August 23, 2005

Black Political Ideologies

Ideologies work to do a few different things. They identify friends and enemies. They identify opinion leaders and anti-opinion leaders. They identify goals, and to a much lesser extent, strategies and tactics. They link individual experiences to group experiences. They reduce complexity and interpret truth (Harris-Lacewell, 2004).

Harris-Lacewell, taking from Dawson, identifies four major streams of black political thought: Black Nationalism, Black Integrationism, Black Feminism, Black Conservatism. A fifth exists--Black Radicalism, but she (again taking from Dawson), argues that it doesn't really appear in popular black public opinion. Myself? I don't think this strain would appear in black public opinion largely because the survey questions used to measure radicalism are weak.

These ideologies are to an extent orthogonal to conservatism and liberalism. Louis Farrakhan for example, with his strong critiques of black cultural life, and his anti-democratic tendencies, can be thought of as a black CONSERVATIVE nationalist. And within black nationalism there are even more dimensions (I published a paper recently arguing that Pan-Africanism should be thought of as a dimension of black nationalism distinct from separatist nationalism).

One thing that bears witnessing. Just as the schools our children attend are set up to deal with mid twentieth century realities, and our media is set up to cover those same realities with a slight techno spin....it is very likely that our ideologies too are fifty years old. Separatist black nationalists for example no longer have to theoretically use the law or revolutionary means to take over land, or a set of southern states (like the Republic of New Africa suggests).

Simply convince around 100,000 or so black people to move to Rhode Island.

Posted by at August 23, 2005 05:40 AM | TrackBack