October 19, 1997

The Not-So-Secret Relationship Between Black Nationalism and Capitalism

On Friday evening, October 17, 1997, I was deeply disturbed by something. I had been reading, and was thinking about E.U. Essien-Udom’s thesis, and the way in which he tried to qualify it:

It may be said that black nationalism is a tortuous route to social mobility, recognition, and status or a spurious way by which the black nationalists seek to gain a sense of identity and membership in American society. It may well be, but this does not deny its immediate significance and meaning for the Muslims; nor is it so strange and unintelligible in view of the whole social history and the psychological trauma which the Negro has suffered in the United States.


His qualification of the thesis only restates the goal of the ideology: to solve the problem of the lack of identity. It is not a qualification or a warning at all.

Meanwhile, I happened to turn to a television show—McHannity and Colmes, or something like that; one of those point/counterpoint shows, in which the liberal and conservative talking heads square off in a duel to something less than the death—and the discussion was about the Million Man March. This being 1997, and the Million Man March having occured in 1995, I knew that the premise of the show could be nothing other than a comparison of that march to the Promise Keepers’ Rally of 1997. It was.

Not only did the all the panel participants, including Leonard Jeffries, eagerly identify the two marches, and apologize profusely for both with the same rhetorical technique Essien-Udom used to “qualify” his critique, and thus fulfill that movement of co-optation which is the media’s primary purpose, but Leonard Jeffries actually said that we “Africans” have been excluded from national politics for long enough, and that we should be denied neither our contribution to, nor participation in, the country, because, after all, none of the 13 colonies, especially Virginia, could have survived without bringing in African labor.

I know this does not read as irrational or crazy. It might sound eminently rational and true. At first. But the way Jeffries said “African labor being brought in to the colonies” made that “bringing” sound as benign as buying a carton of milk.

The way he identifed blacks as “Africans” masked the fact that we are not Africans, and that we are not voluntary Americans. The way in which he said “brought in as surplus labor” masked slavery, and the two together made my heart and jaw drop so swiftly and suddenly, that I hung my head, and I had to laugh bitterly before I changed the channel, or cried. At times like that, I sometimes hope I die soon, or wish I was never born.

I felt betrayed: Leonard Jeffries, one of the most far-out of nationalists, one upon whom we could usually depend not to compromise the nationalist rhetoric, and usually to take it too far, or to change into to something essentialist, was willing to cast us “Africans” as just another group of “immigrants.” How could he do such a thing? Because the motivation for Jeffries’ Afrocentrism is identical to that which Essien-Udom identified for the Nation of Islam.

The criticism Essien-Udom levels against the condition against which black nationalism strives can also be leveled against black nationalism itself, and especially Leonard Jeffries’ brand of Afrocentrism: “The tragedy of the Negro in America is that he has rejected his origins—the essentially human meaning implicit in the heritage of slavery, prolonged suffering, and social rejection. By . . . favoring assimilation and even . . . amalgamation, he thus denies himself the creative possibilities inherent in it and his folk culture.” The Afrocentric urge to place Egypt at the center of black identity is also guilty of aggravating the “dilemma [which] severely limits [the] ability to evolve a new identity or a meaningful synthesis, capable of endowing [] life with meaning and purpose.”

The Afrocentrists will even find themselves guilty, as Leonard Jeffries’ accomodating, rhetoric-switching remarks indicate, when they themselves become aware of the circuitous nature of their enterprise, and being so disillusioned, attempt to do away with all mediations of identity, to go directly to the goal: Americanism. The voice of “black conservatism” comes roaring out of more than the Supreme Court’s chambers; also those hallowed halls of ancient Egyptian slave-society splendor. The black nationalism which would reject our American origins, drives all those who take hold of it into agreement with Thomas Sowell.

Sunday, October 19, 1997























































1. E.U. Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism: A Search for an Identity in America, Chicago, 1962, p. 120. Italics mine.

2. Extremely controversial Professor of Black Studies at the City College of New York.

3. Black Nationalism, at vii.

4. Id.

5. Thomas Sowell, Migrations and Cultures: A Worldview, 1996. Black conservative Sowell, of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, is famous for comparing the shortcomings of American blacks to the achievements of immigrants, and desires that we emulate their pattern for success. The book cited is his most recent.
























































black.nationalism afrocentrism leonard.jeffries nation.of.islam