Introduction

Notes Introduction 1. See, e.g., Jones, The Black Panther Party Reconsidered; Cleaver and Katsiaficas, Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party; and Brown, Fighting for US, The Black Power Movement. 2. See, e.g., Henderson, “War, Political Cycles, and the Pendulum Thesis,” 337–74. 3. Dawson, Black Visions; Brown and Shaw, “Separate Nations,” 22–44; and Davis and Brown, “The Antipathy of Black Nationalism,” 239–52. 4. The use of the term “gender power” here is inspired by Anne McClintock’s use of the term, as well as her discussion of nationalism in Imperial Leather. See McClintock, “No Longer in a Future Heaven,” 352–89. 5. Glaude, Is It Nation Time?, 2. 6. Adeleke, UnAfrican Americans. 7. Robinson, Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought. Robinson argues that gender is important, but is a part of all nationalisms, and, therefore, cannot be seen as that which makes Black nationalism distinct; for Robinson, the defining characteristic of Black nationalism is its mutually constitutive relationship to White American nationalism, “its apparent inability to diverge from what could be con- sidered the ‘normal’ politics of its day” (1). This argument is incomplete, however. Race, class, and gender have always been part of the warp and woof of U.S. politics. To the extent that Black nationalism is a derivative discourse, race, class, and gender politics, too, have marked it. This argument may seem merely tautological, but is significant because it speaks to the important conceptual and analytical shift that is afforded with the adoption of a Black feminist perspective. 8. Yuval-Davis and Anthias, Woman-Nation-State; McClintock, Imperial Leather; and White, “Africa on My Mind,” 73–97. 9. Yuval-Davis and Anthias, Woman-Nation-State; and McClintock, Imperial Leather. 10. White, “Africa on My Mind.” 11. Collins, Fighting Words. Importantly, although she examines the connection of race, gender, and family to the creation of national identity and its influence on social policy regarding the family in From Black Power to Hip Hop, Collins does not explore Black nationalism in its connection to the state in terms of the production of contemporary public policy. Collins, From Black Power to Hip Hop. 170 Notes 12. White, “Africa on My Mind”; and Lubiano, “Standing in for the State,” 156–64. 13. I use the terms paradigm and narrative interchangeably to underscore the fact that this paradigm’s assumptions are typically relayed through political stories or narratives—in the news, in reports, in music, and elsewhere. Its narrative form provides coherence and easy translation. The term itself, Black Cultural Pathology Paradigm, is one I derived from the liter- ature on the Black family. It alludes, of course, to the infamous language Moynihan borrowed from Kenneth Clark, i.e., the notion of a “tangle of pathology,” or the mix of constraining effects that stemmed from Black family breakdown. References to the importance of the culture of pathology (or, alternatively, culture of poverty) theme regarding the Black family are numerous, particularly in discussions of family welfare. See, e.g., Steinberg, The Ethnic Myth; Neubeck and Cazenave, Welfare Racism, 153; and Hancock, The Politics of Disgust, 8, 56–61. For a discussion of the damage thesis regarding Black psychology, including a discussion of culture of poverty arguments, see Scott, Contempt and Pity. 14. Black political scientist Michael Dawson observes that, “black nationalism, not the various black liberal ideologies, is the most important ideo- logical determinant of black public opinion.” Dawson, “Slowly Coming to Grips,” 349. 15. Brown, Fighting for US, 6. 16. Robinson, Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought, 3. 17. Ibid. 18. Brown, Fighting for US. US, one of the most well known Black nationalist groups of the Black Power era, began in 1965. According to Brown, “The term ‘US’ was chosen as a dual reference to the organization and the community its members pledged to serve: us Blacks as opposed to ‘them’ Whites” (38; emphasis in original). 19. Like Collins, I find the juxtaposition and comparison of nationalism and integrationism as polar opposites problematic. Collins, From Black Power to Hip Hop, 76–77. I do not read the politics of major forms of contemporary Black nationalisms as ambiguous, however. Some, such as Collins and Lubiano, see nationalism in general and/or Black nationalism in particular as a “contested” and open space. Collins, From Black Power to Hip Hop, 15; and Lubiano, “Black Nationalism and Black Common Sense,” 232. I leave aside questions about the ultimate political utility of nationalism, and focus instead on the specific articulation of a major form of contemporary Black nationalist politics. 20. This term I borrow and adapt from literary critic, Ingrid Reneau, who uses the concept of a clearing to describe the cultural and historical importance of the African ringshout dance to the survival of African descended peoples and their intergenerational connections; for Reneau, the ringshout is a multidimensional dance aesthetic that embodies and transforms history even as it structures and maintains community. Reneau, “Dancing the ‘Clearing’ in Academia,” 322–26. I use it here to Notes 171 denote an intellectual space or context in which to examine the BCPP, not to interrogate for interrogation’s sake, but to the end that we might refine our understanding of the dynamics I examine about Black politics and Black nationalism. This book builds on and extends previous work. I intend this book, then, to create a meaningful dialogue about the relationship among race, gender, and nationalism in U.S. and Black politics and, thus, to further enable and affirm an intellectual, cultural, and political community that can accommodate dissent and contention as well as agreement. 21. See, Jordan-Zachery, “Black Womanhood and Social Welfare Policy,” 5–24; and Hancock, The Politics of Disgust. 22. Solomon-Fears, “Promoting Responsible Fatherhood.” 23. For a discussion of the connection between Hip Hop and the Black Power Movement, for instance, see Lubiano, “Standing in for the State,” 160. 24. Allen, “Minister Louis Farrakhan,” 53. 25. Monroe, “Louis Farrakhan’s Ministry of Misogyny and Homophobia,” 287–88. 26. Ibid. 27. Muhammed, Million Man March Home Study Guide Manual, 4. 28. Monroe, “Louis Farrakhan’s Ministry of Misogyny and Homophobia,” 288. 29. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. 30. I first explored the concept of Black male endangerment in an essay, enti- tled “The Endangered Black Male Phenomenon: Toward a Critical Understanding of the Black Male Dilemma and the Status of Black Families,” coauthored with Candace Hurst in the spring of 1991. “Sapphirist mythology” is one example of the terminology I subsequently developed as I struggled to adequately describe the political phenomena I examine herein. I have also benefited from dialogue with Rose Harris about this issue. For her discussion of the ideology of the Black male crisis, see Harris, “Countering the Backlash.” 31. Here, and elsewhere in the book, I use the term family welfare at times, as opposed to simply welfare, to emphasize that welfare benefits received by poor families is but one of a variety of types of expenditures that com- prise the welfare state. As others have observed, for instance, government tax breaks and expenditures in the service of corporate entities—what we can properly refer to as corporate welfare—is also part of the welfare state. 32. For a discussion of feminist critiques of and debates surrounding subjec- tivity and objectivity in research, see Ramazanoglu with Holland, “Can Feminists Tell the Truth?,” 41–59. Also, see generally Hesse-Biber and Yaiser, Feminist Perspectives on Social Research. 33. See, e.g., The Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” 13–22. 34. See, e.g., Frankenberg and Mani, “Crosscurrents, Crosstalk,” 292–310; Kaplan, “The Politics of Location as Transnational Feminist Critical Practice,” 137–52; and Fernandes, Transforming Feminist Practice. 172 Notes 35. Ramazanoglu and Holland, Feminist Methodology, 118. 36. See, e.g., Scott, “Deconstructing Equality-Versus-Difference,” 33–50; Fraser and Nicholson, “Social Criticism without Philosophy,” 19–38; and Zerilli, Signifiying Woman. 37. See, e.g., Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline; and Fernandes, Producing Workers. 38. See, generally, Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights. 39. Bell, And We Are Not Saved; Delgado, The Rodrigo Chronicles; and Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights. 40. Black political scientists Cathy Cohen and Michael Dawson, for instance, encourage cross-disciplinary engagement in political science. See Dawson and Cohen, “Problems in the Study of the Politics of Race,” 497. Furthermore, though they are cautious about interdisciplinarity, specifi- cally given the difficulty they see in gaining the level of expertise necessary to do such work and the practical limitations this entails, they nonetheless acknowledge the importance of gender studies for studying racial politics (501–02). 41. McClain and Garcia, “Expanding Disciplinary Boundaries,” 247. 42. Ibid., 253. 43. The work of Black political scientist Mack Jones was most important in inaugurating this approach. See especially Jones, “A Frame of Reference for Black Politics,” 7–20. 44. Mack Jones laments that there has not been a broad-scale development of a Black political science. Jones, “NCOBPS: Twenty Years Later,” 8–9. As chair of Atlanta University’s Department of Political Science, Jones was instrumental in training a generation of scholars, including Rickey Hill, Melanie “Njeri” Jackson, and Adolph Reed, Jr., among others, within the Black Studies approach he introduced. In a retrospective on the Atlanta School of Black political science, Adolph Reed, Jr., notes that the push for a Black political science did not translate into “either a distinctive body of scholarship or a critique and analysis that can make sense of the complex- ities of contemporary black politics.

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