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I know that many of us continue to celebrate African/Black people being installed as agents of the state apparatus, the same state that kept Africans in shackles during the era of chattel slavery, suppressed Black voting rights for nearly a century, sabotaged Black movements for sovereignty, assassinated Black leaders, and has consistently sought to inflict “on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
I am reminded in the midst of these celebratory moments of the wisdom of Malcolm X, who stated, “Racial unrest never occurs among the satisfied, bourgeois class of Negroes. They can easily be appeased and controlled and influenced just by continuing to drop crumbs on their table—the crumbs of tokenism. And this type of Negro that the so-called Negro leadership represents is a type that can be appeased and can be controlled with the crumbs of token integration.”
I think that Malcolm X’s criticism highlights the inadequacy of integrationism as a political strategy and ideology. In many ways one might say that he anticipated its devolution from appeals for structural integration to the present bifurcation of the African/Black community in the US, where the petty bourgeoise class continues to aspire to enjoy the bounty of capitalist exploitation, which the masses are increasingly dislocated by.
Ultimately, the performance of representation by powerful institutions is a paean to the aspirations of the Black elite. Such strivings do not equate to the imperative of self-determination for the masses, a self-determination whose actualization dismisses the very legitimacy of the dominant system itself.
4 Comments-
Asante sana Baba.
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178,618
Abibitumi Points
I find that integrationism is both theory and practice and that even those who don’t advocate for it theoretically engage in it in practice while rhetorically advocating for nationalism/separation/self-determination. Have you seen similar tendencies?
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Yes, I have. I believe that these contradictions are dictated by where we find ourselves in relation to the work, that is for sovereignty to truly be real conceptually, it must also be real institutionally.
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178,618
Abibitumi Points
I also notice that more people, at least in the u.s., are mentioning sovereignty as the work. For me, sovereignty is only a potential step in the process at best and a diversion at worst. Grenada, Ayiti, Panama, and a list too long to name makes it clear to the discerning eye that being sovereign cannot be the work. That, and I feel like we’ve taken a backward step even in terms of going from using terms in our own languages to describe what our actual goals are (uhuru, Abibifahodie, n.k.) back to using latin, french and english terminology–which in and of itself is an abdication of “sovereignty” in many ways.
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