PROUDFLESH: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness

Amina Brown

To: Negro Conspirators and “Silent Slave-Holding Counterfeit Allies”1 of the “Negroisie,”2

I can no longer pretend. I can no longer pretend that there is really a Black “privileged class.” I can no longer be complicit in Black persecution, and allow myself to believe that I am a exceptional Negro whose work ethic and access to whiteness makes me an anomaly of Blackness. I must become a martyr of revolution and reclaim Black solidarity as my own political afterlife. Therefore, I suggest that Black solidarity and all its attributes pertain to Black survival in the face of political antagonism, economic disregard and social displacement. It must pertain to Black creativity, Black art, Black innovation as a means of carving inclusive spaces into society when this society viciously excludes Black men and women. Solidarity is a needed social, political, and cultural phenomenon that relates to Black struggle. It suggests a means of dealing with an abrading urban infrastructure that ultimately proves malignant to Afrikans in dominant physical and ontological structures of whiteness. Black solidarity then is the first step to healing Black pain, and Black despair. It is needed to bridge the binary between Black hope and hopelessness; Black love and embedded hate. Solidarity is needed to redeem us and, above all else, to immortalize Black continuance and progression.

It is for these reasons that I write to silent slaveholders who arrogantly expect Black people to be grateful for token gestures of white access. I further write this correspondence to their pseudo-middle class Negro conspirators who have been tricked into aiding and abetting their own enslavement and oppression. The ones who have let false notions of exceptional Blackness, moral judgements based on distorted definitions of work, and the illusion of Black privilege compel them to perpetuate their own condition of indictment. I write to you in the name of, at best, your maltreatment of Black men and women. I write to you in opposition to your calculated attempt at removing Black men and women from their homes, each other, their children and from a society which has never invited them to participate except as “slaves.”

This letter confronts your twisted notions of law and order that criminalize Black men, women and children. I write to you resisting the politics that you have implemented in an attempt to sequester and nullify the Black man and woman. I write to you in complete revolt against your notion that Black men are criminal pariahs of white citizenry, and fundamental menaces to society. I write to you in true protest against your notions that Black women are sexual objects incapable of “virtue,” “beauty,” and “intellect.”

I write to you in the name of your effort to bar Black men and women from proper educational facilities, employment opportunities, political participation, economic prosperity and social integration. I write against the politics that hinder Black people all over the world from grounding with each other and rising up as a collective to claim our own liberation.

Since me, we--Black people—are by melanin default an oppressed class, our skin binds us to not only each other, but to the systems, attitudes and institutions that have forever claimed us as “collateral damage.” In that vein, we cannot afford to separate ourselves based on classism. The language of classism is only a discourse that the truly privileged can indulge in. Our political and social “well-being” is measured not by the few that are fooled into thinking that they got through, but instead by our masses. The thread of enforced hate and oppression that is signaled by Black skin is what connects us all. Therefore, to inhibit Black solidarity by claiming a pretended closeness to white imposed notions of status is to be a conspirator in Black enslavement. This is my [class] suicide note!

At Wits End!

I was, so I thought, a middle-class Black girl from Northwest D.C. I relished in being from Northwest because it was associated with the money, and the power. Never mind that I was not from the part of Northwest that everyone associated with the White House, the Capital, Cherry Blossoms, the Smithsonian and Georgetown. I was from the part that was all Black. The part that the white people were glad that Rock Creek Park separated them from. Mostly civil servants and government workers inhabited my neighborhood. Everybody was and is just a paycheck out of poverty. Everybody. Nevertheless, no one wanted to admit it. In fact, my neighborhood had two citizen components. Either the old Black church-going population who had acquired what little bit of wealth they had from working in white folk’s kitchens, or through tenures in the military, and the younger population who had nothing and, in the eyes of the old Black population, were going to remain nothing.

The irony of this generational disconnect was that the Black youth ages thirty-five and under were the children and grandchildren of those who had attempted on so many levels to abandon them. All the girls were damned as “half-raised whores” and all the boys were cursed as “drug-dealers.” The youth were stigmatized as the impetus to the inevitability of a bad neighborhood. On the porches, of pseudo-bourgeois Black folks, statements such as, “this was a nice neighborhood before they moved around here,” rang loud and clear. The discussions at the neighborhood/block club centered around the presence of a newly appointed police chief and his plans to “move the hoodlums” out. It was in the midst of this that I became the token up-and-coming Negress.

That one who never hung out, attended private schools in that part of Northwest on the other side of the park, and ultimately the one to go to an elite white private university in upstate New York. As I grew up I never fit into my neighborhood. I never knew the new dances, never attended cheerleading competitions and was picked up everyday as oppose to walking home everyday like all the other children in my neighborhood. I missed out on the community building and camaraderie analogous with street ball and “joaning.” In due course, unconscious Negro’s always told me that all of that stuff was irrelevant. I was different. I was going to be something. I have come to realize that what they really meant was that I would be given upward mobility and be able to join the privileged class of backwards, Greek letter-wearing Negros and Negresses.

I internalized this idea that I was somehow different and ultimately better. I became the bourgeois Negress of my neighborhood. I dissed all the “baby mamas” as if I was the Virgin Mary herself. I dissed the “baby daddy” by saying that I would never date him because “I did not want a microwave family.” I criminalized the low-level drug dealer by excusing police raids and police brutality. I looked down on the high school “drop-out,” and but for my Dad having a GED, I would have scoffed at that also. I had gotten good grades my whole life, and I loved that the entire neighborhood knew that I was the “smart one.” I shamefully vocalized that I wanted a man with a degree. I trivialized street smarts as “thug intellect” and held “book smarts” as the only substantive knowledge. I was becoming a so-called privileged Negro who had “worked hard” and gotten access. It was not until I arrived at Syracuse University and was submersed in the world of whiteness that I finally realized, once and for all, that I under no circumstances fit in. Though I had gone to white schools my whole life and had in some very superficial senses held on to my Blackness, I was no more middle class than the people back home. I was on financial hold every single semester, I was looked at and spoken to as simply an “affirmative action case.”

Of course, then I had to reevaluate how privileged I really was not. Accordingly, I had to become aware of my own potential both as a woman warrior in the Black liberation struggle and as a Black woman conscious of her spiritual and intellectual needs. I therefore had to surrender to personal struggle and resistance. In other words, as the revolutionary philosopher Frantz Fanon articulated in The Wretched of the Earth, to decolonize is to go to war on oneself. It is to identify the tools of your oppressor and resist them psychologically, mentally, and emotionally. It is to vomit up the forms of exploitation and forced inferiority complexes that have created self-hatred, and loathing for one’s people; namely Black people.

I had to first and most painfully oppose the concept of the Black bourgeoisie and the fallacious values that this concept assigns. I had to realize that as long as anything has to be qualified with Black (Black history, Black Studies, Black intellectual, Black middle class) it is by default not of the same caliber as simply the subject without a specific qualification. As long as it does not have Black prior to it, it is automatically white, making it due to racist monopolies of social status, resources, and access to privilege--superior. Consider the following analysis from Fanon when he asserts:

. . . since the middle class has neither sufficient material nor intellectual resources (by intellectual resources we mean engineers and technicians), it limits its claims to the taking over of business offices and commercial houses formerly occupied by the settlers. The national bourgeoisie steps into the shoes of the former European [white] settlement: doctors, barristers, traders, commercial travelers, general agents. It considers that the dignity of the country and its own welfare require that it should occupy all these posts . . . The national middle class discovers its historical mission: that of intermediary . . .3

This is why in “Black middle class” neighborhoods, such as mine, if your mother is a civil servant, and your father a bus driver, you are “doing alright.” However, white middle class people would scoff at such social stations. In effect then, to be middle-class is to own the means of production, which Black people on a global scale do not. Oprah and Michael Jordan do not count, as neither of them own Channel 7, or Nike. They are just exploited by them. I draw upon these often dismissed yet important distinctions because these differences haunt our interactions with one another, impede our progress toward strong kinship and political affinities. This colonized psychosis is after all what impeded my relationships with the people who lived in my very own neighborhood. Sometimes, this inhibiting is external through forces that we lack control over, but sometimes it is internal and even instigated by the so-called underclass who have bought into whiteness, as well as the so-called Black middle class who crudely want to be a part of whiteness.

To discern that there is a Black underclass, and a Black middle class without qualifying both caste situations as fraudulent, is to subscribe to bogus middle-class values and to devalue Black progress, and Black survival. It is to glorify and amplify access to whiteness via tokenized gestures. Nevertheless, as long as Black people not only accept but also are grateful for token gestures, we will forever buy into the imperialistic, oppressive guise associated with whiteness. Therefore, in order for there to be the illusion of the Black middle class, tokenized Black people who have access to social and political structures that contribute to domination must be oppressive to someone else. This someone else most often takes the form of what even confused, self-hating and self-destructing Black people ridicule as the “Black underclass.” For example, Claudia Jones, another woman warrior in the struggle for Black liberation, writes in “An End to the Neglect of the Negro Woman!”:

. . . it is not accidental that the American bourgeoisie has intensified its oppression . . . Nothing so exposes the drive to fascisization in the nation as the callous attitude which the bourgeoisie displays and cultivates toward [Black people].4

In effect, I had to understand that in order for there to be a Black “bourgeoisie,” Black people with access to pseudo-privilege and class, or whiteness, have to be contemptible of what they have been taught to think of as subordinate. For the confused Negroisie, as I shamefully thought that I was, the “subordinate class” is the “baby mama,” “the low-level drug dealer,” “the teenage mother,” “the brother or sister without a college degree,” and with “a GED,” and those who survive because of their knowledge of “street smarts.” I had to realize it is “street” knowledge, not book knowledge, that got us through the Maafa (or “Middle-Passage”), enslavement, Jim Crow, Cointelpro, Tuskegee, Reagan, Clinton, Bush I, and it’s what will get us through Bush II.

Public as opposed to private education, especially on the junior high and high school levels, is supposed to be by definition abominable. Somebody has to clean white peoples toilets, cook in their kitchens, and take care of their dysfunctional children, while they spend time in tanning salons, the Hamptons, Aspen, and getting plastic surgery. To dismiss the GED is to dismiss the millions of Black youth who may not want to or be able to finish high school. This is why the GED is the biggest slap in the face to white America, and the most profound testament to Black resistance, resilience, and brilliance. Higher education is genocide through assimilation; academic institutions are the munitions factories making a degree; and drugs, the same thing—a product to participate in capitalism. Moreover, as a Black woman unwittingly hell bent on imitating white standards of prudence, I had to realize that the Black pseudo-bourgeois wife imitating white middle class feminine virtue is not the backbone of the Black race. The woman that keeps the race going is the so-called “baby mama.”

When I would return to D.C. on various school breaks, my homecoming was all but bourgeois and epic. I returned to some of the most profound impoverishment, drug-addiction, alcoholism, drug addiction and trafficking and prostitution that has ever haunted us. While I was in pain because of the political and social circumstances that my people had been placed in, I was in love with them. They were My People.5 Unlike ever before I wanted and needed them to be my people. They were with all of their “societal indecencies” the reason that even with the Maafa or “Middle-“Passage,” chattel and wage enslavement, Jim Crow, lynching, Tuskegee, AIDS, and immense poverty, we/I had still survived.

I had to look at Black people as more than an abyss of desperation and despair in the form of a consolidated mass with a faint heart beat. I had to look at us as an intricate collective with cultural and aesthetic beauty that has long been overshadowed by white assassination and hypocrisy. I had to look at us as a unit that needed to reclaim its legacy of political insurgency, and I looked at me as a Black woman who had to recommit herself to her people. I had to walk away from a world that amplified whiteness. I had to end my existence as a Negress who had “made progress,” and become a Black revolutionary that was progressive. Therefore, I walked to the cliffs of racism, imperialism, capitalism, chauvinism, patriarchy, homophobia, and classism to end it all.

The Jump Off . . .

The responsibility of the petty Black “bourgeois” has long been compromised by a failure on the part of both continental African intellectuals and diasporic African intellectuals to understand the relationship between a Negro with perfunctory privilege and a Negro with no privilege at all. The difference is that a Negro with inconsequential privilege must act as an intermediary between the Black masses and the white oppressive ruling class. He must posture as oppressive himself to what he considers “the wretched of the earth,” making him a sycophant of whiteness. His enslavement is minimized and presented to him as tolerable despite still being politically, socially and economically ostracized by the white ruling class.

The Negro who is overtly reminded of his lack of privilege is degraded and stigmatized by whiteness. He is banished even from what is the illusion of privilege and placed disproportionately in unemployment, underemployment, poor education, poverty, homicide, suicide, drug use, abuse, and trafficking and prostitution statistics. When at times he may relish a better social station, he negotiates his survival by socially misbehaving and politically disobeying. His contempt for whiteness is loud and expressive, where as the petty Negro conspirator’s contempt for whiteness is silent and cowardly. In the end however, neither one of them is liberated from the bonds of enslavement; a position that illustrates that there is no difference between the two of them. A clear articulation of this false dichotomy is illustrated in Malcolm X’s folkloric yet veracious analogy of the “field Negro” and “house Negro” relationship:

Back during slavery there were two kinds of Negroes. There was the old house Negro and the field Negro. And the house Negro always looked out for his master. When the field Negroes got too much out of line he held them back in check. He put ’em back on the plantation. The house Negro could afford to do that because he lived better than the field Negro. He ate better, he dressed better, and he lived in a better house. He lived right up next to his master--in the attic or the basement. He ate the same food his master ate and wore the same clothes. And he could talk just like his master—good diction. And he loved his master more than his master loved himself. That’s why he didn’t want his master hurt . . . . But then you had the field Negroes, who lived in huts, had nothing to lose. They wore the worst kinds of clothes. They ate the worst food. And they caught hell. The felt the sting of the lash. They hated their master.6

As long as Black people are adulterated into thinking that an oppressed class—as we are—a has caste hierarchy, self-liberation is impossible. The divide and conquer strategy which fostered the “house Negro” and “field Negro” binary was made in an attempt to keep the race from rising up against colonization and enslavement. It is to our slow and painful demise to think of “house Negroes” as privileged slaves; as the notion of a “privilege slave” is a contradiction. Concerning a contemporary political narrative, the house Negro now takes the form of the Black politician, the Black professional and especially the Black intellectual. These social and cultural participants are obviously closer to the master’s quarters (the universities, the corporate offices and the federal buildings) than the brothers and sisters that make up the lumpen Black masses.7 The Black “bourgeois,” as they have come to be classified, is socialized—as the house Negro was—into thinking that they are somehow sanctioned and by default better. The renowned W.E.B. DuBois was confused enough to utter this contempt for his own people with his concept of the Talented Tenth:

The (black) race, like all races is going to be saved by its exceptional men. The problem of education, then, among [blacks] must first of all deal with the Talented Tenth: It is the problem of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst, in their own races. The talented tenth rises and pulls all that are worth the saving up to their vantage ground. This is the history of human progress; and the two historic mistakes which have hindered that progress were the thinking first that no more could ever rise save the few already risen; or second, that it would better the unrisen to pull the risen down.8

The Black intellectual becomes bamboozled by the mockery of academia, making him an imitator of whiteness. By imitating whiteness he ostensibly acquires upward mobility out of the ghettoized slums of Blackness. He fails to realize, however, that he can never move out of his Black social predicament, any more than he can move out of his Black skin. Even in the master’s quarters of academia the Negro is still far kept away from the master. Just as the house Negro was in Malcolm X’s analogy, though he may be closer than the field Negroes he is still acutely removed from the master. Consider the following excerpt from Carter G. Woodson’s The Mis-Education of the Negro, in which again this is articulated:

The Negro of course stood at the foot of the social ladder. The description of the various parts of the world was worked out according to the same plan. The parts inhabited by the Caucasian was treated in detail. Less attention was given to the yellow people, still less to the red, very little to the brown and practically none to the Black race. Those people who are far removed from the physical characteristics of the Caucasians or who do not materially assist them in the domination and exploitation of others were not mentioned except to be belittled or decried.9

The Black intellectual is fundamentally scapegoated into being the token of white acceptance making him the beaming yet plausible victor over attitudinal racism. His mere presence represents a profile of integration and, as a result, he struggles. Not for his people or for their liberation, but instead to claim integration as his own personal reward. To integrate is the ultimate arrival into the world of whiteness, even if it’s done superficially and at the expense of assimilation. This was largely the premise for E. Franklin Frazier’s criticism of the Black “bourgeoisie”:

They have failed to study the problems of [Afro-American] life in a manner which would place the fate of [Afro-Americans] in the broad framework of man’s experience in this world. They have engaged in petty defenses of the Afro-American’s social failures. But more often they have been so imbued with the prospect of integration and eventual assimilation that they have thought that they could prove themselves true Americans by not studying [Afro-Americans].10

For Franklin the responsibility of the Black bourgeois is to free themselves from the desire to conform, thus overcoming their inferiority complexes.11 Their need to separate from essentially themselves is a true detriment to the race, because true liberation has to first come at the expense of an inferiority complex. Harold Cruse would take a more poignant approach when opposing the Negro intellectual and their spurious assignment as the bourgeois:

The tentative acceptance the [black] intellectual find in the predominately white intellectual world allow him the illusion that integration is real—a functional reality for himself, and a possibility of all [blacks]. Even if a [black] intellectual does not wholly believe this, he must give lip service to the aims of racial integration, if only to rationalize his own status in society.12

The Black intellectual because of his interest in being accepted by whiteness must divorce himself from his community; as to have any interest in Blackness is to “regress” back to savagery and inhumanity. He forgets whose definitions define humanity and civilization, thus automatically assuming that whiteness is the standard of respectability and clarity. His contributions to the Black race are by white definition politically irresponsible. They have to be, if he intends on sliding through the ladder of mobility that is stained with Black blood:

When a Negro has finished his education in our schools, then, he has been equipped to begin the life of an Americanized or Europeanized white man, but before he steps from the threshold of his alma mater he is told by his teachers that he must go back to his own people from whom he has been estranged by a vision of ideals which in his disillusionment he will realize that he cannot attain. He goes forth to play his part of the body politic. He is in addition to this a member of a particular race to which he must restrict himself in matters social. While serving his country, he must serve within a special group. While a good American he must above all things be a “good Negro” and to perform this definite function he must learn to stay in a Negro’s place.13

By being trapped into the framework of integration the Black intellectual must suffer his own development as an African intellectual, and nurture becoming an Americanized or Europeanized intellectual. His divorce from Black cultural, aesthetic, political and social relevance marks the final transformation.

[The Black intellectual] is still geared to piddling the intellectual civil right-ism and racial integrationism. That’s all he knows. In the meantime, he plays second and third fiddle to white intellectuals in these establishments—Left, Center, and Right. The white intellectual in these establishments do not recognize the [black] intellectual as a man who can speak both for himself and for the best interests of the nation, but only as someone who must be spoken for and on behalf of. 14

While the Negro intellectual attempts on every level to become a symbol of whiteness, he is nevertheless still banished to the Black lumpen class. He may have his degree, and all the illusionary credentials that signal a sojourn to the land of whiteness, but he is still and will always be Black--and therefore of a perceived inferior class. In that vein, he becomes bitter and frustrated with the fact that all of his efforts to abort his Blackness and everything that comes with it have failed. Instead of becoming the dominator, he remains the dominated. He therefore must position himself to dominate someone, as he can never dominate everyone. He has been forever prohibited from the summit of whiteness, and therefore must oppress those he images are below him in caste hierarchy.

Fate or Fiction?

Once the dichotomy between the Negro with pseudo-privilege and the Negro with no privilege at all is dispelled, then the debate surrounding the pseudo-middle class centers around their contribution to the Black liberation struggle. This debate has long been colored by an inability of again the Black intelligentsia to let the concept of the so-called Black elite vanquish. Like DuBois attempted to do with the concept of the Talented Tenth many African intellectuals argue that the Black intellectual has an invaluable contribution to make toward the goal of decolonization.

Julius Nyerere would argue, for example, that the Black intellectual “has a special contribution to make toward the development of a Black nation and Africa.”15 He further argues that the knowledge that the Black intellectual possesses must be “used for the benefit of the society of which (all Black people) are members.”16 Additionally, Nyerere here believes that intellectuals in so-called developed societies do not have such opportunities as those on the continent:

Here in Africa, we can, by the use of our skills, help people transform their lives from abject poverty—that is, from fear of hunger and always endless drudgery—to decency and simply comfort.17

The problem for Nyerere is that Black intellectuals are prohibited from grounding18 with the masses. For Nyerere, one means to Black liberation is to keep the Black intellectuals from class isolation and alienation from the masses:19

We can try to cut ourselves from our Fellows on the basis of the education we have had: we can try to carve out for ourselves an unfair share of the wealth of the society. But the cost for us, as well as to our fellow citizens, will be very high. It will be high not only in terms of satisfaction forgone, but also in terms of our own security and well-being.20

The goal then is to merge and serve, not isolate and separate. Accordingly, the Black intellectual should merge with the Black proletariat with the understanding that there is no difference between the two. But the Black intellectual cannot merge with the masses if he still contends that he is somehow of a superior intellectual faculty because of his access to whiteness. If he is still defining himself as the intellectual, then he is oblivious to the whole point of social and political convergence, thus impeding Black solidarity. In due course, Nyerere is not only amplifying whiteness, and Black access to it, but also by discerning between the African intellectual and African intellectuals of the diaspora he is magnifying pseudo-nationalism or white nationalism. He therefore is fundamentally not only endorsing class hierarchy, but also oppression hierarchy.

Sekou Toure, like Nyerere, would argue that the Black intellectual must be a conscious, capable, and committed representative of his/her people.21 Additionally, Toure argues:

the (Black intellectual) will realize the necessity of liberating himself intellectually from the colonial complex; further he will rediscover our original virtues and he will serve the African cause . . . 22

For Toure, this requires a class suicide “of true political leaders of Africa whose thought and attitude lean toward the national liberation of their peoples.”23 These people then are men and women “fundamentally engaged against all forms of the dehumanization of African culture. They represent, by anti-colonialist nature and the national tenor of their struggle, the culture values of their society mobilized against colonialism.”24

Toure is correct that class suicide must be inevitable for decolonization, however he, like Nyerere, still pays homage to the notion of the “intellectual or the Black bourgeoisie.” Though he submits that they must denounce their status as the so-called Black middle class (or the “privileged Black class”) and merge with the masses, he nevertheless delegates that the leaders of the Black liberation movement will come from the Black intellectual class. I submit that it is impossible to commit class suicide and still claim elite status. I further submit that if the infrastructure of Black liberation is held by the Black elite, who are elite because of their access to whiteness, then liberation is compromised by white ideas and ideals of domination. Whether covertly or overtly, to claim that “intellectualism” is the prerequisite for Black leadership is to claim that access to whiteness has made a difference in competence. It is to assert that whiteness is still the savior of Black “backwardness,” even if the prophets are Black.

Kwame Nkrumah would argue that there are three different components of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia.25 For him, the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia is not necessarily a homogeneous or static class doomed to betray their people. Instead, he asserts that there are those who outwardly “support the new privileged indigenous class--the bureaucratic, political, and business bourgeoisie who are the open allies of imperialism and neo-colonialism.”26

The second component is comprised of “those who advocate a ‘non-capitalistic road’ of economic development, a ‘mixed economy,’ for the less industrialized areas of the world, as a phase in the progress towards socialism.”27

Lastly, the third component is the revolutionary intellectual class. The revolutionary intellectuals “provide the impetus and leadership of the worker-peasant struggle for all out socialism. It is from among this section that the genuine intellectuals of the African revolution are to be found.”28 For Nkrumah, “very often [the Black intellectual] is the minority product of colonial educational establishments who reacted strongly against its brainwashing processes and who became genuine socialist and African nationalist revolutionaries.”29 It is the task of this third section to “enunciate and promulgate African revolutionary socialists objectives, and to expose and refute the deluge of capitalist propaganda and bogus concepts and theories poured out by imperialist, neocolonialist, and indigenous, reactionary mass communications media.”30

While Nkrumah gives the most credit to the potential progressive diversity of the Black intellectual, I argue that the third component of his revolutionary class analysis is small and marginalized. In fact, so much so that they can make little dent in the domination that is synonymous with imperialism and neocolonialism. I submit that most Black intellectuals fall within the first of the three components. It was Fanon who tried to give the Black intellectual credit for accepting a revolutionary philosophy, and he had to concede the unliklyhood of that ever coming to pass.

Fanon contended that the true vocation of the progressive Black intellectual “bourgeoisie” is to renounce its own nature and status as the privileged elite and make itself the “willing slave of the revolutionary capital, which is the people.”31 For Fanon, the Black intellectual should “put at the peoples disposal the intellectual and technical capital that it has snatched”32 from the dominant society.33 While Fanon articulated that this should be the goal of the Black intellectual, he recognized the problematic of the situation.

Fanon recognized that conditions create consciousness.34 Given this, the oppressive situation of the Black intellectual class does not yield a masked component of Black revolution, but instead is an “obscene caricature of Europe, marked by ‘intellectual laziness . . . spiritual penury and . . . the profound cosmopolitan mold that its mind is set in’”35 Thus, even though he calls for self-repudiation by the class, Fanon is cynical and suggests that an alternative to the so-called multi-class revolutionary elite must be established.36 Nkrumah himself was irresolute about how effective the Black intellectual can be in exacting change:

. . . the intelligentsia always leads the nationalist’s movement in its early stages, it aspires to replace the colonial power, but not to bring about a radical transformation of society. The object is to control the ‘system’ rather than change it . . . the intelligentsia tends as a whole to be bourgeois-minded and against revolutionary socialist transformation.37

Additionally, the problem of the Black intellectual class is that in large part, they are from working class families and communities, and yet they aspire to have middle class status. Consequently, they seek to aspire out of the class background from which they come, making them alienated from their origins.

Amilcar Cabral argues in Return to the Source that the Black intellectual must decide whether or not they are going to throw themselves into revolution, elevate the Black race, and be for the good of overall humanity--or if they are going to succumb to the individual fruits of assimilated labor. The dilemma is how to get the “problematic class” on to the side of social revolution instead of reaction and oppression.38

As a whole, the Black intellectual class is more interested in divorcing itself from all the social, political and cultural signals of Blackness. While they do a stellar performance at imitating whiteness, they are never accepted into the social ranks that are reserved for white people. Instead, they resolve to check their own. They condemn and ostracize the Black race that they come from, and can never leave. The Black intellectual becomes the enforcer of whiteness, insuring his eternal position as the “petty-bourgeois” house Negro, by mutilating the field Negro:

. . . still owning nothing of significance, Blacks as a people have little significance in the postindustrial [world] except as unskilled labor and a potential consumer market . . . If they cannot assume this consumer/labor role, blacks have no real value or place in the New World Order. The exception of course is the New Age House Negro. Also owning nothing of significance in postindustrial America, the New Age House Negro, though elevated on the backs of Black struggle, finds his significance in his ability to serve the New Age racist agenda. . . . The New Age House Negro must round up the lazy black field slaves, the unwed welfare mothers and their children, the criminal predators and the rest of the postindustrial residue, and himself open the dikes of Social Darwinism that will drown the Black riffraff . . .39

The House Negro in historic terms, the Black intellectual in euphemistic terms, and the New Age House Negro in contemporary terms cares little if anything about Black people. His only reference to them comes in the form of reproach. Since he can never live with, be loved by, or revered by whiteness, his only escape hatch into the world of white defined importance and accomplishment comes at the expense of his own people:

Facing the undesirable result, the highly Educated Negro often grows sour. He becomes too pessimistic to be a constructive force and usually develops into a chronic faultfinder or a complaint at the bar of public opinion. Often when he sees that the fault lies at the door of the white oppressor whom he is afraid to attack, he turns upon the pioneering Negro who is at work doing the best he can to extricate himself from an uncomfortable predicament.40

While Cabral and other Black intellectuals interested in committing class suicide have argued that Black leadership will come from the intellectual class, I argue that Black leadership will come from the lumpen Black masses. Their survival skill have long been in resistance to white imposed notions of dominance and prudence and are the reason that we—Black people—are. Black liberation can only be true liberation if its grand design falls outside the archetype of whiteness. This cannot be done if its leaders have been exposed to white academia and they use the pedagogy of this encounter to construct a movement against enslavement, and in favor of decolonization:

The thought of the inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and in almost every book he studies. If he happens to leave school after he masters the fundamentals, before he finishes high school or reaches college, he will naturally escape some of this bias and may recover in time to be of service to his people.41

The usual circumstance of the Black intellectual is that he does not leave in time to embezzle knowledge from the world of whiteness, that he can use for revolutionary purposes. Most Black intellectuals go for advanced degrees, becoming increasingly contaminated by white ideals and ideologies. In due course, Black leadership will come from those who have very little (if anything) to lose. Black leadership will come from the ones who know they have nothing, and who are fed up with their social and political disenfranchisement. Consider the following excerpt from a poem by Herbert Lee Pitts entitled We Must Lead:

Black leadership will never
Be the new nigger
With middle class expectations
Asked me “How far in college I went”
I said “Did you dig on Fanon at Howard”
Him still tryin’ to find a reply
He
. . .
Wears Ivy-League dashiki
Made at Burlington Industries
From cotton grown and handpicked in
Alabama . . . Black revolutionary
Hung himself on African beads
Made in Hong Kong . . . 42

Free-Fall . . .

1. “In the first phase, the native intellectual gives proof that he has assimilated the culture of the occupying power. His writings correspond point by point with those of his opposite numbers in the mother country. His inspiration is European and we can easily link up these works with definite trends in literature of the mother country. This is the period of unqualified assimilation.”43

2. “In the second phase, we find the native is disturbed; he decides to remember what he is. This period of creative work approximately corresponds to that immersion which we have just described. But since the native is not part of his people, since he only has exterior relations with his people, he is content to recall their life only. Past happenings of the bygone days of his childhood will be brought up in the depths of his memory; old legends will be reinterpreted in the light of a borrowed estheticism and of a conception of the world which was discovered under other skies.”44

3. “Finally in the third phase, which is the fighting phase, the native after having tried to lose himself in the people and with the people, will on the contrary shake the people. Instead of according the people’s lethargy an honored place of esteem, he turns himself into an awakener of the people; hence comes a fighting literature, a revolutionary literature and a national literature . . . the native intellectual nevertheless sooner or later will realize that you do not show proof of your nation from its culture but that you substantiate its existence in the fight which the people wage against the forces of occupation.”45

This process has been my mental, psychological and ontological purgatory. As of late, I have been asked if I have lost my mind, what has happened to me since I have been at school . . .? While these questions are to be expected, I know that their posers are far from class suicidal. I know that though they are my friends and family they are stuck in the paradigms of whiteness, that at one time and in many ways still do haunt me.

I have a new found respect and love for the Black “baby mama” whose will and love for her children has made them warriors in Black liberation. I have a new found respect for the low level drug dealer whose social and economic predicament has left him little exposure to mobility; leaving him little options to exhaust when it comes to how he will exist under capitalism. I have a new love and respect for the Black brothers and sisters who enlist in the military as a part of an “economic draft” instigated by the state; a state that would otherwise let them starve into extinction. I have a newfound respect for the Black prostitute or sex worker who has defied white definitions of virtue and sexual respectability to ensure her everyday survival and continuance. I have a newfound respect and love for the high school “drop-out.” His/her attitude toward abominable institutions of mis-education that teach him nothing about himself is courageous and admirable. I have a newfound respect for the brothers and sisters who have been funneled from the schoolyard to the prison yard. Their story is too common and always, inevitably innocent.

I have since been called everything from a criminal groupie, to a thug lover, to a “baby mama wanna-be.” I can only say in response that I love the people that will lead us to liberation. I cannot love the so-called middle class Negroes and Negresses who have gained their pseudo-status on the backs of the Blacks they so want to be separated from. And I have no love for theirsilent-slave-holding allies who expect that we love them before we love our own.

In due course, I do not succumb to the pitfalls of whiteness, I look forward to what awaits me on the other side. My eternal rest will be in the garden of Black expression, Black love, Black political insurgency, Black economic stability, Black self-determination, Black matriarchy, Black sexuality, Black psychology, Black healing and Black spirituality. My final resting- place will then be in the waters of Black freedom.

To: Negro Conspirators and “Silent Slave-Holding Counterfeit Allies” of the “Negroisie”

I bid you and your hateful, pathological colonized ways good-bye. I love my people and their survival instinct, but I hate that you make us choose between death and death. You get no credit for our continual and persistent existence in paradigms of domination and oppression. You will not impede my relationships and kinship with my people anymore. You have granted me nothing but intrusion and hopelessness. This will be my existence no more!

Sincerely,

Amina.

Notes and References