The Study of Racialism

cjohns48233305 · Regular User Joined: 25 Apr 2009 {Posts: 84 }

.The Conspiracy of Civil Rights: 1968 - 2008

By taschenge

How the Talented Tenth has worked to arrest Black self-determination in the United States

After the regime change of 1968, which for all intents and purposes effectively re-installed the restrictive hegemony of the severely limited Civil Rights ideology, in the wake of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination, the proud mantle of Black Self-Determination was once again under massive attack; no longer simply from without, however now the battle for the hearts and minds of the Black community was also largely engaged from within. In many ways, this was simply a replay, or to say it another way, it was merely a continuation if you will, of the Black on Black cultural / class / ideological warfare which had marked the concentrated Talented Tenth-US Government aided assault that had been launched decades earlier, first upon the strident voices of the New Militancy which survived the regime change of 1909, and then in a more direct manner on The Garvey Movement one decade later. The New York Boulee was formed Dr. Dubois had said in 1916, “in order to steal the Black professional away from the Garvey Movement”. Fifty years later, the devastating effects of this protracted class warfare upon the Black community had become patently clear.

Suddenly, now that the phenomenally popular Dr. King had been successfully moved out of the way, with the aid of the vast repressive forces of the US Government (COINTELPRO), a new cabal of the Talented Tenth worked to permanently marginalize and subdue any visible remnant of the naturally nationalistic ideological tendencies of the greater masses of Black people. Henceforth the effort would be once again to criminalize within the minds of the American people any inkling of Black Nationalism. While the Black Panther ideology was fundamentally one of Black pride and self-defense, this would easily be curried into a threat towards all White people. Nobody, let alone another Italian would ever dare to condemn Italians for celebrating their link to Italy, and for acting to maintain the cultural integrity and security of their own Italian community. But, to proclaim your love for your African heritage was somehow once again deemed as being instantly at war with the entire United States. J. Edgar Hoover publically named the BPP Party as ‘Enemy Number One’. Even Vietnamese nationals, who had come here to establish communities of their own while their homeland was still at war with the United States, were respected for their nationalistic communal expressions far and above that of Black Nationalists within America. Nonetheless, all of a sudden, a new cabal of the Black Talented Tenth had come to power, and a part of their legacy would ultimately be that they would come to wield power over the perceptual direction of Black liberation for the next 40 years. This was a period of intellectual hegemony that would eventually last longer than the reign of Booker T. Washington, and The NAACP under Roy Wilkins combined.

In the process, the language along with the history of the Black Freedom Struggle was cleverly re-written in order to fit the limited prerogatives of the Civil Rights Intergrationalist agenda. The greatest example of this has been their approach towards racist violence within the United States over the last forty years. Although today it is most likely contrary to lingering wide-spread perceptions the fact remains that a rope and a tree has never been required to commit the act of lynching. What many people will be surprised to know is that as recently as the beginning of this year, the epidemic of Black people being lynched within the United States has continued at an alarming rate. This scourge of racist violence has not truly abated from the epidemic that it was 50 years ago. Nonetheless, an entire new cabal of leading Blacks would now insure that the word ‘lynching’ would be completely removed from the lexicon of Black resistance within the United States. What’s more, incidents that were once deemed ‘racistly-motivated’ – a term which naturally focuses upon the psycho-pathology of the perpetrator of the immoral and or violent act, were now called ‘racially motivated’ – a term which cleverly places the onus for the immoral and or violent deed upon the victim. The point is, that in rather quiet and subtle ways, the New Talented Tenth has set about to completely recast the entire narrative of Black struggle in America.

The overall success of the New Tenth in this altogether nefarious scheme can be easily measured by just how successfully the 1960’s Black Freedom Struggle has been cleverly re-cast as exclusively a ‘Civil Rights Movement’. Even leaders such as Malcolm X are now being narrowly defined simply as ‘Civil Rights Leaders’ when nothing could be further from the truth. Malcolm X was adamant to carefully delineate what was the actual difference between the struggle for Civil Rights and the struggle for Human Rights. “Civil Rights are inferior to Human Rights” he said, and since the fact was that Eleanor Roosevelt was the actual chair of the 1948 Convention On Human Rights, the Talented Tenth (who swooned all over her) must have been well aware of just what all of this actually meant. However, today we live in a nation where the push is already on to basically grant Civil Rights to domesticated animals, and yet the Human Rights of Black people are still not fully respected, as White cops continue to assault and murder Black people at will.

During the 1960’s, there were a number of ‘active streams’ of Historical Black Consciousness, such as Black Nationalism and the desire for repatriation. The Talented Tenth Civil Rights Intergrationalist point of view was but one of them. What’s more, by 1966 the Civil Rights perspective had already begun to once again assume its naturally minor roll in view of the necessarily broader Human Rights agenda of a community facing the incessant repression of what for all intents and purposes remained for them a brutally terrorist state. Even Dr. King had famously said five years earlier in 1961 that he never had any intention of building a Civil Rights Movement. His desire was to build a rainbow Human Rights coalition. The difference can perhaps be best expressed in this way: Imagine that you lived next to a Jeffery Dahlmer, and you solicited someone to be an advocate for you. What would be your greatest concern, that he just may not be courteous to you when he passes you in the hallway (Civil Rights), or the very real possibility that he just may eat your children (Human Rights)? Nonetheless, after the regime change Civil Rights was once again neatly crafted as the exclusive mouthpiece of the Black Freedom Struggle in America. The Tenth were simply living up to creed, believing as always that full citizenship should be limited to only a small marginal class of Black people.

Although he himself had been a political prisoner for nearly 30 years, upon the February 11, 1990 release of Nelson Mandela, there was still to be absolutely no talk of solidarity with the now over 100 Black Political Prisons who had given their lives in a similar fashion to the struggle against apartheid in the United States. Going forward, those who would even dare to speak or act in terms of Black Self-Determination were to be marginalized and their ideology would be brought under constant scrutiny

In a sense, by securing Affirmative Action and leading the campaign to condemn the great majority of Black neighborhoods as dangerous community-adverse slums during the 1970’s – of which one could only hope but to escape from, the New Talented Tenth had finally achieved their ultimate goal; which had been duly articulated by Dr. WEB Dubois more than a century ago. In The Souls of Blackfolk (1903) he wrote: “….The Negro only wishes to gain a seat at the table of brotherhood (affirmative action) and not be spit upon by his fellows”. And then, later he stated that: “The purpose of the education of the Talented Tenth is to keep the best amongst us, away from the worst”. By the 1980’s, now that enough ‘leading Blacks’ had been able to successfully abandon the Black community and follow George Jefferson (‘Moving On Up!’) into White dominated suburbs where they often found themselves literally ‘dogging the spit of their fellows’, the Tenth’ could once again work to re-write history and simply present a new generation with a Disneyland version of the past. Today, it is shameful that even at the 100 year anniversary of the founding of the NAACP; the lie is still widely being told that this largely White-Jewish-controlled organization was actually a direct outgrowth of the Niagara Movement. What makes this even more insulting is the fact that during the deliberations of what was at that time called the National Negro Committee, the 52 White board members told the only Black board member WEB Dubois, that they really did not want New Militant leaders such as Monroe Trotter in their organization. Nonetheless, there is an African saying: ‘Until lions have historians, hunters will be heroes’.

From the late 1970’s until the passage of the 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill signed into law by President Bill Clinton, an enormous effort was made to re-instate the private prison plantation industry which today has made the United States the largest jailer in the entire world. Under the guise of waging a War on Crime, for decades the United States waged a blatantly racist war on people of color. Today, America incarcerates its citizens at an even higher rate than China, Russia, North Korea, Cuba and Iran. One in every one hundred Americans is beholden to some aspect of the Justice System in the United States. What this actually means, is that they are either incarcerated, or on some form of probation or parole. America incarcerates Black males at an even higher and more vigorous rate than South Africa during any period of the former White Nationalist apartheid regime.

However, one particular aspect of this three-decades-old conspiracy to re-establish the profit motive of legalized prison plantation slavery into the national economy seems to have been quickly forgotten. During the early 1980’s a campaign was on full-blast that aimed to pass what was then being called a landmark ‘Victims Bill of Rights’, which aimed at highlighting the plight of the victims of violent crime. For a time, the widows and orphans of victims of violent crime were used as poster children for the new effort to insure that the rights of the victim took president over the rights of convicted criminals. Then, all of a sudden, this wide-spread rather popular campaign seemed to quietly come to an end. Why?

One possible theory lies in an understanding of contemporary events which were actually coincidental to the effort to pass a Victims Bill of Rights. First, a little background is needed: The early 1980’s was a period that saw the simultaneous emergence of a number of dynamic movements within African American culture; which ultimately had an enormous impact upon the nation as a whole. An entire new generation of Black youth had come of age, and they had gradually grown tired of hearing a brand of politics that often made them the subject of much of its discourse, yet refused to speak honestly in a language that actually ‘looked like them’. The widespread resentment that this engendered gave rise to a remarkably instantaneous shift of African American cultural production. Before it became the subject of a vast Contelpro-like assault (called NowIntelpro), the dynamic Hip Hop Revolution allowed for independent political expession on an entirely new level; demostrating the power that the youth can acutally have to completely alter the cultural idiom at will.

This was also a significant era for Black Scholarship with the emergence of a new school of thought called Afro-centricity. Coming upon the heels of the 1974 Cairo Symposium which left no room for any further serious scholastic contemplation that the Ancient Egyptians were anything but a Black African people, this vast philosophical movement aimed at viewing African and African American cultlure and history from a self-conscious subjective point of view, rather than simply studying African people and culture as the object of historical analysis. Under the inspiration of Dr. Chiek Anta Diop, the ancient African High Civilizations of the Nile Valley were now placed in their proper perspective as the classical foundation of African culture in the very same manner as Greece has played its role as the classical foundation for all subsequent European cultures This was Self-Determination on a scholastic level. It signified a genuine maturation of the Black Studies Movement, and became a defining moment in the Great (intellectual) Awakening which had actually begun during the same year as the Supreme Court of the United States decided Brown vs Board of Eduction (1954) with the publication of Stolen Legacy by George GM James. The 1990s ultimately marked the astronomical popularity and rise of Black book stores all throughout the country.

Nonetheless, along the way, quite a number of Black scholars came under the feirce substained attack of White Academia along with members of the New Talented Tenth academic establishment who dutifully played their role as gatekeepers in colleges and universities around the country. Shamefully, this was an era when countless numbers of Black scholars were actually banned from even speaking on the campuses of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).

More importantly, the 1990s also marked the substaintial rise of the contemporary Reparations Movement, which had always been a significant plank of the Black Nationalist platform. However, all of a sudden the ancestors of the ‘victims’ of the horrendeous crimes of American slavery and Jim Crow Apart-Hate, were leading a brand new massive movement for reparations. If any group in America could rightfully claim to be the constant victims of violent crimes, it was surly the decendants of enslaved and segragated Americans. In the wake of the poupularity of the New Reparations Movement, the push for a Victim’s Bill of Rights seemed to just suddenly fade away and it has not really been heard from since.

Oddly enough, although the push for a Victims Bill of Rights had quickly dissipated, within just a few years, a new effort immediately came to the forefront that would actually approach victimization from a completely the opposite point of view. Led by conservative African American authors like Shelby Steele of the Hoover Institute, suddenly the proponents of ‘anti-victimization’ used an ancillary trend from the field of contemporary clinical psychology to fashion an entirely new ideology of anti-victimization.

According to this point view, institutional racism had little if nothing at all to do with arresting the achievement and or the upward mobility of African Americans. Much like women who often seemed trapped in a life of depression and misery years after the experience of sexual abuse, suddenly it was the self-defeating mindset of the masses of Black people that was actually being blamed for their problems. This was classic Talented Tenth ‘crabs-in-a-barrel-in-reverse’ psychology. So too, much like the subtle change in terminology from ‘racistly motivated’ to ‘racially motivated’ it was a neat trick.

Nevertheless, today it remains simply another way to blame the victim for whatever crime may have been perpetrated upon them. In recent years, this ‘tricknology’ has simply been used to stifle and then to re-direct any genuine discussion of racial discrimination and or abuse. It has become a perfect example of just how language is often used to oppress, by confining the entrance into where one buys into an idea. Ironically, during and the 2008 Campaign, first Hilary Clinton after her defeat in the Democratic Primary, and then the Republican Party in the last days of the election, quickly flipped the script by pulling out an old political trick which is often used when the losing side of a conflict wants to deflect attention away from their own inherent inadequacies by simply “playing the victim”. Suddenly, we were led to believe that John McCain and Sarah Palin lost the election simply because the “the media is in the tank for Obama”. Since it was they (conservatives) came up with the tricknology in the first place, when it is convenient for them, they simply play the victim; as if their victimization is somehow now more credible than others. Poor Sarah Palin, the ‘Liberal Eastern Establishment Media’ simply hates her.

TS Aschenge he is a fulltime Freelance Author who telecommutes his blogs and vast writing services throughout the world. You can visit his website: I CAN WRITE THAT 4 U! www.okwriteit.wordpress.com His Blog is titled: IF NEAL STREET COULD TALK! www.ifnealstreetcouldtalk.wordpress.com. Follow him on twitter at: twitter.com/taschenge. Follow him on identi.ca at: http://identi.ca/taschenge/all Follow him on spnbabble.sitepronews.com at: http://spnbabble.sitepronews.com/taschenge Share

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Permalink Reply by Re? on July 17, 2009 at 7:55pm
Someone summarize that into something that I'll have the time to sit down and read. Compact this summary into at least 2 paragraphs.► Reply to This
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