Revisiting Black Radicalism
new pieces in COMPACT & Sublation (and new pods)
First, we’re offering a 40% off spring fever sale on annual subs. Click here to take advantage of it.
Make sure to check out our piece from earlier this week on campus protests and the corporatization of universities. You may also want to read COMPACT’s viral piece by Musa al-Gharbi on Columbia’s protests—the most nuanced and comprehensive piece we’ve seen yet.
While you’re at it, check out Stephen’s appearance on ’s The Iffy podcast on campus protests, God, Coleman Hughes, Mariah, Cornel West and Zizek, and other hot topics.
And check out Brennan’s appearance on Cracks in PoMo, in which we chat about his Substack pieces on Mo’Nique, Matt Rife, gays and Satan, and his upcoming one on the state of R&B.
Listen on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube.
In the midst of debates between identitarians and colorblind libertarians (and straight up racists), past narratives of race that focused more on culture, tradition, and local communities has fallen by the way side. In two recent pieces, Stephen revisits these narratives, positing that we should look to the history of black radicalism in order to forge a pro-black communitarianism/populism.
In Sublation:
In 1963, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed that his children would “one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” While one of his most frequently quoted remarks, it also is one of his most hotly debated. The writer and pundit Coleman Hughes has been making waves with his recently released book entitled The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America, a polemic which takes King’s statement as its point of departure…
I share plenty of Hughes’s concerns about the predominant identitarian narrative: namely its tendency to adopt a relativistic attitude toward personal morality, its reluctance to afford “problematic” persons due process, its deterministic harping on victimhood narratives that downplay the role of personal agency, and above all, its deceptive ploy for greater diversity while pushing for an globalist monoculture – with superficial elements of BIPOC cultures sprinkled on top. And I agree that social justice initiatives ought to focus primarily on class-related disparities.
Yet the notion of “colorblindness” – even Hughes’s measured form of it – gives me pause. Is this really the best alternative to identitarianism? As a person of faith and theologian, I question the growing trend of Christians misusing King’s “by the content of their character” line and borrowing arguments from libertarian-adjacent figures and wielding them as tools against the “secular,” “liberal” values of the woke hegemony. Perhaps in their effort to counter the errors of the identitarian left, Christians would do better to look not to its right, but to its left: the Black radical tradition…
Christianity distinguishes itself from paganism and other forms of monotheism in that it believes that God entered into the flesh, into the realm that humans inhabit. In other words, that which is universal communicated itself through the particular. And so Christian morality – adherence to the Creator’s will – is achieved not by a stoic force of the individual’s will, but by living in communion with others, enmeshing oneself with the Body of Christ and the larger Body of believers.
Thus, one’s character is not developed in a vacuum – independent of one’s cultural context or of the people to whom one belongs. While Christians ought to be cautious not to sacralize our cultural heritage into a form of tribalism, we also ought not dismiss or neutralize its value. In this sense, Blackness holds weight in a Christian context more as an ethnic category than as a racial one. While we cannot afford to ignore the extent to which one’s phenotypes were morphed into a socially and politically “real” category by slavery and Jim Crow laws, it is ultimately ethnicity as a cultural point of reference that should interest us, insofar as it consists of a set of beliefs, traditions, and rituals through which metaphysical truths can be transmitted, and which gives substance to a people’s identity (something “race” can only do in an abstract way)…
While Black radicals often fell into the error of propping up race as a false idol, and of excusing violent means in the name of noble end goals, its recognition of Blackness as a point of pride – as a gift – provided a much-needed celebration of the particular, offering an antidote to anti-Black sentiment that liberal Christianity and colorblind libertarianism gravely lacked.
Though significant scholarship has been published about the religious dimensions of Marcus Garvey’s legacy, the faith of the godfather of Black nationalism is unfortunately forgotten or blatantly ignored by many. Born in Jamaica in 1887, Garvey’s Pan-Africanist movement was premised on affirming and retracing the roots of descendents of the African diaspora, spurred by the recognition that a rootless person can only feebly attempt to claim his or her dignity. In contrast to most social movements today, Pan-Africanism offered a thorough, comprehensive vision – encompassing the metaphysical and material, the aesthetic and political.
Disillusioned with the limited Protestant theological imaginary of the Methodist tradition with which he was raised, Garvey converted to Roman Catholicism, while also maintaining a close relationship with Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity. Rastafarian theology borrows many ideas from Garvey – and hails him as a John the Baptist-type prophet for “predicting” the rise of Haile Selassie as emperor of Ethiopia. Yet Garvey “scorned” Rastafarianism, and dismissed the claim that Selassie was the second coming of Christ as “blasphemy.”
His fidelity to Catholic doctrine was loose, as he often spoke of forging a new form of “Black Christianity” – yet expressed that he wanted it to be as close as possible to Catholicism. He affirmed that God transcended race, but that “it is human to see everything through one’s own spectacles, and since the white people have seen their God through white spectacles, we have only now started out (late though it be) to see our God through our own spectacles.” Thus his insistence on black people praying to images of Black Jesuses and Marys, perhaps a reflection of the stronger emphasis on particularity found in Catholicism.
Essential to his ideology was the idea of blackness as a gift from God to be celebrated and enjoyed, constituting a rich legacy upon which Blacks should draw inspiration for their endeavors. Without such an awareness of blackness as gift, it would be impossible to restore the Black man’s sense of dignity and worth. Upon his visit to Garvey’s grave in 1965, Martin Luther King shared his esteem for “the first man of color to lead and develop a mass movement. He was the first man to give millions of Negroes a sense of dignity and destiny on a mass scale and level. And he was the first man to make the Negro feel that he was somebody.”
It goes without saying that Pan-Africanism has an unmistakable dark side, clearly deviating in many ways from its Christian roots. Garvey promoted extreme separatism, to the point that he imagined diasporic Blacks moving “Back to Africa” – and considered enlisting the support of the KKK to do so. A fierce anti-assimilationist, he was so committed to the cause of strengthening Black people’s roots that he condemned miscegenation. His skepticism toward government intervention in the affairs of individuals made him an intense advocate for Black self-determination. A staunch capitalist and anti-communist/socialist, at times he waxed fascistic (he claimed he was one of “the first fascists” and that “Mussolini copied Fascism from me”).
That being said, unlike today’s libertarian bootstrappers, Garvey was hardly an individualist. His self-determinist and anti-big government musings were tempered by his communitarian vision – centering the people, the community as the locus of agency. This is where Garvey and the movements he inspired most echo Christianity. Central to the Catholic Church’s social tradition are the complementary principles of subsidiarity – that neither the state nor any larger society should substitute itself for the initiative and responsibility of individuals and intermediary bodies, and solidarity – a sincere commitment to the Common Good. Ideally, the two principles temper each other, with subsidiarity protecting smaller entities from being overpowered by larger, distant ones, and solidarity ordering the smaller to the large, the particular toward the universal, aiming to foster loving unity among all peoples, reconciling differences and forgiving offenses.
Subsidiarity was certainly Black nationalism’s strength, as its scope toward solidarity as a broader, universal ideal was limited by its skepticism toward the government and, well, non-Blacks. This sensibility shaped Garvey’s anti-colonialist rhetoric – borrowing heavily from Irish anti-colonial discourse, which went on to inspire Frantz Fanon and the postcolonialist movement. While Fanon’s postcolonial musings have been appropriated by contemporary identitarians, one can recognize the subsidiarist and thus distinctly Christian underpinnings of his ideology, as Irish Catholic writer John Waters highlights…
Unlike contemporary DEI discourse, which merges the causes of Black liberation with an individualistic progressive cultural agenda, most Pan-Africanist adjacent movements merged progressive political and economic ideals with traditional cultural values – a marriage unthinkable in today’s secular neoliberal paradigm (but more common in circles inspired by Catholic social doctrine, like the various Christian democratic movements, forms of Catholic socialism found in Latin America, the Catholic Worker movement, and contemporary “postliberal” discourse).
Often deeply pro-natalist and in favor distinct gender roles, several of these movements often bordered on the virulently homophobic and misogynistic, and took anti-abortion and anti-contraceptive stances – claiming that for Blacks to avoid conception is to capitulate to the agenda to sterilize (and eventually eliminate) the Black population. Further, the spread of libertine sexual practices like non-procreative sex, sodomy, and gender fluidity was often associated with the elitism and decadence of white colonial powers (see reggae-dancehall songs like Shabba Ranks’s “Dem Bow”) – prophetically warning of what Pope Francis would later condemn as “ideological neocolonialism.”…
In our rootless, disenchanted age, neither the highly elitist, bureaucratic program of liberal identitarians, nor the bootstrapping rhetoric of colorblind libertarians–both steeped in materialist individualism–provide a way out of our social deadlocks. While Black radicalism may have plenty of pitfalls, it offers us a nuanced vision of the polyvalent elements that make up society–and above all, envisions society as fundamentally rooted in something greater than the atomized individual. If we insist on being “colorblind,” then let us refuse to be cultureblind, because culture is beautiful. As Dostoyevsky famously quipped, “beauty will save the world.” Consequently, a world bereft of substantial aesthetic underpinnings is beyond salvation, let alone “liberation” from oppression.
Read the whole thing at Sublation.
And in COMPACT:
In 2020, amid calls to defund the police, progressive politicians in many US cities embraced the view that law enforcement is a problem, not a solution. The results seemed to speak for themselves, with crime spiking in many blue cities; some local governments that hastily opted to slash funding for policing soon reversed course. One noteworthy exception to all of this was Newark, NJ. The city’s left-wing mayor, Ras Baraka, made headlines at the height of the George Floyd protests when he dismissed defunding the police as a “bourgeois-liberal” apparatus. His words came on the heels of a dramatic moment: Despite fears that protests would trigger a resurgence of the rioting that had ravaged Newark 53 years earlier, residents and observers were struck by the absence of looting, violence, or destruction. As then-Public Safety Director Anthony Ambrose told me, “we were very conscious of not going back to 1967.”
Such a feat was hardly spontaneous. It was the result of painstaking strategic planning by Baraka in cooperation with the police department, Office of Violence Prevention, the Newark Community Street Team, and local activist organizations. This spirit of strategic problem-solving and collaboration has come to define Newark’s approach toward public safety ever since the city began implementing a federal consent decree and civilian review board in 2014, leading to a major drop in theft and violent crimes and instances of police corruption and brutality. …
Newark owes these improvements in public safety to many factors, but these came together under the leadership of the 54-year-old mayor, the son of the late poet Amiri Baraka (formerly known as LeRoi Jones), for decades one of the country’s most controversial radical black activists. Having grown up in Newark while his father was heavily involved in city politics, Baraka was well-acquainted with its history and the various factions that hold sway over its public life. After studying at Howard University, he returned to Newark to teach in its public schools, eventually joining the city council and serving as deputy mayor to Sharpe James, with a stint as principal of Central High School. Baraka also made a name for himself in the city’s arts scene for his poetry and rapping, garnering attention for his appearances on albums by Lauryn Hill and the Fugees.
For those who have followed his career, Baraka’s brand of communitarian progressivism is far from surprising. And while deviating from his father’s antagonistic methods, Baraka demonstrates the extent to which he has been schooled by the self-determinist leanings of the black-nationalist tradition, with its emphasis on grassroots solutions and prioritizing the immediate needs of ordinary citizens, rather than by identitarian “anti-racists” who place their hope in diversifying bureaucracies. As cities try to learn from Newark’s example, they would do well to pay close attention to the populist and localist inspiration behind the mayor’s methods. …
On public safety, Baraka has attempted, as Ambrose put it, to “bring everyone to the table”—including politicians, the police department, social workers, civilians, activists like Hamm, and the newly instituted Street Team and Office of Violence Prevention. This pragmatism was by no means to be expected, given the mayor’s parentage and background in radical politics. But it has earned him praise from activists and police alike. Hamm told me that the mayor’s collaborative approach has allowed the city to make substantial headway in curbing police brutality. For his part, Ambrose told me that real change requires being willing to “put relationships together” to identify and address the root causes of a problem and get the job done, reiterating the need to treat the department “like a business.” …
Baraka continues to invoke the black radical rhetoric passed down from his father. During the speech, he reminded the crowd of how his father’s head was “split wide open” by a Newark police officer during the “rebellion” of 1967—ostentatiously avoiding the more commonly used term “riot.” But the younger Baraka’s version of black-power politicking is fundamentally about making progress for Newark’s black residents. His reforms to the police department, his campaign to boost homeownership among black families, and his initiatives on behalf of local business owners in the face of gentrification—all of these demonstrate his localist sympathies. His dismissive attitude toward symbolic progressivism is driven not only by his realism and pragmatism, but by his deep ties to the particular city he governs and to its people. “This city is all I am,” he told me after the State of the City address.
Christopher Lasch warned in 1979 of those who clamor for social causes du jour, whose narcissistic ploys for affirmation may “make for success in bureaucratic institutions” but ultimately “discourage the formation of deep personal attachments.” He went on to comment later, in 1991, that the “capacity for loyalty is stretched too thin when it tries to attach itself to the hypothetical solidarity of the human race.”
When announcing a new set of policies to address gentrification in 2022, Baraka lamented that “in cities and even suburbs across America, institutional investors are eroding the American dream of homeownership as they convert owner-occupied homes into corporately owned rental units. In Newark,” he continued, “where we have worked hard for years to expand homeownership, we will do everything possible to combat this dangerous trend,” expressing his intention to work to foster “coordinated state and local policy to address the effects of large-scale corporate ownership of private homes” and “to ensure that residents share in the growth of our city.”
The “bourgeois” activists dismissed by Baraka have no skin in the game and can only propose “hypothetical” solutions to concrete problems—at best. Having been born and raised in the city, taught in its public schools, made art and written poetry about it, Baraka’s roots are firmly planted in Newark, whose ins and outs he knows—and loves—intimately. “How beautiful is our city, despite the pundits, those that cry from outside the arena.… They are all wrong!” he shouted to the enthusiastic crowd. “By God’s grace, we will always stand tall.”
Read the whole piece here.
Please consider signing up for a paid subscription to this page for more riveting content.
If you’re new to Cracks in Pomo, check out the About page or read up on our Essentials. Also check out our podcast on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube and follow us on Instagram and Twitter.
