Customer Reviews

Revolutionaries to Race Leaders: Black Power and the Making of African American Politics

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I was apprehensive when, early on, Cedric Johnson footnotes Hardt and Negri and other 'autonomist Marxists' as useful theoretical guides (if this is the alternative to black nationalism, give me Baraka). And my apprehension deepened when Johnson scolded Harold Cruse for not embracing certain approaches to culture that have become fashionable in academia thirty years after the publication of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. But then I was surprised. Johnson sets aside his theoretical predispositions (or at least buries them in the text) and offers a sympathetic, but highly critical history of the way in which Black power rhetoric ultimately paved the way for conventional ethnic-brokerage politics. The problem--not so surprising in basic theoretical outline, but Johnson closely explicates how it works in practice--is that the unity claimed around Black identity masks divergent ideologies and class interests. It impairs a detailed understanding of the contradictions of the American political economy, and also complicates producing coalitions that would cross identity lines.

For those who care (and I know we're not huge in numbers, but we matter!), the book marks a step forward in the historiography of the American left. In recent years, there has been a backlash against works written primarily by white liberals that glorify the early days of SDS or SNCC, and then trash the later radical turn. Newer works, like Max Elbaum's Revolution in the Air, insist on the validity and nobility of the radical turn. Johnson moves the debate forward by sympathetically describing many of the limitations of the forms of radicalism adopted, particularly Black nationalism and the Marxist Leninism of the mid seventies (which addressed emergent contradictions in the Black Power movement by retreating to doctrinaire ideology).
One complaint--Johnson looks entirely within the movement to describe its weaknesses. But it was also a problem that it was making history under conditions not of its choosing. For example, the American union movement basically adopted a reactionary attitude towards social movements until, at the earliest, the mid-nineties (and up to the present, it has not yet opened itself up and fully dealt with racism in its leadership practices). This did a lot to push the movement in some directions and not in others.
Presently, we are seeing some glimmerings of more complex formulations about organizing with both class and race in mind. Johnson praises (with justification, in my thinking) some of the writings of Bill Fletcher, Jr. Reading Johnson's book, and understanding fully some of the dead ends of the past, may help improve the prospect that these approaches can work better in the future.