Page 62 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

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The Development of African American Nationalism
Both structural and institutional racism and the intensification of globalization have
increased the problem of the African American masses. With the intensification of
globalization, the racist capitalist economic restructuring has shifted the Black popu-
lation from being incorporated into the capitalist economy as the lowest of the most
super-exploited sector to being discarded and marginalized from participation in the
capitalist production process.White flight to suburbia mainly to undermine desegre-
gation laws after the mid-1960s and the intensification of globalization have created a
functional transformation in large American cities where the Black people live.These
cities have become the centers of knowledge-intensive service industries, such as ad-
ministration, information, finance, law and health, insurance, colleges and universities,
transportation and communication technologies, and management consulting.At the
same time, labor-intensive jobs that require fewer skills and less education in manu-
facturing and retail have been declining because of industrial relocation and capital
flight to suburbia and peripheral countries.According to J. D. Kasarda,“The simulta-
neous transformation and selective decline of the employment and residential bases of
these cities have contributed to a number of serious problems, including a widening
gap between urban job-structures and the skill levels of disadvantaged residents (with
corresponding high rates of structural unemployment), spatial isolation of low-income
minorities, and an intractable high level of urban poverty.Accompanying these prob-
lems have been a plethora of social and institutional ills further aggravating the
predicament of people and places in distress: rising crime, poor public schools. . . .” 223
These social ills, particularly unemployment and poverty, have forced some Blacks
to depend on the welfare economy and the underground economy. Rather than pro-
mote development and transformation, these economies perpetuate dependency,
hopelessness, despair, drug abuse, family dissolution, and crime. Referring to the un-
derdevelopment of Black America, Roger Wilkins argues,“The state of helplessness,
debility, and cultural deprivation imposed for centuries on millions of blacks in the
United States did not prepare them, their children, or their grandchildren for the tran-
sition into a modern high-tech society.” 224 Currently, Black ghettos are controlled by
two main forces: the police and gangs.These are not forces of development.When po-
lice are the force of social control, gangs are forces of social destruction. Because of
these problems and the availability of opportunities in suburbia, the Black elites left
these cities, leaving behind the Black masses.This makes the future of the Black strug-
gle complex.
The Black masses in inner cities have lost control of their educational, social, po-
litical, and economic institutions. The subordination of Black America to White
America for centuries has arrested African American cultural and economic devel-
opment. Since the Black movement legally challenged American apartheid laws, the
future struggle can use these successes and engage in developing cultural, political,
and intellectual strategies that are required in developing Black America and pro-
moting multicultural democracy. Further, the complex features of the previous strug-
gle, such as Black mass militancy, resilient cultural and institutional resources, the
sophisticated political and ideological pragmatism of Martin Luther King,the cultural
and revolutionary heroism of Malcolm X, the organizational knowledge of various
grassroots leaders, and the accumulated liberation knowledge of Black intellectuals,
can be the foundation of the future African American struggle for total emancipation
and development.