacks to a white society that was, at bottom, racist, materialistic, and inhumane. ... The [Vietnam] war appeared to confirm two theories advanced in Black Power adherents: that racism at home produced imperialism abroad and that national liberation movements in urban ghettos were as justifiable as in the third world.
Polenberg added that the movement "provided an attractive model for Puerto Ricans, Chicanos, Native Americans, and, indeed, the descendants of nearly every immigrant group," in other words every group that has felt the preponderant weight of American history, built on white supremacy. In order to support such an assertion, there is no need for extravagant theorizing. The simple facts will do. Carmichael and Hamilton point to the way history is taught: "Frequently, in the textbooks and classrooms, we are told that America is a 'society of laws, not of men,' the implication being, of course, that laws operate impartially and objectively, irrespective of race or other particular differences. This is completely inconsistent with reality." The past -- and the present -- are seen through a lens of unvarnished Realpolitik:
Law is the agent of those in political power; it is the product of those powerful enough to define right and wrong and to have that definition legitimized by "law." This is not to say that "might makes right," but it is to say that Might makes Law. ... The history of the country shows that black people could come together to do only three things: sing, pray, dance. Any time they came together to do anything else, they were threatened or intimidated. For decades, black people had been taught to believe that voting, politics, is "white folks' business." And the white folks had indeed monopolized that business, by methods which ran the gamut from economic intimidation to murder.
In a pluralistic society like the United States, change happens when groups coalesce around their shared group interest to fight for policies that affect them as a group. It may not sound nice, but given American history it is not at all racist. Some things have not really changed in the near half-century that has elapsed since Black Power was first published: "The core problem within the ghetto is the vicious circle created by the lack of decent housing, decent jobs and adequate education." Hashtags alone will not challenge this ongoing reality.