BLACK THOUGHT and BLACK REALITY Lou Turner

BLACK THOUGHT AND BLACK REALITY A Critica~ Essay By Lou Turner I . Bwak Revolt vs. Bwck Studies It doesn't take a Black studies course in sociology to decipher what the May explosion in Miami revealed about the nature of the crisis in America, nor, in 1980, what relationship Miami has to the resurgence of Black mass revolt in South Africa during the June 16 anniversary of the 1976 Soweto rebellion. Yet, an earlier protest this year involving American Black youth at Harvard University demonstrating against the latest reorgani zation of the Black Studies Department very nearly appears to be in another world, separated from the economically depressed reality Black youth of Miami and Capetown, South Africe have shown they have every intention of transforming.! What drives the world of Black academia to face the Black reality of the ghetto is the inescapable totality of crises which demands that thought and activity not be kept in separate realms. Whether the crisis is spelled out as Carter's drive to war, the racist balance-the-budget-on-the-backs-of-the-poor hysteria, the imposition of an unprecedented draft registration in peace time or the struggle c;~ver the direction of Black studies, the crisis i s so deep that Black thought cannot be separated in an ivory tower from Black reality. The truth is that theory has been running a losing race with the reality that the mass of Black Americans live and vith the deep undercurrent of revolt that runs very near the surface of American society. Thus, the current debates over the inter pretation of Black history and culture in Black studies would seem far afield from the race and class struggles of Miami and South Africa were it nor for the fact that social upheavals com pel consciousness to break with its old categories of thought and create new ones, more intrinsically rooted in reality. For instance, it is not accidental that Black intellectuals gained a new impulse for studying the thought of Frantz Fanon just as the Soweto revolt revealed the Black Consciousness Move ment had brought his thought to life in their struggle against the apartheid regime of South Africa. That intellectuals have r elegated Fanon to academia or reduced his thought to psychology or existentialism, as if it developed outside of the social forces 101 of his day, exposes, in one sense, the dilemma of Black studies.2 By separating what the South African youth had joined together- the dialectics of thought with the dialectics of liberation- Black academia and the New Left show that while they extol Fanon, they, nevertheless, don't follow him. The Black youth activists in America, however, have shown that they have never separated the multi-dimensionality of Fanon from all his liberating strug gles that they have followed. The fragmentation Fanon suffered, only in part, discloses what happens when theory gets separated from reality. It is true, Frantz Fanon' s Black Skins, White Masks and Wretched of the Earth, which were never divorced from his actual participation in the African Revolution, show him to be far ahead of everyone else in grasping and making a category out of that revolutionary up surge. No doubt that is what attracts today's revolutionaries and intellectuals to him. But, what happened to Fanon's ideas when he died? In other words, what happens to theory when there is no collectivity, no organization, to concretize it at each new stage of historic development? What made Soweto and the Black Consciousness Movement new was their beginning to grasp the twofold relationship of spontaneity to organization, and organization to theory. In 1980, it is both crises and revolution which demand a new reorganization of Black thought; one which roots us more deeply in the freedom struggles of the day, and, therefore, com pels another look at that hidden history of the two-way road to revolution stretching between the U.S. and Africa. What allows us to see the impact of the Black past on the course of world history and thought is its continuity with the burning questions of our day; questions which cannot be answered outside of the most serious and concrete working out of a totally new relation ship of theory to practice, as Black perspectives for the 1980s. It is not alone for the reason that the late, Black historian, Carter G. Woodson, described as the "awful fate of becoming a negligible factor in the thought of the world, "3 that a reexami nation of Black history is imperative for today ' s freedom strug gles. It is, also, because critical strands in the history of Black thought relate in such a way to the present objective situ ation that we can begin to break down the dialectic by which thought illuminated reality, and through which theory is united to practice. Thus, three strands of consciousness converged in the first four decades of the twentieth centruy to form the Black dimension of American thought. Whereas, national, international and class consciousness in the form of Pan-Africanism and Garvey ism, Black anti-imperialism, and the industrial trade unionism of the r.w.w. (Industrial Workers of the World) and the c.r.o. seemed to have developed along divergent lines, nevertheless, 102 the economic remains of slavery in the cotton culture and tenancy farming of the South conditioned and developed special economic relations which pursued the Negro everywhere, in the city and in the country, on the plantation and in industry, South and North.4 In the forty years since World War II the convergence of four very different, powerful historic forces--the Civil Rights Movement in America, the emergence of the Third World, the East European revolutions and the Cold War--have determined the development of world history. It was in this period that Black intellectuals tried both to respond to the new forces and realities of the objective situation and to search for a unifying philosophy for the various conceptions and tendencies surrounding the Black question. II. Negritude and the New Humanism of Frantz Fanon One such search began with Black French intellectuals and students residing in Paris in the 1930s and '40s and cen tered around the conception of negritude. Recognized as the intellectual creation of the Martiniquan poet, Aime Cesaire, and the Senegalese writer, Leopold Senghor, the evolution of negritude over its forty-year existence stood for a num~er of things: "A critique of imperialism; a revolutionary African development distinguished from the proletarian revolt; the birth of a new black civilization; a philosophy of life; an ideology for African unity; a methodology for development; a justification for rule by indigenous elites; a defense of the dignity of cultured blacks."S It was out of their dual alienation from both French and African society that the Black French intellectuals created the conception of negrit·ude. It was their bridge back to the roots of African culture. However, why didn't negritude become their link to the African masses? Why after creating a modern Black ideology, whose universalism transcended the more narrow entity of nation to encompass the socpe of race, did the African in tellectual, nevertheless, remain alienated from African reality? Indeed, the next stage in the evolution of ne~ritude, following World War II, saw Senghor make an amalgam of Marx's humanism and negritude, as this time African socialism was pro pounded as the new bridge to unite the Black intellectual with the mass movement. Senghor 's first formal statement on African socialism wasn't made public until 1958, after independence seemed assured and some ten years after his break with the French Social ist party, because he recognized the French socialists as look ing upon post-war Africa as nothing more than a voting bloc for their parliamentary ambitions, meanwhile, leaving Africa to re main an appendage of France. 6 103 Senghor' s own words express well enough, however, the dualities of his African socialism. On the one hand, there is nowhere a more cogent passage summarizing the three component parts of Marx's philosophy than where he says in his report to the Party of African Federation (1959): "Let us recapitulate Marx ' s positive contributions. They are: the philosophy of humanism, economic theory, dialectical method." By contrast, on the other hand, there is the following passage from Senghor' s speech, Theory and Practice of Senegalese Socialism (1962): " .•. the party must do more: it must guide the masses. The con sciousness of the mass, who lack education and culture, still remains confused, lost in the fog of animal needs. (Conscious ness) can reach the mass only from the outside, the intellectuals." Despite the African intellectual' s desire to find his way to the masses via Marxism, he found himself more separated from the masses than ever, by conceptions which were no expres sion of Marx's. Surely technological underdevelopment and the global political climate charged with the super-power rivalry of the U.S. and Russia were inescapable realities. Nevertheless, that alone doesn' t explain the middle-class nature of African leaders and intellectuals which led to the "administrative men tality"7 that now characterizes African socialism. Indeed, Af rican socialism as propounded today has become an ideological barrier to the development of the African revolution. It is for that reason that Raya Dunayevskaya's analysis of the rela tionship of the Third World intellectual to the Afro-Asian re volutions remains even more true today than when she originally wrote it in 1959: "The inescapable fact is that in this epoch of state capitalism the middle class intellectual, as a world phenomenon, has translated 'individualism' into 'collectivism', by which he means nationalized property, state administration, State Plan."S From its beginnings, the two contributions that negritude brought to Black thought were 1) the theme of cultural alienation which runs throughout the literature of the tendency, and 2) the search for a collective philosophy.

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