TO CHANGE OUR WORLD FIRST UNDERSTAND OUR WORLD

- 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divisions are, in fact, superseded by a harsh racial reality which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