Black Power

 

Subject: Black Power

The “Black Power”movement, (the Micheal X hybrid of power politics, not the Black Lives Matter offshoot) represents the rage, drama, and style, of a dispossessed people a revolutionary jargon which offers something to everybody: To the unemployed the idealist the drop out the Communist the politically frustrated the anarchist the angry student returning home from humiliation abroad or the racialist and the old fashioned preacher who for years said on the street corner that after Israel it was to be the turn of Africa. Black Power means Cuba and interestingly China, it is identity politics and miscegenation, it is eating pork and dancing, it is going back to Abyssinia. Black Power transcends bread and butter politics and is about identity and belonging. It's a them and us politics which can't be answered by achievement, only by eventually throwing out the old for a new something. It's not transactional its transitional it's a process which has a reason but precludes other reason. It's an all or nothing situation based, much like White Power, on unadulterated Power and it's use and misuse. There is no cogent explanation as to why, only the how and the when.

Black power in a country predominantly black is about the past and it's exposure to slavery, colonialism and exploitation, in society's which are under educated from top to bottom and who's real enemy is the is a lack of resources. Opportunism or jargon may define phantom enemies, racial minorities and elites but in the end the problems will be the same, dignity and identity.

In countries where the black person owns its nationhood, such as in Africa, even there impoverishment and under skilling, ring a cordon sanitaire around people who are not needed, anywhere. They will largely remain dependent on other more advanced economies for finished goods and in this way will continue to be half made,  a dependent people, the Third Worlds third world. They will consume but create only on a limited scale and without material resources they might never, other than in certain exceptional cases develop beyond a certain level or attain higher skills. Identity in the end depends on achievement and without fiscal where-with-all the frustration of where one was born and to who, remains mankind's eternal enigma.

Of course I could be writing about 'White Power' or at least the lack of opportunities for the mass of white people, of how power is still in the hands of a few but that's another story for another day.