Vision Circle

Ujamaa & Brain Drain

Today was a very fertile one for discussion. My colleagues at Lucy Florence engaged in a wide-ranging discussion about Jews, Israel, China, Tanzania and Ujamaa. I'll simply excerpt one salient point I'd like to establish.

As my man mentioned, it was like pulling teeth to get Negroes to wear afros ('naturals') in the 60s and 70s. He said that black beauty shops hated the black consciousness movement. They figured that could never make money if blackfolks weren't going to get conked any longer. He recalled the turning point, when even James Brown cut off his permed hair. A great deal of energy was spent in changing blackfolks orientation to themselves.

I agree strongly, but I also think a bit too much energy was spent without revising that vision. In particular as black activists left the streets to start integrating and turing the tide at universities, they spent too much on a Marxist vision. This is the reason so many blackfolks are unsatisfied with 'black leadership'.

To my way of seeing the progress of black intellectual progress we went from the streets, to starting black student unions on predominantly white and recently integrated college campuses. We went from there to getting black professors, to black studies classes, to interdisciplinary programs to majors. The effect of efforts of blackfolks in the American universities is a decicive and extarodinary accomplishment that cannot be underestimated. It continues to this day.

Now my man, an older black gent, has still got Jews on the brain. He says that Jews are powerful because they are educated. So I tell him that the problem is that we have all these black PhDs and educators but they're all still tripping off Marx and colonialism. We have misspent our educational capital. If the Jews have gone to be doctors and lawyers or whatever it is they've done that's so great, it's not because they are smarter. We have our PhDs too, they just thought making money wasn't important. So whose fault is that?

So here's what I'm doing. I am laying a wide series of 'problems' with African America at the foot of economics, which for some reason we decided not to study. I certainly know more black engineers, scientists and programmers than I do economists. Try as I might, I have not been able to sustain a decent dialog disabusing Ujamaa as much as I would like to. My breakdown is Ujamaa, Black Capitalism, Blackface Capitalism and Invisiblack Capitalism, but what do I know?

Is it any wonder that there are so few influential economists in the pantheon of African American intellectuals? Whom do we have? Very few and all of them far from the left orthodox, with the exception of Manning Marable. Sowell, Walter Williams, Glenn Loury. Are blackfolks afraid of studying economics? Is there a truth out there that we seek to avoid? Hmmm.

Present company excepted, maybe our problem is that we have too many Political Science professors, too many American Studies professors, too many Social Scientists, EdDs etcetera?

The consequence of this is quite understandable. The man with the hammer sees all problems as nails. The educator, of which we've had generations, see the problem of young black men today in terms of the failure of the educational system. Today I'm contrarian, and I say the failure is ours as well. We have failed to use it completely and overburdened a few narrow paths. That needs to change.