From colonialism to neocolonialism
Considering Allen’s Black Awakening, we can perhaps take up black people’s colonial history and condition as our starting point for understanding current events. This, I’ll admit, may feel foreign. But, that’s only because we’ve effectively been severed from the broad—one could even say bipartisan—use of “colonial” to describe inequality in America. The racial qualities of capitalism and the extractive value of racism seemed a whole lot like colonialism for generations who came before us.
Black Awakening, in many ways, represents the analytic pinnacle of the anticolonial critique. It’s also an effort to reclaim Black Power from any of its procapitalist associations. For Allen, black nationalist takes on capitalism—like, say, a self-described CEO of a black church brokering a “sit down” with warlords of Chicago’s informal economy—served only to hide the “brute force…preserving [the colonizer’s] domination.” As a sociologist, Allen argued black America needed to develop communal relations in place of capitalist relations as part of an evolving attack on white control. But he also thought with a historian’s sensitivity to change. “Black America,” he remarked in 1969, “is now being transformed from a colonial nation into a postcolonial nation; a nation nonetheless subject to the will and domination of white America.” And just as decolonization bore certain promises for the masses in the Third World, Afro-America was being offered a false notion of equality. The “neocolonial” world, as Allen called it, was one wherein groups like the Congress of Racial Equality and other cultural nationalist organizations swept into municipal politics in Newark, NJ, and elsewhere, successfully “[using] the nationalist sentiment of the black masses to advance the class interests of the black bourgeoisie.” Allen deemed such happenings counterproductive to black liberation. They represented, to him, an extension, a deepening, and a further concealing of the older colonial arrangements of mid-twentieth-century American capitalism.
That we don’t even use the word “colonialism” today to describe the profitability of racism in America serves as chilling testament to the success of that project. Instead, if we consider the Black Power Movement at all, it’s got space for black nationalist entrepreneurs like your neighborhood black bookstore, uplifting black preachers like Philadelphia’s Leon Sullivan, and the Black Panther Party. We generally accept Black Power as a multifaceted political vision—variously capitalist and communitarian, depending on the organizations under scrutiny. There always loomed, however, a danger that, under such broad notions of Black Power, corporate and white appropriations could carry the day.
