Black chauvinism–the yoking of economic and political self-determination with separatist notions of racial solidarity has long misled blacks. It periodically reappears, especially at times when the white majority seems uninterested in racial progress. Richard Allen and Absalom Jones in the 1780s and Martin Delaney and Bishop Henry Turner in the second half of the 19th century urged blacks to leave the United States for Africa, the West Indies or Canada. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, there were “Black Exodus” schemes aimed at giving blacks their own state or settlement. (Plans included taking over uninhabited parts of Texas and Oklahoma.) Meanwhile, other blacks promoted “colonization” drives to return to Africa to rule over natives who had never left. This culminated in the Marcus Garvey marches of the 1920s–the first mass urban black movement. And now there is the Black Muslim vision of separatist black capitalism and urban enterprise zones.
Black separatists strongly dismiss integration as a viable option. This is the main reason why most African-Americans, including leaders from Booker T. Washington to Martin Luther King Jr., have rejected such movements and why, ironically, racist whites have always supported separatist blacks. Garvey invited Ku Klux Klan leaders to speak at his marches, and insisted the Klansmen were “better friends of the race” than other whites. Farrakhan’s obsessive racism and Jew-baiting is deeply rooted in this anti-white tradition.
Separatists racialize problems that can only be solved in a nonracial way. The high rate of arrests and jailings afflicting the bottom third of blacks is not just racism in the criminal-justice system, but criminal behavior and its roots in disintegrating families and neighborhoods. And the answer to chronic unemployment is not just black entrepreneurship-which will mainly benefit black entrepreneurs-but retraining and job creation.
Separatists also tend to be sexist. Black Muslims subordinate women; Stokely Carmichael once said the only position for women in the black-power movement was “prone.” The sad irony is that African-American women are among the best role models for black men. College-educated black women are the only category of blacks who now earn more than their white counterparts.
To be sure, as the King-led integrationist consensus began to fall apart in the late 1960s, blacks understandably wanted to identify more with their race. After centuries of being brainwashed by the dominant culture into feeling inferior, many had to go through a process of psychological liberation to put some emphasis on the positive worth of being black.
But the strategy of racial solidarity, ever a nonstarter in economic affairs, now threatens to engulf blacks in a counterproductive chauvinism that will benefit only separatist leaders and reactionary whites. Witness the 1994 political disaster in Georgia, where the price of gerrymandering three black congressional seats was a white Republican sweep of the rest of the state. And the chauvinist strategy does nothing to improve lower-class blacks’ dreadful educational performance. Knowledge, tragically, has been racialized. Success in school – and, later, in the office is identified with white culture, and academic achievement is sneered at as a sellout in inner-city schools.
Black college students, among whom Farrakhan finds some of his most ardent followers, also hurt themselves by living according to a black version of separate-but-equal. The problem is not that blacks socialize mainly with each other, since other groups do the same, but the tendency to exclude all others. Given that many African-Americans tend to grow up in largely segregated environments, college and professional schools are among the few places where they can get to know whites and other minorities. That is critical to equip blacks to move effectively through a majority-white world, particularly if they are to supervise whites later on.
It is striking that so many American separatists–Garvey, Malcolm X, Carmichael, Farrakhan-have roots in the West Indies. Because Caribbean blacks come from a richly diverse, majority-black culture, once they find themselves in the minority here, they usually turn one of two ways. Either they react militantly, and struggle for separatism, or–like Colin Powell–they strive hard for integration, trying to create a better version of the world from which they came. And history tells us that the best hope for black America lies with Powell’s way–not Farrakhan’s.
