Black Power

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Black Power is a political slogan and a name which is given to various associated ideologies which aim to achieve self-determination for people of African descent. It is primarily, but not exclusively, used by African Americans in the United States. The Black Power movement was prominent in the late 1960s and early 1970s, emphasizing racial pride and the creation of black political and cultural institutions to nurture and promote black collective interests and advance black values.

The basis of Black Power is various ideologies that aim at achieving self-determination for black people in the U.S. Black power dictates that blacks create their own identities despite being subjected to pre-existing societal factors.

"Black Power" expresses a range of political goals, from defense against racial oppression, to the establishment of social institutions and a self-sufficient economy, including black-owned bookstores, cooperatives, farms, and media. However, the movement has been criticized for alienating itself from the mainstream civil rights movement, for its apparent support of racial segregation, and for constituting black superiority over other races.

Etymology

The earliest known usage of the term "Black Power" is found in Richard Wright's 1954 book Black Power. New York politician Adam Clayton Powell Jr. used the term on May 29, 1966, during an address at Howard University: "To demand these God-given rights is to seek black power."

The first popular use of the term "Black Power" as a political and racial slogan was by Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) and Willie Ricks (later known as Mukasa Dada), both organizers and spokespersons for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). On June 16, 1966, in a speech in Greenwood, Mississippi, after the shooting of James Meredith during the March Against Fear, Stokely Carmichael said:

This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested and I ain't going to jail no more! The only way we gonna stop them white men from whuppin' us is to take over. What we gonna start sayin' now is Black Power!

Stokely Carmichael saw the concept of "Black Power" as a means of solidarity between individuals within the movement. It was a replacement of the "Freedom Now!" slogan of Carmichael's contemporary, the non-violent leader Martin Luther King. With his use of the term, Carmichael felt this movement was not just a movement for racial desegregation, but rather a movement to help end how American racism had weakened blacks. He said, "'Black Power' means black people coming together to form a political force and either electing representatives or forcing their representatives to speak their needs."

Variants

Black Power adherents believed in black autonomy, with a variety of tendencies such as black nationalism, black self-determination, and black separatism. Such positions caused friction with leaders of the mainstream Civil Rights Movement, and thus the two movements have sometimes been viewed as inherently antagonistic. Civil Rights leaders often proposed passive, non-violent tactics while the Black Power movement felt that, in the words of Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, "a 'non-violent' approach to civil rights is an approach black people cannot afford and a luxury white people do not deserve."  "However, many groups and individuals—including Rosa Parks, Robert F. Williams, Maya Angelou, Gloria Richardson, and Fay Bellamy Powell—participated in both civil rights and black power activism. A growing number of scholars conceive of the civil rights and black power movements as one interconnected Black Freedom Movement.

Numerous Black Power advocates were in favor of black self determination due to the belief that black people must lead and run their own organizations. Stokely Carmichael is such an advocate and states that, "only black people can convey the revolutionary idea—and it is a revolutionary idea—that black people are able to do things themselves." However, this is not to say that Black Power advocates promoted racial segregation. Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton write that "there is a definite, much-needed role that whites can play." They felt that whites could serve the movement by educating other white people.

Not all Black Power advocates were in favor of black separatism. While Stokely Carmichael and SNCC were in favor of separatism for a time in the late 1960s, organizations such as the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense were not. Though the Panthers considered themselves to be at war with the prevailing white supremacist power structure, they were not at war with all whites, but rather with those (mostly white) individuals empowered by the injustices of the structure and responsible for its reproduction.

Bobby Seale, Chairman and Co-Founder of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, was outspoken about this issue. His stance was that the oppression of black people was more a result of economic exploitation than anything innately racist. In his book Seize the Time, he states that "In our view it is a class struggle between the massive proletarian working class and the small, minority ruling class. Working-class people of all colors must unite against the exploitative, oppressive ruling class. So let me emphasize again—we believe our fight is a class struggle and not a race struggle."

Internationalist offshoots of black power include African Internationalism, pan-Africanism, black nationalism, and black supremacy.

History

The term "Black Power" was used in a different sense in the 1850s by black leader Frederick Douglass as an alternative name for the Slave Power—that is the disproportionate political power at the national level held by slave owners in the South. Douglass predicted: "The days of Black Power are numbered. Its course, indeed is onward. But with the swiftness of an arrow, it rushes to the tomb. While crushing its millions, it is also crushing itself. The sword of Retribution, suspended by a single hair, hangs over it. That sword must fall. Liberty must triumph."

In Apartheid Era South Africa, Nelson Mandela's African National Congress used the call-and-response chant "Amandla! (Power!)", "Ngawethu! (The power is ours!)" from the late 1950s onward.

The modern American concept emerged from the Civil Rights Movement in the early 1960s. Beginning in 1959, Robert F. Willams, president of the Monroe, North Carolina chapter of the NAACP, openly questioned the ideology of nonviolence and its domination of the movement's strategy. Williams was supported by prominent leaders such as Ella Baker and James Forman, and opposed by others, such as Roy Wilkins (the national NAACP chairman) and Martin Luther King Jr. In 1961, Maya Angelou, Leroi Jones, and Mae Mallory led a riotous (and widely covered) demonstration at the United Nations in order to protest against the assassination of Patrice Lumumba. Malcolm X, national representative of the Nation of Islam, also launched an extended critique of nonviolence and integrationism at this time. After seeing the increasing militancy of blacks in the wake of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, and wearying of Elijah Muhammad's domination of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm left that organization and engaged with the mainstream of the Civil Rights Movement. Malcolm was now open to voluntary racial integration as a long-term goal, but he still supported armed self-defense, self-reliance, and black nationalism; he became a simultaneous spokesman for the militant wing of the Civil Rights Movement and the non-separatist wing of the Black Power movement.

An early manifestation of Black Power in popular culture was the performances given by Nina Simone at Carnegie Hall in March 1964, and the album In Concert which resulted from them. Nina Simone mocked liberal nonviolence ("Go Limp"), and took a vengeful position toward white racists ("Mississippi Goddamn" and her adaptation of "Pirate Jenny"). Historian Ruth Feldstein writes that, "Contrary to the neat historical trajectories which suggest that black power came late in the decade and only after the 'successes' of earlier efforts, Simone's album makes clear that black power perspectives were already taking shape and circulating widely...in the early 1960s." 

By 1966, most of SNCC's field staff, among them Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture), were becoming critical of the nonviolent approach to confronting racism and inequality—articulated and promoted by Martin Luther King, Jr., Roy Wilkins, and other moderates—and they rejected desegregation as a primary objective. King was critical of the black power movement, stating in an August 1967 speech to the SCLC: "Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout 'White Power!' — when nobody will shout 'Black Power!' — but everybody will talk about God's power and human power." In his 1967 book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, King stated:

In the final analysis the weakness of Black Power is its failure to see that the black man needs the white man and the white man needs the black man. However much we may try to romanticize the slogan, there is no separate black path to power and fulfillment that does not intersect white paths, and there is no separate white path to power and fulfillment, short of social disaster, that does not share that power with black aspirations for freedom and human dignity. We are bound together in a single garment of destiny. The language, the cultural patterns, the music, the material prosperity, and even the food of America are an amalgam of black and white.

SNCC's base of support was generally younger and more working-class than that of the other "Big Five" civil rights organizations and became increasingly more militant and outspoken over time. As a result, as the Civil Rights Movement progressed, increasingly radical, more militant voices came to the fore to aggressively challenge white hegemony. Increasing numbers of black youth, particularly, rejected their elders' moderate path of cooperation, racial integration and assimilation. They rejected the notion of appealing to the public's conscience and religious creeds and took the tack articulated by another black activist more than a century before, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who wrote:

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. ... Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will.

Most early 1960s civil rights leaders did not believe in physically violent retaliation. However, much of the African-American rank-and-file, especially those leaders with strong working-class ties, tended to complement nonviolent action with armed self-defense. For instance, prominent nonviolent activist Fred Shuttlesworth of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (and a leader of the 1963 Birmingham campaign), had worked closely with an armed defense group that was led by Colonel Stone Johnson. As Alabama historian Frye Gaillard writes,

...these were the kind of men Fred Shuttlesworth admired, a mirror of the toughness he aspired to himself…They went armed [during the Freedom Rides], for it was one of the realities of the civil rights movement that however nonviolent it may have been at its heart, there was always a current of 'any means necessary,' as the black power advocates would say later on.

During the March Against Fear, there was a division between those aligned with Martin Luther King, Jr. and those aligned with Carmichael, marked by their respective slogans, "Freedom Now" and "Black Power."

While King never endorsed the slogan, and in fact opposed the Black Power movement, his rhetoric sometimes came close to it. In his 1967 book Where Do We Go From Here?, King wrote that "power is not the white man's birthright; it will not be legislated for us and delivered in neat government packages."

"Crisis and Commitment Statement"

The "Crisis and Commitment Statement" was a full-page ad taken out in the New York Times on October 14, 1966. The ad was written and signed onto by Civil Rights leaders, condemning the "extreme" measures used by groups such as the Black Power movement, while reaffirming the basic tenets of the Civil Rights Movement. The statement was signed by Dorothy Height, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, and Hobson R. Reynolds.

Impact

Although the concept remained imprecise and contested and the people who used the slogan ranged from business people who used it to push black capitalism to revolutionaries who sought an end to capitalism, the idea of Black Power exerted a significant influence. It helped organize scores of community self-help groups and institutions that did not depend on Whites, encouraged colleges and universities to start black studies programs, mobilized black voters, and improved racial pride and self-esteem.

One of the most spectacular and unexpected demonstrations for Black Power occurred at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City. At the conclusion of the 200m race, at the medal ceremony, United States gold medalist Tommie Smith and bronze medalist John Carlos wore Olympic Project for Human Rights badges and showed the raised fist (see 1968 Olympics Black Power salute) as the anthem played. Accompanying them was silver medalist Peter Norman, a white Australian sprinter, who also wore an OPHR badge to show his support for the two African Americans.

Black politics

Tommie Smith and John Carlos showing the raised fist on the podium after the 200 m race at the 1968 Summer Olympics.

 

Though the Black Power movement did not remedy the political problems faced by African Americans in the 1960s and 1970s, the movement did contribute to the development of black politics both directly and indirectly. As a contemporary of and successor to the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power movement created, what sociologist Herbert H. Haines refers to as a "positive radical flank effect" on political affairs of the 1960s. Though the nature of the relationship between the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power movement is contested, Haines' study of the relationship between black radicals and the mainstream civil rights movement indicates that Black Power generated a "crisis in American institutions which made the legislative agenda of 'polite, realistic, and businesslike' mainstream organizations" more appealing to politicians. In this way, it can be argued that the more strident and oppositional messages of the Black Power movement indirectly enhanced the bargaining position of more moderate activists. Black Power activists approached politics with vitality, variety, wit, and creativity that shaped the way future generations approached dealing with America's societal problems (McCartney 188). These activists capitalized on the nation's recent awareness of the political nature of oppression, a primary focus of the Civil Rights Movement, developing numerous political action caucuses and grass roots community associations to remedy the situation.

 

The National Black Political Convention, held March 10–12, 1972, was a significant milestone in black politics of the Black Power era. Held in Gary, Indiana, a majorly black city, the convention included a diverse group of black activists, although it completely excluded whites. The convention was criticized for its racial exclusivity by Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, a group that supported integration. The delegates created a National Black Political Agenda with stated goals including the election of a proportionate number of black representatives to Congress, community control of schools, national health insurance, etc. Though the convention did not result in any direct policy, the convention advanced goals of the Black Power movement and left participants buoyed by a spirit of possibility and themes of unity and self-determination. A concluding note to the convention, addressing its supposed idealism, read: "At every critical moment of our struggle in America we have had to press relentlessly against the limits of the 'realistic' to create new realities for the life of our people. This is our challenge at Gary and beyond, for a new Black politics demands new vision, new hope and new definitions of the possible. Our time has come. These things are necessary. All things are possible." Though such political activism may not have resulted in direct policy, they provided political models for later movements, advanced a pro-black political agenda, and brought sensitive issues to the forefront of American politics. In its confrontational and often oppositional nature, the Black Power movement started a debate within the black community and America as a nation over issues of racial progress, citizenship, and democracy, namely "the nature of American society and the place of the African American in it." The continued intensity of debate over these same social and political issues is a tribute to the impact of the Black Power movement in arousing the political awareness and passions of citizens.

Other minorities

Though the aims of the Black Power movement were racially specific, much of the movement's impact has been its influence on the development and strategies of later political and social movements. By igniting and sustaining debate on the nature of American society, the Black Power movement created what other multiracial and minority groups interpreted to be a viable template for the overall restructuring of society. By opening up discussion on issues of democracy and equality, the Black Power movement paved the way for a diverse plurality of social justice movements, including black feminism, environmental movements, affirmative action, and gay and lesbian rights. Central to these movements were the issues of identity politics and structural inequality, features emerging from the Black Power movement. Because the Black Power movement emphasized and explored a black identity, movement activists were forced to confront issues of gender and class as well. Many activists in the Black Power movement became active in related movements. This is seen in the case of the "second wave" of women's rights activism, a movement supported and orchestrated to a certain degree by women working from within the coalition ranks of the Black Power movement. The boundaries between social movements became increasingly unclear at the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s; where the Black Power movement ends and where these other social movements begin is often unclear. "It is pertinent to note that as the movement expanded the variables of gender, class, and only compounded issues of strategy and methodology in black protest thought."

African-American identity

Protester raises his hand in black power salute, Ferguson, Missouri, 15 August 2014

 

Due to the negative and militant reputation of such auxiliaries as that of the Black Panther Party, many people felt that this movement of "insurrection" would soon serve to cause discord and disharmony through the entire U.S. Even Stokely Carmichael stated, "When you talk of Black Power, you talk of building a movement that will smash everything Western civilization has created." Though Black Power at the most basic level refers to a political movement, the psychological and cultural messages of the Black Power movement, though less tangible, have had perhaps a longer-lasting impact on American society than concrete political changes. Indeed, "fixation on the 'political' hinders appreciation of the movement's cultural manifestations and unnecessarily obscures black culture's role in promoting the psychological well being of the Afro-American people," states William L. Van Deburg, author of A New Day in Babylon, "movement leaders never were as successful in winning power for the people as they were in convincing people that they had sufficient power within themselves to escape 'the prison of self-deprecation'"  Primarily, the liberation and empowerment experienced by African Americans occurred in the psychological realm. The movement uplifted the black community as a whole by cultivating feelings of racial solidarity and positive self-identity, often in opposition to the world of white Americans, a world that had physically and psychologically oppressed Blacks for generations. Stokely Carmichael stated that "the goal of black self-determination and black self-identity—Black Power—is recognition of the virtues in themselves as black people." Through the movement, blacks came to understand themselves and their culture by exploring and debating the question, "who are we?" in order to establish a unified and viable identity. And "if black people are to know themselves as a vibrant, valiant people, they must know their roots."

Black Lives Matter protest in September 2016

 

Throughout the Civil Rights Movement and black history, there has been tension between those wishing to minimize and maximize racial difference. W.E.B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King Jr. often attempted to deemphasize race in their quest for equality, while those advocating for separatism and colonization emphasized an extreme and irreconcilable difference between races. The Black Power movement largely achieved an equilibrium of "balanced and humane ethnocentrism." The impact of the Black Power movement in generating discussion about ethnic identity and black consciousness supported the appearance and expansion of academic fields of American studies, Black Studies, and African studies, and the founding of several museums devoted to African-American history and culture in this period. In these ways the Black Power movement led to greater respect for and attention accorded to African Americans' history and culture.

Britain

Black Power got a foothold in Britain when Carmichael came to London in July 1967 to attend the Dialectics of Liberation Congress. As well as his address at the Congress, he also made a speech at Speakers' Corner. At that time, there was no Black Power organization in Britain, although there was Michael X's Racial Adjustment Action Society (RAAS). However, this was more influenced by the Malcolm X's visit to Britain in 1964. Malcolm X also adopted Islam at this stage, whereas Black Power was not organized around any religious institution.

The Black Power Manifesto was launched on 10 November 1967, published by the Universal Coloured People's Association. Obi Egbuna, the spokesperson for the group, claimed they had recruited 778 members in London during the previous seven weeks. In 1968 Egbuna published Black Power or Death. He was also active with CLR James, Calvin Hernton and others in the Antiuniversity of London, set up following the Dialectics of Liberation Congress.

Black people in Britain who identified themselves as the British Black Power Movement (BBMP) formed in the 1960s. They worked with the U.S. Black Panther Party in 1967–68, and 1968–72.^[54] The On March 2, 1970, roughly one hundred people protested outside the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square, London, in support of the U.S. Black Panther founder Bobby Seale, who was on trial for murder in New Haven, Connecticut. They chanted "Free Bobby!" and carried posters proclaiming "Free, Free bobby Seale" and "You can kill a revolutionary but not a revolution."  London police arrested sixteen of the protestors that day, three women and thirteen men with threatening and assaulting police officers, distributing a flier entitled "the Definition of Black Power", intending to incite a breach of the peace, and willful damage to a police raincoat. The raincoat charge was dropped by the judge, but the judge found five of the accused guilty of the remaining charges.

Jamaica

A Black Power movement arose in Jamaica in the late 1960s. Though Jamaica had gained independence from the British Empire in 1962, and Prime Minister Hugh Shearer was black, many cabinet ministers (such as Edward Seaga) and business elites were white. Large segments of the black majority population were unemployed or did not earn a living wage. The Jamaica Labour Party government of Hugh Shearer banned Black Power literature such as The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the works of Eldridge Cleaver and Stokely Carmichael. 

Guyanese academic Walter Rodney was appointed as a lecturer at the University of the West Indies in January 1968, and became one of the main exponents of Black Power in Jamaica. When the Shearer government banned Rodney from re-entering the country, the Rodney Riots broke out. As a result of the Rodney affair, radical groups and publications such as Abeng began to emerge, and the opposition People's National Party gained support. In the 1972 election, the Jamaica Labour Party was defeated by the People's National Party, and Michael Manley, who had expressed support for Black Power, became Prime Minister.

Beauty

The cultivation of pride in the African-American race was often summarized in the phrase "Black is Beautiful." The phrase is rooted in its historical context, yet the relationship to it has changed in contemporary times. "I don't think it's 'Black is beautiful' anymore. It's 'I am beautiful and I'm black.' It's not the symbolic thing, the afro, power sign… That phase is over and it succeeded. My children feel better about themselves and they know that they're black," stated a respondent in Bob Blauner's longitudinal oral history of U.S. race relations in 1986. The outward manifestations of an appreciation and celebration of blackness abound: black dolls, natural hair, black Santas, models and celebrities that were once rare and symbolic have become commonplace.

The "Black is beautiful" cultural movement aimed to dispel the notion that black people's natural features such as skin color, facial features and hair are inherently ugly. John Sweat Rock was the first to coin the phrase "Black is Beautiful", in the slavery era. The movement asked that men and women stop straightening their hair and attempting to lighten or bleach their skin. The prevailing idea in American culture was that black features are less attractive or desirable than white features.

Arts and culture

The Black Power movement produced artistic and cultural products that both embodied and generated pride in "blackness" and further defined an African-American identity that remains contemporary. Black Power is often seen as a cultural revolution as much as a political revolution, with the goal of celebrating and emphasizing the distinctive group culture of African Americans to an American society that had previously been dominated by white artistic and cultural expressions. Black power utilized all available forms of folk, literary, and dramatic expression based in a common ancestral past to promote a message of self-actualization and cultural self-definition. The emphasis on a distinctive black culture during the Black Power movement publicized and legitimized a culture gap between Blacks and Whites that had previously been ignored and denigrated. More generally, in recognizing the legitimacy of another culture and challenging the idea of white cultural superiority, the Black Power movement paved the way for the celebration of multiculturalism in America today.

The cultural concept of "soul" was fundamental to the image of African-American culture embodied by the Black Power movement. Soul, a type of "in-group cultural cachet," was closely tied to black America's need for individual and group self-identification. A central expression of the "soulfulness" of the Black Power generation was a cultivation of aloofness and detachment, the creation of an "aura or emotional invulnerability," a persona that challenged their position of relative powerlessness in greater society. The nonverbal expressions of this attitude, including everything from posture to handshakes, were developed as a counterpoint to the rigid, "up-tight" mannerisms of white people. Though the iconic symbol of black power, the arms raised with biceps flexed and clenched fists, is temporally specific, variants of the multitude of handshakes, or "giving and getting skin," in the 1960s and 1970s as a mark of communal solidarity continue to exist as a part of black culture. Clothing style also became an expression of Black Power in the 1960s and 1970s. Though many of the popular trends of the movement remained confined to the decade, the movement redefined standards of beauty that were historically influenced by Whites and instead celebrated a natural "blackness." As Stokely Carmichael said in 1966, "We have to stop being ashamed of being black. A broad nose, thick lip and nappy hair is us and we are going to call that beautiful whether they like it or not." "Natural" hair styles, such as the Afro, became a socially acceptable tribute to group unity and a highly visible celebration of black heritage. Though the same social messages may no longer consciously influence individual hair or clothing styles in today's society, the Black Power movement was influential in diversifying standards of beauty and aesthetic choices. The Black Power movement raised the idea of a black aesthetic that revealed the worth and beauty of all black people.

In developing a powerful identity from the most elemental aspects of African-American folk life, the Black Power movement generated attention to the concept of "soul food," a fresh, authentic, and natural style of cooking that originated in Africa. The flavor and solid nourishment of the food was credited with sustaining African Americans through centuries of oppression in America and became an important aid in nurturing contemporary racial pride. Black Power advocates used the concept of "soul food" to further distinguish between white and black culture; though the basic elements of soul food were not specific to African-American food, Blacks believed in the distinctive quality, if not superiority, of foods prepared by Blacks. No longer racially specific, traditional "soul foods" such as yams, collard greens, and deep-fried chicken continue to hold a place in contemporary culinary life.

Black Arts Movement

The Black Arts Movement or BAM, founded in Harlem by writer and activist Amiri Baraka (born Everett LeRoy Jones), can be seen as the artistic branch of the Black Power movement. This movement inspired black people to establish ownership of publishing houses, magazines, journals and art institutions. Other well-known writers who were involved with this movement included Nikki Giovanni; Don L. Lee, later known as Haki Madhubuti; Sonia Sanchez; Maya Angelou; Dudley Randall; Sterling Plumpp; Larry Neal; Ted Joans; Ahmos Zu-Bolton; and Etheridge Knight. Several black-owned publishing houses and publications sprang from the BAM, including Madhubuti's Third World Press, Broadside Press, Zu-Bolton's Energy Black South Press, and the periodicals Callaloo and Yardbird Reader. Although not strictly involved with the Movement, other notable African-American writers such as novelists Ishmael Reed and Toni Morrison and poet Gwendolyn Brooks can be considered to share some of its artistic and thematic concerns.

BAM sought "to link, in a highly conscious manner, art and politics in order to assist in the liberation of black people", and produced an increase in the quantity and visibility of African-American artistic production. Though many elements of the Black Arts movement are separate from the Black Power movement, many goals, themes, and activists overlapped. Literature, drama, and music of Blacks "served as an oppositional and defensive mechanism through which creative artists could confirm their identity while articulating their own unique impressions of social reality." In addition to acting as highly visible and unifying representations of "blackness," the artistic products of the Black Power movement also utilized themes of black empowerment and liberation. For instance, black recording artists not only transmitted messages of racial unity through their music, they also became significant role models for a younger generation of African Americans. Updated protest songs not only bemoaned oppression and societal wrongs, but utilized adversity as a reference point and tool to lead others to activism. Some Black Power era artists conducted brief mini-courses in the techniques of empowerment. In the tradition of cultural nationalists, these artists taught that in order to alter social conditions, Blacks first had to change the way they viewed themselves; they had to break free of white norms and strive to be more natural, a common theme of African-American art and music. Musicians such as the Temptations sang lyrics such as "I have one single desire, just like you / So move over, son, 'cause I'm comin' through" in their song "Message From a Black Man," they expressed the revolutionary sentiments of the Black Power movement.

Ishmael Reed, who is considered neither a movement apologist nor advocate, said: "I wasn't invited to participate because I was considered an integrationist" but he went on to explain the positive aspects of the Black Arts Movement and the Black Power movement:

I think what Black Arts did was inspire a whole lot of Black people to write. Moreover, there would be no multiculturalism movement without Black Arts. Latinos, Asian Americans, and others all say they began writing as a result of the example of the 1960s. Blacks gave the example that you don't have to assimilate. You could do your own thing, get into your own background, your own history, your own tradition and your own culture. I think the challenge is for cultural sovereignty and Black Arts struck a blow for that.

By breaking into a field typically reserved for white Americans, artists of the Black Power era expanded opportunities for current African Americans. "Today's writers and performers," writes William L. Van Deburg, "recognize that they owe a great deal to Black Power's explosion of cultural orthodoxy."

Criticism

Bayard Rustin, an elder statesman of the Civil Rights Movement, was a harsh critic of Black Power in its earliest days. Writing in 1966, shortly after the March Against Fear, Rustin said that Black Power "not only lacks any real value for the civil rights movement, but [...] its propagation is positively harmful. It diverts the movement from a meaningful debate over strategy and tactics, it isolates the Negro community, and it encourages the growth of anti-Negro forces." He particularly criticized the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and SNCC for their turn toward Black Power, arguing that these two organizations once "awakened the country, but now they emerge isolated and demoralized, shouting a slogan that may afford a momentary satisfaction but that is calculated to destroy them and their movement."

The Black Power slogan was also criticized by Martin Luther King Jr., who stated that the black power movement "connotates black supremacy and an anti-white feeling that does not or should not prevail." The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) also disapproved of Black Power, particularly Roy Wilkins, then the NAACP's executive director, who stated that Black Power was "a reverse Hitler, a reverse Ku Klux Klan...the father of hate and mother of violence." The Black Power slogan was also met with opposition from the leadership of SCLC and the Urban League.

Politicians in high office also spoke out against Black Power: in 1966, President Lyndon Johnson criticized extremists on both sides of the racial divide, stating "we are not interested in Black Power, and we're not interested in white power, but we are interested in American democratic power with a small 'd'". At a NAACP rally the next day, Vice President Hubert Humphrey argued "Racism is racism and we must reject calls for racism whether they come from a throat that is white or one that is black."

Responses

Kwame Ture, formerly known as Stokely Carmichael, and Charles V. Hamilton, both activists with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and authors of the book, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation highlight that some observers and critics of the Black Power movement conflated "Black Power" with "Black Supremacy." They countered that Black Power advocates were not proposing a mirror-image of white supremacy and domination, instead they were working towards "an effective share in the total power of society."

Black nationalism

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_nationalism 

 

Black nationalism is a type of political thought that seeks to promote, develop and maintain a black race identity for people of black ancestry. Black nationalist activism revolves around social, political, and economic empowerment of black communities and people, especially to resist assimilation into white culture (through integration or otherwise), and maintain a distinct black identity.

Black nationalism arose within the African-American community in the United States. In the early 20th century, the Garveyism promoted by the U.S.-based Marcus Garvey furthered black nationalist ideas. Black nationalist ideas also proved an influence on the Black Islam movement, particularly groups like the Nation of Islam founded by Elijah Muhammad. During the 1960s, black nationalism influenced the Black Panther Party and the broader Black Power movement.

Early history

Martin Delany (1812–1885), an African-American abolitionist, was arguably the first proponent of black nationalism.

Inspired by the success of the Haitian Revolution, the origins of black and indigenous African nationalism in political thought lie in the 19th and early 20th centuries with people such as Marcus Garvey, Benjamin "Pap" Singleton, Henry McNeal Turner, Martin Delany, Henry Highland Garnet, Edward Wilmot Blyden, Paul Cuffe, and others. The repatriation of African-American slaves to Liberia or Sierra Leone was a common black nationalist theme in the 19th century. Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association of the 1910s and 1920s was the most powerful black nationalist movement to date, claiming millions of members. Garvey's movement was opposed by mainline black leaders, and crushed by government action. However, its many alumni remembered its inspiring rhetoric.

According to Wilson Jeremiah Moses, black nationalism as a philosophy can be examined from three different periods, giving rise to various ideological perspectives for what we can today consider black nationalism.

The first period of pre-classical black nationalism began when the first Africans were brought to the Americas as slaves through the American Revolutionary period.

The second period of black nationalism began after the Revolutionary War. This period refers to the time when a sizeable number of educated Africans within the colonies (specifically within New England and Pennsylvania) had become disgusted with the social conditions that arose out of the Enlightenment's ideas. From this way of thinking came the rise of individuals within the black community who sought to create organizations that would unite black people. The intention of these organizations was to group black people together so they could voice their concerns, and help their own community advance itself. This form of thinking can be found in historical personalities such as; Prince Hall, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, James Forten, Cyrus Bustill, William Gray through their need to become founders of certain organizations such as African Masonic lodges, the Free African Society, and Church Institutions such as the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas. These institutions served as early foundations to developing independent and separate organizations for their own people. The goal was to create groups was to include those who so many times had been excluded from (exclusively) white community and government-funded organizations.

The third period of black nationalism arose during the post-Reconstruction era, particularly among various African-American clergy circles. Separated circles were already established and accepted because African-Americans had long endured the oppression of slavery and Jim Crowism in the United States since its inception. The clerical phenomenon led to the birth of a modern form of black nationalism that stressed the need to separate blacks from non-blacks and build separate communities that would promote racial pride and collectivize resources. The new ideology became the philosophy of groups like the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam. By 1930, Wallace Fard Muhammad had founded the Nation of Islam. His method to spread information about the Nation of Islam used unconventional tactics to recruit individuals in Detroit, Michigan. Later on, Elijah Muhammad would lead the Nation of Islam and become a mentor to people like Malcolm X. Although the 1960s brought a period of heightened religious, cultural and political nationalism, it was black nationalism that would lead the promotion of Afrocentrism.

Prince Hall

Prince Hall was an important social leader of Boston following the Revolutionary War. He is well known for his contribution as the founder of Black Freemasonry. His life and past are unclear, but he is believed to have been a former slave freed after twenty one years of slavehood. In 1775 fifteen other black men along with Hall joined a freemason lodge of British soldiers, after the departure of the soldiers they created their own lodge African Lodge #1 and were granted full stature in 1784. Despite their stature other white freemason lodges in America did not treat them equal and so Hall began to help other black Masonic lodges across the country to help their own cause - to progress as a community together despite any difficulties brought to them by racists. Hall was best recognized for his contribution to the black community along with his petitions (many denied) in the name of black nationalism. In 1787 he unsuccessfully petitioned to the Massachusetts legislature to send blacks back to Africa (to obtain "complete" freedom from white supremacy). In 1788, Hall was a well known contributor to the passing of the legislation of the outlawing of the slave-trade and those involved. Hall continued his efforts to help his community, and in 1796 his petition for Boston to approve funding for black schools. Despite the city's inability to provide a building, Hall lent his building for the school to run from. Until his death in 1807, Hall continued to work for black rights in issues of abolition, civil rights and the advancement of the community overall.

The Free African Society

In 1787 Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, black ministers of Pennsylvania, formed the Free African Society of Pennsylvania. The goal of this organization was to create a church that was free of restrictions of only one form of religion, and to pave the way for the creation of a house of worship exclusive to their community. They were successful in doing this when they created the St. Thomas African Episcopal Church in 1793. The community included many members who were notably abolitionist men and former slaves. Allen, following his own beliefs that worship should be out loud and outspoken, left the organization two years later. With the re an opportunity to become the pastor to the church but rejected the offer leaving it to Jones. The society itself was a memorable charitable organization that allowed its members to socialize and network with other business partners, in attempt to better their community. Its activity and open doors served as a motivational growth for the city as many other black mutual aid societies in the city began to pop up. Additionally the society is well known for their aid during the yellow fever epidemic in 1793 known to have taken the life of many of the city.

African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The African Church or the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas Philadelphia, Pennsylvania was founded in 1792 for those of African descent, as a foster church for the community with the goal to be interdenominational. In the beginning of the church's establishment its masses were held in homes and local schools. One of the founders of the Free African Society was also the first Episcopal priest of African American descent, Absalom Jones. The original church house was constructed at 5th and Adelphi Streets in Philadelphia, now St. James Place, and it was dedicated on July 17, 1794; other locations of the church included: 12th Street near Walnut, 57th and Pearl Streets, 52nd and Parrish Streets, and the current location, Overbrook and Lancaster Avenue in Philadelphia's historic Overbrook Farms neighborhood. The church is mostly African-American. The church and its members have played a key role in the abolition/anti-slavery and equal rights movement of the 1800s.

"Since 1960 St. Thomas has been involved in the local and national civil rights movement through its work with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Union of Black Episcopalians, the Opportunities Industrialization Center (OIC), Philadelphia Interfaith Action, and The Episcopal Church Women. Most importantly, it has been in the forefront of the movement to uphold the knowledge and value of the black presence in the Episcopal Church. Today, that tradition continues with a still-growing membership through a host of ministries such as Christian Formation, the Chancel Choir, Gospel Choir, Jazz Ensemble, Men’s Fellowship, Young Adult and Youth Ministries, a Church School, Health Ministry, Caring Ministry, and a Shepherding Program."

Nation of Islam

Wallace D. Fard founded the Nation of Islam in the 1930s. Fard took as his student Elijah (Poole) Muhammad, who later became the leader of the organization. The basis of the group was the belief that Christianity was exclusively a White man's religion, while Islam was the way for black folk; Christianity was a religion that, like slavery itself, was forced upon the people who suffered at the hands of the whites during their enslavement. The beliefs of the members of the Nation of Islam are similar to others who follow the Quran and worship Allah under the religion of Islam. Founded on resentment of the way Whites historically treated people of color, the Nation of Islam embraces the ideas of black nationalism. The group itself has, since the leadership of Elijah Muhammad, recruited thousands of followers from all segments of society: from prisons, as well as from black pride and black nationalist movements. Members of the Nation of Islam preached that the goal was not to integrate into White American culture, but rather to create their own cultural footprint and their own separate community in order to obliterate oppression. Their aim was to have their own schools and churches and to support each other without any reliance on other racial groups. The members of the Nation of Islam are known as Black Muslims. As the group became more and more prominent with public figures such as Malcolm X as its orators, it received increasing attention from outsiders. In 1959 the group was the subject of a documentary named The Hate that Hate Produced. The documentary cast the organization in a negative light, depicting it as a black supremacy group. Even with such depictions, the group did not lose support from its people. When Elijah Muhammad died, his son took on the role as the leader of the Nation of Islam, converting the organization into a more orthodox iteration of Islam and abandoning beliefs that tended toward violence. This conversion prompted others to abandon the group, dissatisfied with the change in ideology. They created a "New" Nation of Islam in order to restore the aims of the original organization.

The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies the Nation of Islam as a hate group, stating: "Its theology of innate black superiority over whites and the deeply racist, antisemitic and anti-LGBT rhetoric of its leaders have earned the NOI a prominent position in the ranks of organized hate." Louis Farrakhan currently leads the group.

Elijah Muhammad

Elijah Muhammad was famously known as the successor of Wallace Fard, the founder of the Nation of Islam. He was born in Georgia on October 7, 1897. He led the group from 1934 to 1975, being very well recognized as one of the mentors to other famous leaders such as Malcolm X. He lived until February 25, 1975, in Chicago, and the leadership of the organization passed to his son.

20th century

Marcus Garvey

Marcus Garvey encouraged African people around the world to be proud of their race and see beauty in their own kind. This form of black nationalism later became known as Garveyism. A central idea to Garveyism was that African people in every part of the world were one people and they would never advance if they did not put aside their cultural and ethnic differences and unite under their own shared history. He was heavily influenced by the earlier works of Booker T. Washington, Martin Delany, and Henry McNeal Turner. Garvey used his own personal magnetism and the understanding of black psychology and the psychology of confrontation to create a movement that challenged bourgeois blacks for the minds and souls of African Americans. Marcus Garvey's return to America had to do with his desire to meet with the man who inspired him most, Booker T. Washington, however Garvey did not return in time to meet Washington. Despite this, Garvey moved forward with his efforts and two years later, a year after Washington's death, Garvey established a similar organization in America known as the United Negro Improvement Association otherwise known as the UNIA. Garvey's beliefs are articulated in The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey as well as Message To The People: The Course of African Philosophy.

Malcolm X

Between 1953 and 1964, while most African leaders worked in the civil rights movement to integrate African-American people into mainstream American life, Malcolm X was an avid advocate of black independence and the reclaiming of black pride and masculinity. He maintained that there was hypocrisy in the purported values of Western culture – from its Judeo-Christian religious traditions to American political and economic institutions – and its inherently racist actions. He maintained that separatism and control of politics, and economics within its own community would serve blacks better than the tactics of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and mainstream civil rights groups such as the SCLC, SNCC, NAACP, and CORE. Malcolm X declared that nonviolence was the "philosophy of the fool," and that to achieve anything, African Americans would have to reclaim their national identity, embrace the rights covered by the Second Amendment, and defend themselves from white hegemony and extrajudicial violence. In response to Rev. Martin Luther King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech, Malcolm X quipped, "While King was having a dream, the rest of us Negroes are having a nightmare."

Prior to his pilgrimage to Mecca, Malcolm X believed that African Americans must develop their own society and ethical values, including the self-help, community-based enterprises, that the black Muslims supported. He also thought that African Americans should reject integration or cooperation with whites until they could achieve internal cooperation and unity. He prophetically believed that there "would be bloodshed" if the racism problem in America remained ignored, and he renounced "compromise" with whites. In April 1964, Malcolm X participated in a Hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca); Malcolm found himself restructuring his views and recanted several extremist opinions during his shift to mainstream Islam.

Malcolm X returned from Mecca with moderate views that included an abandonment of his commitment to racial separatism. However, he still supported black nationalism and advocated that African Americans in the United States act proactively in their campaign for equal human rights, instead of relying on Caucasian citizens to change the laws that govern society. The tenets of Malcolm X's new philosophy are articulated in the charter of his Organization of Afro-American Unity (a secular Pan-Africanist group patterned after the Organization of African Unity), and he inspired some aspects of the future Black Panther movement.

Stokely Carmichael

In the 1967 Black Power, Stokely Carmichael introduces black nationalism. He illustrates the prosperity of the black race in the United States as being dependent on the implementation of black sovereignty. Under his theory, black nationalism in the United States would allow blacks to socially, economically and politically be empowered in a manner that has never been plausible in America history. A black nation would work to reverse the exploitation of the black race in America, as blacks would intrinsically work to benefit their own state of affairs. African Americans would function in an environment of running their own businesses, banks, government, media and so on and so forth. Black nationalism is the opposite of integration, and Carmichael contended integration is harmful to the black population. As blacks integrate to white communities they are perpetuating a system in which blacks are inferior to whites. Blacks would continue to function in an environment of being second class citizens, he believes, never reaching equity to white citizens. Stokley Carmichael uses the concept of black nationalism to promote an equality that would begin to dismantle institutional racism.

Frantz Fanon

While in France, Frantz Fanon wrote his first book, Black Skin, White Masks, an analysis of the impact of colonial subjugation on the African psyche. This book was a very personal account of Fanon's experience being black: as a man, an intellectual, and a party to a French education. Although Fanon wrote the book while still in France, most of his other work was written while in North Africa (in particular Algeria). It was during this time that he produced The Wretched of the Earth where Fanon analyzes the role of class, race, national culture and violence in the struggle for decolonization. In this work, Fanon expounded his views on the liberating role of violence for the colonized, as well as the general necessity of violence in the anti-colonial struggle. Both books established Fanon in the eyes of much of the Third World as one of the leading anti-colonial thinkers of the 20th century. In 1959 he compiled his essays on Algeria in a book called L'An Cinq: De la Révolution Algérienne.

Revolutionary Black Nationalism

Revolutionary Black nationalism is an ideology that combines cultural nationalism with scientific socialism in order to achieve Black self-determination. Proponents of the ideology argue that revolutionary Black nationalism is a movement that rejects all forms of oppression, including class based exploitation under capitalism. Revolutionary Black nationalist organizations such as the Black Panther Party and the Revolutionary Action Movement also adopted a set of anti-colonialist politics inspired by the writings of notable revolutionary theorists including Frantz Fanon, Mao Zedong and Kwame Nkrumah. In the words of Ahmad Muhammad (formerly known as Max Stanford) the national field chairman of the Revolutionary Action Movement:

“We are revolutionary black nationalist[s], not based on ideas of national superiority, but striving for justice and liberation of all the oppressed peoples of the world. . . . There can be no liberty as long as black people are oppressed and the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America are oppressed by Yankee imperialism and neo-colonialism. After four hundred years of oppression, we realize that slavery, racism and imperialism are all interrelated and that liberty and justice for all cannot exist peacefully with imperialism.”

Professor and author Harold Cruse saw revolutionary Black nationalism as a necessary and logical progression from other leftist ideologies, as he believed that non-Black leftists could not properly assess the particular material conditions of the Black community and other colonized people:

“Revolutionary nationalism has not waited for Western Marxian thought to catch up with the realities of the "underdeveloped" world...The liberation of the colonies before the socialist revolution in the West is not orthodox Marxism (although it might be called Maoism or Castroism). As long as American Marxists cannot deal with the implications of revolutionary nationalism, both abroad and at home, they will continue to play the role of revolutionaries by proxy."

Criticism

Norm R. Allen, Jr., former director of African Americans for Humanism, calls black nationalism a "strange mixture of profound thought and patent nonsense".

On the one hand, Reactionary Black Nationalists (RBNs) advocate self-love, self-respect, self-acceptance, self-help, pride, unity, and so forth - much like the right-wingers who promote "traditional family values." But - also like the holier-than-thou right-wingers - RBNs promote bigotry, intolerance, hatred, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, pseudo-science, irrationality, dogmatic historical revisionism, violence, and so forth.

Allen further criticizes black nationalists' strong "attraction for hardened prisoners and ex-cons", their encouragement of violence when other African-American individuals or groups are branded as "Toms," traitors, or "sellouts", the blatantly sexist stance and the similarities to white supremacist ideologies:

Many RBNs routinely preach hate. Just as white supremacists have referred to African Americans as "devils," so have many RBNs referred to whites. White supremacists have verbally attacked gays, as have RBNs. White supremacists embrace paranoid conspiracy theories, as do their African counterparts. Many white supremacists and RBNs consistently deny that they are preaching hate, and blame the mainstream media for misrepresenting them. (A striking exception is the NOI's Khallid Muhammad, who, according to Gates, admitted in a taped speech titled "No Love for the Other Side": "Never will I say I am not anti-Semitic. I pray that God will kill my enemy and take him off the face of the planet.") Rather, they claim they are teaching "truth" and advocating the love of their own people, as though love of self and hatred of others are mutually exclusive positions. On the contrary, RBNs preach love of self and hatred of their enemies. (Indeed, it often seems that these groups are motivated more by hatred of their enemies than love of their people.)

Tunde Adeleke, Nigerian-born professor of History and Director of the African American Studies program at the University of Montana, argues in his book UnAfrican Americans: Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalists and the Civilizing Mission that 19th-century African-American nationalism embodied the racist and paternalistic values of Euro-American culture and that black nationalist plans were not designed for the immediate benefit of Africans but to enhance their own fortunes.

Black feminists in the U.S., such as Barbara Smith, Toni Cade Bambara, and Frances Beal, have also lodged sustained criticism of certain strands of black nationalism, particularly the political programs advocated by cultural nationalists. Black cultural nationalists envisioned black women only in the traditional heteronormative role of the idealized wife-mother figure. Patricia Hill Collins criticizes the limited imagining of black women in cultural nationalist projects, writing that black women "assumed a particular place in Black cultural nationalist efforts to reconstruct authentic Black culture, reconstitute Black identity, foster racial solidarity, and institute an ethic of service to the Black community." ^[25] A major example of black women as only the heterosexual wife and mother can be found in the philosophy and practice called Kawaida exercised by the Us Organization. Maulana Karenga established the political philosophy of Kawaida in 1965. Its doctrine prescribed distinct roles between black men and women. Specifically, the role of the black woman as "African Woman" was to "inspire her man, educate her children, and participate in social development." Historian of black women's history and radical politics, Ashley Farmer, records a more comprehensive history of black women's resistance to sexism and patriarchy within black nationalist organizations, leading many Black Power era associations to support gender equality.

White supremacy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_supremacy 

 

White supremacy or white supremacism is the racist belief that white people are superior to people of other races and therefore should be dominant over them. White supremacy has roots in the now-discredited doctrine of scientific racism and often relies on pseudoscientific arguments. Like most similar movements such as neo-Nazism, white supremacists typically oppose members of other races as well as Jews.

The term is also used to describe a political ideology that perpetuates and maintains the social, political, historical, or institutional domination by white people (as evidenced by historical and contemporary sociopolitical structures such as the Atlantic slave trade, Jim Crow laws in the United States, the set of "White Australia" policies from the 1890s until the mid-1970s, and apartheid in South Africa). Different forms of white supremacism put forth different conceptions of who is considered white, and different groups of white supremacists identify various racial and cultural groups as their primary enemy.

In academic usage, particularly in usage which draws on critical race theory or intersectionality, the term "white supremacy" can also refer to a political or socioeconomic system, in which white people enjoy a structural advantage (privilege) over other ethnic groups, on both a collective and individual level.

History

White supremacy has ideological foundations that date back to 17th-century scientific racism, the predominant paradigm of human variation that helped shape international relations and racial policy from the latter part of the Age of Enlightenment until the late 20th century (marked by decolonization and the abolition of apartheid in South Africa in 1991, followed by that country's first multiracial elections in 1994).

The Battle of Liberty Place monument in Louisiana was erected in 1891 by the white-dominated New Orleans government. An inscription added in 1932 states that the 1876 US Presidential Election "recognized white supremacy in the South and gave us our state". It was removed in 2017 and placed in storage.

 

Ku Klux Klan parade in Washington, D.C. in 1926

United States

White supremacy was dominant in the United States both before and after the American Civil War, and it also persisted for decades after the Reconstruction Era. In the antebellum South, this included the holding of African Americans in chattel slavery, in which four million of them were denied freedom. The outbreak of the Civil War saw the desire to uphold white supremacy being cited as a cause for state secession and the formation of the Confederate States of America. In an editorial about Native Americans in 1890, author L. Frank Baum wrote: "The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians."

The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited U.S. citizenship to whites only. In some parts of the United States, many people who were considered non-white were disenfranchised, barred from government office, and prevented from holding most government jobs well into the second half of the 20th century. Professor Leland T. Saito of the University of Southern California writes: "Throughout the history of the United States, race has been used by whites for legitimizing and creating difference and social, economic and political exclusion."

The denial of social and political freedom to minorities continued into the mid-20th century, resulting in the civil rights movement. Sociologist Stephen Klineberg has stated that U.S. immigration laws prior to 1965 clearly declared "that Northern Europeans are a superior subspecies of the white race". The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 opened entry to the U.S. to immigrants other than traditional Northern European and Germanic groups, and significantly altered the demographic mix in the U.S as a result. Many U.S. states banned interracial marriage through anti-miscegenation laws until 1967, when these laws were invalidated by the Supreme Court of the United States' decision in Loving v. Virginia. These mid-century gains had a major impact on white Americans' political views; segregation and white racial superiority, which had been publicly endorsed in the 1940s, became minority views within the white community by the mid-1970s, and continued to decline into 1990s polls to a single-digit percentage. For sociologist Howard Winant, these shifts marked the end of "monolithic white supremacy" in the United States.

After the mid-1960s, white supremacy remained an important ideology to the American far-right. According to Kathleen Belew, a historian of race and racism in the United States, white militancy shifted after the Vietnam War from supporting the existing racial order to a more radical position—self-described as "white power" or "white nationalism"—committed to overthrowing the United States government and establishing a white homeland. Such anti-government militia organizations are one of three major strands of violent right-wing movements in the United States, with white supremacist groups (such as the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazi organizations, and racist skinheads) and a religious fundamentalist movement (such as Christian Identity) being the other two. Howard Winant writes that, "On the far right the cornerstone of white identity is belief in an ineluctable, unalterable racialized difference between whites and nonwhites." In the view of philosopher Jason Stanley, white supremacy in the United States is an example of the fascist politics of hierarchy, in that it "demands and implies a perpetual hierarchy" in which whites dominate and control non-whites.

Some academics argue that outcomes from the 2016 United States Presidential Election reflect ongoing challenges with white supremacy. Psychologist Janet Helms suggested that the normalizing behaviors of social institutions of education, government, and healthcare are organized around the "birthright of...the power to control society's resources and determine the rules for [those resources]". Educators, literary theorists, and other political experts have raised similar questions, connecting the scapegoating of disenfranchised populations to white superiority.

On July 23, 2019, Christopher A. Wray, the head of the FBI, said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that the agency had made around 100 domestic terrorism arrests since October 1, 2018, and that the majority of them were connected in some way with white supremacy. Wray said that the Bureau was "aggressively pursuing [domestic terrorism] using both counterterrorism resources and criminal investigative resources and partnering closely with our state and local partners," but said that it was focused on the violence itself and not on its ideological basis. A similar number of arrests had been made for instances of international terrorism. In the past, Wray has said that white supremacy was a significant and "pervasive" threat to the U.S.

On September 20, 2019, the acting Secretary of Homeland Security, Kevin McAleenan, announced his department's revised strategy for counter-terrorism, which included a new emphasis on the dangers inherent in the white supremacy movement. McAleenan called white supremacy one of the most "potent ideologies" behind domestic terrorism-related violent acts. In a speech at the Brookings Institution, McAleenan cited a series of high-profile shooting incidents, and said "In our modern age, the continued menace of racially based violent extremism, particularly white supremacist extremism, is an abhorrent affront to the nation, the struggle and unity of its diverse population." The new strategy will include better tracking and analysis of threats, sharing information with local officials, training local law enforcement on how to deal with shooting events, discouraging the hosting of hate sites online, and encouraging counter-messages.

Effect of the media

White supremacism has been depicted in music videos, feature films, documentaries, journal entries, and on social media. The 1915 silent drama film The Birth of a Nation followed the rising racial, economic, political, and geographic tensions leading up to the Emancipation Proclamation and the Southern Reconstruction era that was the genesis of the Ku Klux Klan.

David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, believed that the Internet was going to create a "chain reaction of racial enlightenment that will shake the world." Jessie Daniels, of CUNY-Hunter College, also said that racist groups see the Internet as a way to spread their ideologies, influence others and gain supporters. Legal scholar Richard Hasen describes a "dark side" of social media:

There certainly were hate groups before the Internet and social media. [But with social media] it just becomes easier to organize, to spread the word, for people to know where to go. It could be to raise money, or it could be to engage in attacks on social media. Some of the activity is virtual. Some of it is in a physical place. Social media has lowered the collective-action problems that individuals who might want to be in a hate group would face. You can see that there are people out there like you. That's the dark side of social media.

With the emergence of Twitter in 2006, and platforms such as Stormfront which was launched in 1996, an alt-right portal for white supremacists with similar beliefs, both adults and children, was provided in which they were given a way to connect. Daniels discussed the emergence of other social media outlets such as 4chan and Reddit, which meant that the "spread of white nationalist symbols and ideas could be accelerated and amplified". Sociologist Kathleen Blee notes that the anonymity which the Internet provides can make it difficult to track the extent of white supremacist activity in the country, but nevertheless she and other experts see an increase in the amount of hate crimes and white supremacist violence. In the latest wave of white supremacy, in the age of the Internet, Blee sees the movement as having primarily become a virtual one, in which divisions between groups become blurred: "[A]ll these various groups that get jumbled together as the alt-right and people who have come in from the more traditional neo-Nazi world. We're in a very different world now."

A series on YouTube hosted by the grandson of Thomas Robb, the national director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, "presents the Klan's ideology in a format aimed at kids — more specifically, white kids."^[33] The short episodes inveigh against race-mixing, and extol other white supremacist ideologies. A short documentary published by TRT describes the experience of Imran Garda, a journalist of Indian descent, who met with Thomas Robb and a traditional KKK group. A sign that greets people who enter the town states "Diversity is a code for white genocide." The KKK group interviewed in the documentary summarizes its ideals, principles, and beliefs, which are emblematic of white supremacists in the United States. The comic book super hero Captain America, in an ironic co-optation, has been used for dog whistle politics by the alt-right in college campus recruitment in 2017.

British Commonwealth

In 1937, Winston Churchill told the Palestine Royal Commission: "I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place." British historian Richard Toye, author of Churchill's Empire, said that "Churchill did think that white people were superior."

South Africa

A number of Southern African nations experienced severe racial tension and conflict during global decolonization, particularly as white Africans of European ancestry fought to protect their preferential social and political status. Racial segregation in South Africa began in colonial times under the Dutch Empire, and it continued when the British took over the Cape of Good Hope in 1795. Apartheid was introduced as an officially structured policy by the Afrikaner-dominated National Party after the general election of 1948. Apartheid's legislation divided inhabitants into four racial groups—"black", "white", "coloured", and "Indian", with coloured divided into several sub-classifications. In 1970, the Afrikaner-run government abolished non-white political representation, and starting that year black people were deprived of South African citizenship. South Africa abolished apartheid in 1991.

Rhodesia

In Rhodesia a predominantly white government issued its own unilateral declaration of independence from the United Kingdom during an unsuccessful attempt to avoid immediate majority rule. Following the Rhodesian Bush War which was fought by African nationalists, Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith acceded to biracial political representation in 1978 and the state achieved recognition from the United Kingdom as Zimbabwe in 1980.

Poster of the Nazi paper Der Stürmer (1935) condemning relations between Jews and non-Jewish Germans

Germany

Nazism promoted the idea of a superior Germanic people or Aryan race in Germany during the early 20th century. Notions of white supremacy and Aryan racial superiority were combined in the 19th century, with white supremacists maintaining the belief that white people were members of an Aryan "master race" which was superior to other races, particularly the Jews, who were described as the "Semitic race", Slavs, and Gypsies, which they associated with "cultural sterility". Arthur de Gobineau, a French racial theorist and aristocrat, blamed the fall of the ancien régime in France on racial degeneracy caused by racial intermixing, which he argued had destroyed the "purity" of the Nordic or Germanic race. Gobineau's theories, which attracted a strong following in Germany, emphasized the existence of an irreconcilable polarity between Aryan or Germanic peoples and Jewish culture.

As the Nazi Party's chief racial theorist, Alfred Rosenberg oversaw the construction of a human racial "ladder" that justified Hitler's racial and ethnic policies. Rosenberg promoted the Nordic theory, which regarded Nordics as the "master race", superior to all others, including other Aryans (Indo-Europeans). Rosenberg got the racial term Untermensch from the title of Klansman Lothrop Stoddard's 1922 book The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man. It was later adopted by the Nazis from that book's German version Der Kulturumsturz: Die Drohung des Untermenschen (1925). Rosenberg was the leading Nazi who attributed the concept of the East-European "under man" to Stoddard. An advocate of the U.S. immigration laws that favored Northern Europeans, Stoddard wrote primarily on the alleged dangers posed by "colored" peoples to white civilization, and wrote The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy in 1920. In establishing a restrictive entry system for Germany in 1925, Hitler wrote of his admiration for America's immigration laws: "The American Union categorically refuses the immigration of physically unhealthy elements, and simply excludes the immigration of certain races."

German praise for America's institutional racism, previously found in Hitler's Mein Kampf, was continuous throughout the early 1930s, and Nazi lawyers were advocates of the use of American models. Race-based U.S. citizenship and anti-miscegenation laws directly inspired the Nazis' two principal Nuremberg racial laws—the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. In order to preserve the Aryan or Nordic race, the Nazis introduced the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, which forbade sexual relations and marriages between Germans and Jews, and later between Germans and Romani and Slavs. The Nazis used the Mendelian inheritance theory to argue that social traits were innate, claiming that there was a racial nature associated with certain general traits such as inventiveness or criminal behavior.

According to the 2012 annual report of Germany's interior intelligence service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, at the time there were 26,000 right-wing extremists living in Germany, including 6000 neo-Nazis.

Russia

Neo-Nazi organisations embracing white supremacist ideology are present in many countries of the world. In 2007, it was claimed that Russian neo-Nazis accounted for "half of the world's total".

Ukraine

In June 2015, Democratic Representative John Conyers and his Republican colleague Ted Yoho offered bipartisan amendments to block the U.S. military training of Ukraine's Azov Battalion — called a "neo-Nazi paramilitary militia" by Conyers and Yoho. Some members of the battalion are openly white supremacists.

Academic use of the term

The term white supremacy is used in some academic studies of racial power to denote a system of structural or societal racism which privileges white people over others, regardless of the presence or the absence of racial hatred. White racial advantages occur at both a collective and an individual level (ceteris paribus, i. e., when individuals are compared that do not relevantly differ except in ethnicity). Legal scholar Frances Lee Ansley explains this definition as follows:

By "white supremacy" I do not mean to allude only to the self-conscious racism of white supremacist hate groups. I refer instead to a political, economic and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority and entitlement are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.

This and similar definitions have been adopted or proposed by Charles W. Mills, bell hooks, David Gillborn, Jessie Daniels, and Neely Fuller Jr, and they are widely used in critical race theory and intersectional feminism. Some anti-racist educators, such as Betita Martinez and the Challenging White Supremacy workshop, also use the term in this way. The term expresses historic continuities between a pre–civil rights movement era of open white supremacism and the current racial power structure of the United States. It also expresses the visceral impact of structural racism through "provocative and brutal" language that characterizes racism as "nefarious, global, systemic, and constant". Academic users of the term sometimes prefer it to racism because it allows for a distinction to be drawn between racist feelings and white racial advantage or privilege.

The term's recent rise in popularity among leftist activists has been characterized by some as counterproductive. John McWhorter, a specialist in language and race relations, has described its use as straying from its commonly accepted meaning to encompass less extreme issues, thereby cheapening the term and potentially derailing productive discussion. Political columnist Kevin Drum attributes the term's growing popularity to frequent use by Ta-Nehisi Coates, describing it as a "terrible fad" which fails to convey nuance. He claims that the term should be reserved for those who are trying to promote the idea that whites are inherently superior to blacks and not used to characterize less blatantly racist beliefs or actions. The use of the academic definition of white supremacy has been criticized by Conor Friedersdorf for the confusion it creates for the general public inasmuch as it differs from the more common dictionary definition; he argues that it is likely to alienate those it hopes to convince.

Ideologies and movements

Supporters of Nordicism consider the "Nordic peoples" to be a superior race. By the early 19th century, white supremacy was attached to emerging theories of racial hierarchy. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer attributed cultural primacy to the white race:

The highest civilization and culture, apart from the ancient Hindus and Egyptians, are found exclusively among the white races; and even with many dark peoples, the ruling caste or race is fairer in colour than the rest and has, therefore, evidently immigrated, for example, the Brahmans, the Incas, and the rulers of the South Sea Islands. All this is due to the fact that necessity is the mother of invention because those tribes that emigrated early to the north, and there gradually became white, had to develop all their intellectual powers and invent and perfect all the arts in their struggle with need, want and misery, which in their many forms were brought about by the climate.

The Good Citizen 1926, published by Pillar of Fire Church

 

The eugenicist Madison Grant argued in his 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, that the Nordic race had been responsible for most of humanity's great achievements, and that admixture was "race suicide". In this book, Europeans who are not of Germanic origin but have Nordic characteristics such as blonde/red hair and blue/green/gray eyes, were considered to be a Nordic admixture and suitable for Aryanization.

Members of the second Ku Klux Klan at a rally in 1923.

 

In the United States, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is the group most associated with the white supremacist movement. Many white supremacist groups are based on the concept of preserving genetic purity, and do not focus solely on discrimination based on skin color. The KKK's reasons for supporting racial segregation are not primarily based on religious ideals, but some Klan groups are openly Protestant. The KKK and other white supremacist groups like Aryan Nations, The Order and the White Patriot Party are considered antisemitic.

Nazi Germany promulgated white supremacy based on the belief that the Aryan race, or the Germans, were the master race. It was combined with a eugenics programme that aimed for racial hygiene through compulsory sterilization of sick individuals and extermination of Untermenschen ("subhumans"): Slavs, Jews and Romani, which eventually culminated in the Holocaust.

Christian Identity is another movement closely tied to white supremacy. Some white supremacists identify themselves as Odinists, although many Odinists reject white supremacy. Some white supremacist groups, such as the South African Boeremag, conflate elements of Christianity and Odinism. Creativity (formerly known as "The World Church of the Creator") is atheistic and it denounces Christianity and other theistic religions. Aside from this, its ideology is similar to that of many Christian Identity groups because it believes in the antisemitic conspiracy theory that there is a "Jewish conspiracy" in control of governments, the banking industry and the media. Matthew F. Hale, founder of the World Church of the Creator, has published articles stating that all races other than white are "mud races", which is what the group's religion teaches.

The white supremacist ideology has become associated with a racist faction of the skinhead subculture, despite the fact that when the skinhead culture first developed in the United Kingdom in the late 1960s, it was heavily influenced by black fashions and music, especially Jamaican reggae and ska, and African American soul music.

White supremacist recruitment activities are primarily conducted at a grassroots level as well as on the Internet. Widespread access to the Internet has led to a dramatic increase in white supremacist websites. The Internet provides a venue to openly express white supremacist ideas at little social cost, because people who post the information are able to remain anonymous.

White separatism

White separatism is a political and social movement that seeks the separation of white people from people of other races and ethnicities, the establishment of a white ethnostate by removing non-whites from existing communities or by forming new communities elsewhere.

Most modern researchers do not view white separatism as distinct from white supremacist beliefs. The Anti-Defamation League defines white separatism as "a form of white supremacy"; the Southern Poverty Law Center defines both white nationalism and white separatism as "ideologies based on white supremacy." Facebook has banned content that is openly white nationalist or white separatist because "white nationalism and white separatism cannot be meaningfully separated from white supremacy and organized hate groups".

Use of the term to self-identify has been criticized as a dishonest rhetorical ploy. The Anti-Defamation League argues that white supremacists use the phrase because they believe it has fewer negative connotations than the term white supremacist.

Dobratz & Shanks-Meile reported that adherents usually reject marriage "outside the white race". They argued the existence of "a distinction between the white supremacist's desire to dominate (as in apartheid, slavery, or segregation) and complete separation by race". They argued that this is a matter of pragmatism, that while many white supremacists are also white separatists, contemporary white separatists reject the view that returning to a system of segregation is possible or desirable in the United States.