Tyehimba
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« on: November 08, 2003, 04:53:34 AM » |
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- TO CHANGE OUR WORLD FIRST UNDERSTAND OUR WORLD -
For the majority core of African Americans, racial categorization is based on phenotype, a reality that is unavoidable at birth, unchanging, life-long, and in most instances cannot be overlooked by the viewing public. Given the right circumstances, class, on the other hand, can be fleeting, is often illusory, subject to the whims of fortune, varying with individual, family and group economic and status vicissitudes. Even the heritability of class is mushier, less reliable and more malleable than race. Hence race is the more appropriate concept of analysis. It, rather than class, is what should be meant when we evoke the objective material force which conditions the Black experience. Change job, income or address---new class image but same Africoid face! Even "passing for white"---the recourse of many thousands gone---springs from the reality of an archetypal Black phenotype from which it is possible to vary in appearance. Image is crucial because in America the way others perceive you racially either limits or expands your life chances.
With striking similarity to the division between the "slave aristocracy" and the field hands, internal "class" divisions tentatively separate this generation of African Americans into an "elite" (consisting of a handful of Fortune 500 corporate executives, self-employed entrepreneurs, wealthy athletes and entertainers, politicos, professionals and clergy) and the rank and file made up of a "bourgy" Black middle class, the working poor and the "underclass." These divisions are, in fact, superseded by a harsh racial reality which sentences all Blacks, irrespective of complexion and ranking vis-à-vis one another, to one and the same race-caste. Under white supremacy there is the potential for racist discrimination in one form or another against every African American.
Black social stratification remains stuck at the sub-class or inter-class level. North American whites are in truth divided along class lines. There are true cleavages between the white ruling, middle and working classes, and such distinctions are even more salient in European societies. Our situation is different, however. The differences in life-styles and life-chances that we ourselves commonly describe as "underclass", "middle class" and "upper class" are, in fact, subdivisions within one and the same large social class. This is because in the racist socioeconomic edifice, Afro-Americans (and Afro-Latinos) constitute one single great race-class whose cellar-ranking in the overall social structure is enforced most rigidly by labor-market discrimination/high unemployment, and by a residential segregation that has proven impervious to change since 1900.
Civilizational historicism offers an alternative Black agenda analysis to the vagaries of racist political economy. White supremacy not only stains all social and cultural expression, it styles the political economy. One of several current unique forms of racist oppression is the devalorization of growing segments of Black people's capacity to perform gainful labor. That reduction in life and civil status is going hand in glove with a startling discounting of Black-owned capital. Let us explain the devalorization phenomenon.
Black labor power (capacity to work for remuneration) is devalorized (or devalued) when financial decision-makers---almost without exception white males---conclude that economic circumstances have become such that they are unlikely to derive above-average profits from the employment of Black workers. The average profit is equal profit for sums of equal amount invested in different branches of the economy. Remember, going back nearly 400 years, white folks had only one thing in mind when they hauled us to these latitudes. The only role envisioned for our forebears was to produce riches for white society. In white America's eyes, such was our use-value then, and such should still be our primary use now.
Dr. C.J. Munford
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