Page 148 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

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Beyond Nationalism
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transcend the bankrupt politics of liberal integrationism, it is probable that we will
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witness more Clarence Thomases in the near future.” Integration as it has been prac-
ticed since the 1960s only helped middle-class Blacks, and it could not improve the
condition of the Black majority.The idea that integrationism can solve the problems
of the entire Black community must be abandoned since the interests of a few well-
to-do Blacks do not necessarily coincide with those of the Black masses.“The funda-
mental contradiction inherent in the notion of integrationist ‘symbolic representation’
is that it presumes that a degree of structural accountability and racial solidarity binds
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the black public figure with the larger masses of African-Americans.”
In reality, once Black public figures join White institutions, the Black majority have
no mechanisms to influence their behavior and to make them accountable to the
Black community. Conservative and some African American liberal elites can get ac-
cess to positions of power and privilege without being accountable to the Black com-
munity and without compensating for the sacrifice the Black masses and activists paid
to dismantle racial segregation. Despite the fact that liberal integrationism failed to
solve the problems of the Black community, most “black liberal intellectuals, whose
world-views and political perceptions were hardened by the turmoil of the 1960s and
the heroic struggles against legal segregation, implicitly accept the notion of symbolic
representation, and the totality of the ideological baggage of liberal integration.” 32
These Black liberals, like their White counterparts, do not recognize the connection
between wealth and poverty and consciously or unconsciously endorse the status quo
that maintains and reproduces the poverty and underdevelopment of the Black ma-
jority.According to Marable,“The moral poverty in contemporary American society
is found, in part, in the vast chasm which separates the conditions of material well-
being, power and privilege of some from the others.The evil in our world is politi-
cally and socially engineered, and its products are poverty, homelessness, illiteracy,
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political subservience, race and gender domination.” Those Whites who claim ad-
herence to the ideology of individualism create, re-create, and maintain the ideologies
of racism, sexism, and classism to protect their class and group privileges through cap-
turing and maintaining institutional power.
The Black struggle for individual and group rights, cultural identity, and multi-
cultural democracy has not yet reached its desired goals.The suppression of revolu-
tionary nationalism, the denial of self-determination for the Black community, and
the imposition of the politics of law and order on the Black masses and revolution-
aries have perpetuated the underdevelopment of Black America. Because of the ab-
sence of a national organization that can effectively mobilize and organize Blacks to
articulate the demands of the Black majority, presently existing Civil Rights organi-
zations and Black elites cannot obtain adequate goods and services for the Black
community. Black elites have been incorporated into the White establishment, and
they do not have the institutional and organizational power to facilitate meaningful
social change in the African American community.In creating and socializing a global
intermediate class by destroying multicultures in the name of science, the dominant
elites and groups in the capitalist world economy use the ideologies of individualism
and cultural universalism to look at the world from their own cultural centers and to
control the economic and cultural resources of the dominated people. 34 Different
people have different authentic cultural centers that allow them to freely develop. 35
The destruction of these cultural centers through colonization and globalization pro-
motes underdevelopment.