Black America: the street and the campus; Race and Class IN BLACK America resurgent cultural nationalism has taken two forms. In the academy as an intellectual movement known as "Afrocentrism' and in the community as Hip-Hop culture and especially rap music. Straddling the divide is the 'Black Patriarch', Malcolm X.
The first essay takes us back to an America in the aftermath of the urban rebellions of the late 1960's. The ruling class co-opted the moderate elements and suppressed the militant. So there are now over 8,000 African-Americans in public office compared to 103 in 1964.
Death Row The revolutionary elements were tortured, imprisoned and assassinated. Two Black Panthers, Geronimo Ji-Jaga Pratt and Mumia Abu Jamal are interviewed; their moving testimonies are powerful in the absence of rancour though the former is a lifer and the latter on death-row.
Rap music is now a global commodity. The major record companies have packaged rebellions of black youth into a multi-million dollar industry. Rap artists are still slaves to a market system.' Lusane surveys the Hip-Hop scene and the themes and lyrics which have been denounced by the establishment and became an issue in the 1992 Presidential election. The contradictions within this culture of resistance are notably its 'phallo-centric musings' or downright misogyny.
Heroes and heroines None of the writers are opposed to people of African descent discovering and reclaiming their past, asserting the right to have their own heroes (and heroines!) and a literary canon not solely consisting of white, dead males.
However Afrocentrism as defined by scholars such as Molefi Kete Asante 'is an ideology shrouded in mysticism and mythology without giving any real strategies for the future.' The Afrocentric prescription for the ills of black people nearly dovetails with those of white conservatives.
The problem with the black community is not "political. economic or structural' but an internal one that is 'cultural, behavioral and psychological'. The breakdown of the family is the major culprit and single-parent female headed families the cause of drug abuse, gangsterism and teenage pregnancies. The Afrocentric solution seems to be, 'add strong black man an stir.
Sid Lemelle points out that for all their anti-Eurocentrism, Asante and fellow Afrocentrist, Leonard Jeffries belong to the Hegelian tradition of idealism. Ideas in the form of words are the motor force of change in society.
Lemelle counterwhich romanticises the past ism. gle in their own communities.
ON poses to Afrocentrism an ideology of revolutionary Pan-Africanism. He suggests it allows for a concrete materialist analysis of society and a means of achieving black empowerment. In order to be so it must be 'trans-racial and trans-gendered', inclusive of the aspirations of the working class as a whole and internationalist as opposed to the present inward looking narrow nationalDuality In a final and important contribution, Manning Marable charts a way froward to a 'multicultural democracy'. The Afrocentrists by focusing on Africa have ignored the duality of AfricanAmerican consciousness. They are also Americans and must confront the strugMarable examines key social and economic indicators of the Latino community arriving at the conclusion that they fare as badly or even worse than blacks. This indicates the possibility or as Marable sees it a necessity, for a black-Latino coalition.
'What is missing is the dynamic vision and political leadership to build something more permanent...between these groups.' The calibre of the many contributions in this collection are testament to the high standard of radical AfricanAmerican scholarship and the ideological combativeness of 'Race and Class'. Read this book and discuss its ideas, in it are resources for the class and antiracist struggle in Britain too.
£6 from Institute of Race Relations, 120-126 Lavender Avenue, Mitcham, Surrey, CR4 3HP.
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