This is the story of “woke”.
It begins with W.E.B. Du Bois and the concept of the talented tenth. Du Bois believed that it was necessary for the advancement of freed Black people in America that an intelligent and industrious class of people should rise from their ranks. According to Du Bois and other contemporary abolitionists, one out of every ten Black men (women were still an expansion pack at this point in history) given the proper education and drive were capable of becoming great leaders and thinkers. These people would use their talents not for their own personal gain but for the betterment of the entire Black community.
In the decades immediately following reconstruction being Black and successful was a far more dangerous occupation than being a police officer ever was. Tulsa being a prime example. Nevertheless, they persisted. Black people sought their education. Some went to universities and got degrees. They became teachers and academics. They became doctors and lawyers. Others earned their education through less institutional means. They read books between shifts and attended union meetings. They made good use of the prison library.
For the majority of this country's history an educated Black person was by definition a radical. Or at least a cultural oddity. A credit to their race, if you will. White Liberals in the north would pat themselves on the back for inviting Black entertainers to their house parties. White Conservatives in the south would shoot them. Since gaining an education as a Black person was an act of radicalism, Black intellectuals found a natural home in the radical left and labor movements. While Liberalism claimed credit for freeing Black people from bondage, they mostly reacted to the continued oppression and marginalization of the Black population with mild frustration and acquiescence. After all, those systems of oppression often generated a profit and ultimately these kinds of things are best left to the market.
For the socialist the experience of Black people in America was the grotesque final form of the manager/labor relationship. For the Black liberation activist, the materialist analysis of capitalist systems provided a sound foundation for their intellectual critiques of institutionalized white supremacy as well as an explanation for why it continued to exist despite the obvious moral hazard. Many of the liberation movements’ earliest leaders and intellectual stewards rose from unions and labor organizing. Many of them were communists. The most important post reconstruction victories for Black liberation were had in the factories and the fields. In packhouses and train cars. White communists and socialists within the labor movement saw Black liberation as inseparable from their own project.
It’s important to note that at the beginnings of the Black liberation movement, there was not much difference between the Black intellectual and the Black worker. For the simple fact that a lot of the intellectual leaders of the early movement were workers. But this is not the story of the socialism that informed and propelled the civil rights movement. This is the story of “woke”. And to tell the story of “woke”, we must ask a question.
How did Black liberation politics go from unionizing sharecroppers to empowerment zones?
The current popular conception of Black politics and the fight for equality is very different than it was in the time of A. Phillip Randolf and Richard Wright. Contemporary Black politics, as it is understood in mainstream discourse, is irrevocably tied to Democratic politics. Black political discourse is liberal. It turns a blind eye to empire, if not outright supporting it. And most importantly it is capitalist. And even though it is rarely mentioned in the pages of the New York Times or on MSNBC, this is a massive shift in ideology from the time when even the less radical Black political figures like MLK described their politics as socialist. It has had real and devastating effects on the project of Black liberation. And it was intentional.
In the 60’s a deal was made. White America would grant Black people equal protection under the law and the eventual promise of equal representation in it’s exploitative capitalist system, and in return Black people would reject radicalism. Or else the Chicago police department would pay them a visit while they slept. We are taught to see the Black liberation movement today as a noble fight for equal participation in American society and legal codification of Black humanity. But in reality it was much more a labor fight. It was very anti capitalist. We call it the “civil rights” era instead of the socialist Black labor era partly because it obscures what the men and women who participated in it were really fighting for.
What ended up happening was a re-conception of the talented tenth. When Du Bois described their purpose, he meant for those exceptional Black people to use their education and skills to actively change the conditions of society that subjugated Black people. This re-conception now viewed the talented tenth not as active participants in a revolution against an unequal social order but as an inspiration for Black people. Proof that given the right circumstances these systems and institutions that worked so hard to exclude Black people could actually lead to our success.
If you can get into the right school.
And thus the Black Bourgeoisie was born.
This new talented tenth received their education almost exclusively through institutions. They had either elevated themselves out of menial work or never had to bother. They believed in the promise of America because for whatever reasons they had been allowed to take part. They did not seek to unionize the Black busboys but instead they told them to save their paychecks and take night classes. Instead of Black excellence being a weapon in the war against institutional white supremacy, it became the sole signifier of victory. This new talented tenth sought success for themselves and this possession of modest wealth and status was inherently in service to the larger project of Black liberation. Yes, racism still existed. Yes, things were unfair. But with enough hard work, dedication, and making good choices, racism could be overcome.
This talented tenth 2.0 was an explicit project of Liberalism. And to be fair, a Black middle class did arise from the civil rights era of the 60’s. They went to college en masse for the first time in history. Black people bought houses and moved to the suburbs. They sat in boardrooms and closed deals. However, this success didn’t protect Black America at large from the vagaries of capitalism. And in this country when economic storms hit, they always hit the Black community harder. The number of Black college graduates steadily increased but Black homeownership and wages stagnated and began to fall ever so slightly with economic downturns in the late 70’s and 80’s. Not only that but Black people who weren’t able to make it to middle class still experienced marginalization and violence at the hands of white supremacist institutions like the finance industry and the police.
The bankers and police chiefs of the Black bourgeoisie did not stop this abuse. Often they participated in it. They were not radical and therefore could not see the condition of the Black poor as a result of the purposeful machinations of oppressive systems but rather the lack of either opportunity or drive to fully follow the example they had so carefully provided. They could not see criminality as a natural radical reaction to a social order that had marked Black people as outcast prima facie but as a personal defect. A defect that could only be corrected with discipline. And a crime bill.
Barack Obama was the apotheosis of the talented tenth 2.0. A black man who rose from meager means to attain the highest levels of education and subsequently the highest office in the land. For the bourgeois conception of Black liberation to be true, Obama’s election should have shocked white America out of it’s racial animus due to respect for the office and the people who elected him. A good ole fashioned Democrat run economy combined with the inspirational influence on young Black people from a Black president should have resulted in a resurgence of the Black middle class.
Obama’s project was concerned with bringing Black people into the system rather than fundamentally changing the system for their material benefit. And there was a real expectation that this was going to be death knell for racism in this country. The election of a Black man as president meant that racism could no longer function as an effective political tactic. Movement conservatism would have to abandon their dog whistle racism lest they would be rejected by an electorate that clearly favored intelligence and competence over whatever specious racial allegiances they may have held.
It quickly became clear that not only was racism alive and well, just as effective a political tactic as ever, but also that it was more than capable of completely hamstringing the agenda of the first Black president. Obama did everything he was supposed to. He went to the right school. He got the right degree. He went through the system and proved himself worthy to lead it. He went out of his way to demonstrate to conservatives that their disagreements in policy were miniscule and that he truly believed that both sides only sought what was best for America. He invited them to movie night and everything. But it did not work.
It’s really hard to say that Obama’s presidency did much of anything to address racial inequality and marginalization. The material conditions for Black people got worse and they were still routinely subjected to sanctioned violence by the state. The “talented tenth 2.0” had achieved its zenith and yet racism was still firmly entrenched in American society. But this isn’t the story of the Black bourgeoisie (even though they are named in the title) or the failures of Barack Obama’s presidency. This is the story of “woke”. And to tell that story we need to talk about a concept that has consumed the psyche of the Black Bourgeoisie for the last decade.
We need to talk about Afro-Pessimism.
There has been much written on the subject of Afro-Pessimism and in a short amount of time. The idea draws from earlier intellectual work. Most notably Franz Fanon. I possess neither the will nor ability to reproduce the argument of Afro-Pessimism in its original academic prose. But I can do a decent Cliff Notes version.
Afro-Pessimism is the idea that Black people in America are unique from all other marginalized victims of colonization. African identity was effective erased by the institution of slavery and replaced with the conception of Black, which was synonymous with slave. Our modern society is powered by anti-Black violence and that violence cannot be compared with other forms of marginalization. Indeed other marginalized communities also seek the destruction of the Black body because Black people can only be seen in our modern context as fungible property.
Afro-Pessimism rejects the idea that racism is the natural product of capitalist structures and that any marginalized community can become the preferred underclass of entrenched capital hierarchies. The subjugation of the Black body is not done for profit but for the psychological need of white people to destroy Blackness. These systems serve no other purpose than providing the means with which to institutionalize the anti-Black violence that our society requires in order to preserve our national consciousness.
Now I will leave it to other more intelligent and qualified writers to present the serious problems with the textual analysis that undergirds Afro-Pessimism but for our purposes we need to look at how this theory has affected our discourse around racism and Black Liberation. For the Afro-Pessimist internationalism is a naïve fool's errand. Other marginalized communities cannot meaningfully relate to the struggle of Black Americans and given the chance they would happily participate in their annihilation. So basically Palestine can fuck right off.
Because racism is not related to material concerns but rather an existential hatred of Blackness within white people, white America will never allow those systems to be changed. Even if those changes would benefit them. Attempting to change those systems without somehow addressing America's psychological need for anti-Black violence would be pointless. And because the goal of racism is to destroy Blackness, any anti-racism project must first defend Blackness above all else.
Afro-Pessimism excuses the failure of the talented tenth 2.0 (there was nothing they could do) and places them above criticism. Criticizing the Black bourgeoisie would be to contribute to the destruction of Blackness. It also puts the material effects of racism to the back burner in order to focus on the cultural aspects of white supremacy. For the Afro-Pessimist culture is the chief agent of Black destruction. Changing material conditions is a second order problem. Things like cultural appropriation (but only of Black culture), dog whistle racism, and support of the Republican party need to be addressed first and the material justice will follow from there.
You just have to root for everybody Black.
When I wrote about cancel culture some time ago, I made a point of noting how the demand for personal accountability for cultural transgressions was born out of the subconscious knowledge that systems will never change and material conditions will never get better. Afro-Pessimism is the intellectual justification for that sense of hopelessness. It puts the burden of anti-racism on individuals rather than systems. It makes cultural signifiers more important than material needs. It becomes more important to defend Barack Obama from attacks from both the left and right than it is for Flint to have clean water. It becomes more important that Obama gave Joe Biden his stamp of approval than Biden's significant contributions to the carceral state that continues to distribute anti-Black violence to this day.
White America must be reprimanded and shamed for their reliance of Black destruction. Whether they realize that’s what they were doing or not. We cannot form solidarity with white labor because they are just as invested in anti-Black violence as management. It forms their identity. White people can never become truly invested in Black liberation until they get it. And since they can never really truly get it they must be confined to white fragility gulags until further notice.
You can’t change systems. You can’t criticize the Black leaders who benefit from those systems. You can’t form solidarity with other marginalized groups. You can’t seek collective action other than voting for the Democratic party. The only thing you can do in service of a anti-racist project is to be woke.
And this is the story of “woke”.
To be woke is to understand Blackness not as an artificial construct of a capitalist need for surplus labor but as an indelible identity permanently bonded to Black America through subjugation. To be woke is to flatten the incredibly broad reality of Blackness to an essentialized and consumable product to be purchased, flaunted and defended from haters. To be woke is to drape Kente cloth on Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. To be woke is to correctly identify how systems perpetuate racism and yet focus all of one's corrective effort on individuals, or as they are more colloquially known: A few bad apples.
Conservatives and (ahem) Classical Liberals want to portray wokeness as a product of the left. However, it is a firmly a neoliberal project. The principle political action of neoliberalism is taking radical thought and processing it until it is more palatable for capital interests. Woke is the brand name of Afro-pessimism. Brand managers like Ta Nehisi Coates and Robin DeAngelo give it pop culture purchase. Corporations and institutions buy it and write it off under their public relations budget. And all the while systems of oppression go largely unchallenged. Woke is proclaiming Black Lives Matter but hang wringing over #defundthepolice.
Now as I say this, you might think that I am advocating for a wholesale rejection of Afro-Pessimism and wokeness. My friends this is not the case. For all of it’s failures in prescribing solutions, wokeness does a decent job of identifying the mechanisms of white supremacy. Culture is important and Blackness does need to be defended. Racism is an indelible part of the American psyche and we do need to address that. The problem is when we ignore the material consequences of racism and treat the act of being Black as an essential quality that absolves a person from complicity in systems of oppression. To be woke is to be isolated from the world at large and to believe that isolation is a permanent condition of the Black experience.
At the end of the day, to be woke is the privilege of the elite. Black politicians, entertainers, sports figures, etc. are by the nature of their success removed somewhat from the concerns of materialism. When your money is more or less straight, the cultural aspects of white supremacy seem more pressing. The capitalist systems that materialize oppression can’t be the whole problem because the Black elite succeeded through these same systems. This focus on culture is passed down through the concept of the talented tenth onto Black petite bourgeoisie. Those for whom material comfort is more precarious but nonetheless identify as middle class and exceptional within the American conception of Blackness. That is to say the average Black voter.
The most dangerous effect of this ideology is the space that it creates between race and class. A space that white supremacist propagandists are more than happy to occupy. By abandoning materialism and labor politics, wokeness has removed any bridge for white America to see their concerns reflected in the struggle for Black liberation. This bridge was understood as a necessary part of the struggle by the early socialist leaders of the civil rights movement. Without it, white supremacists and crypto fascists are more or less unchallenged in their assertions that Black liberation is antithetical to the material concerns of white people. It is not enough to simply lament white people's commitment to racial hierarchy nor is it enough to reduce it’s causes to an existential need of the American psyche. If we are to defeat racism, we must be able to understand what compels a human being to tacitly or explicitly support the subjugation of other human beings.
And so, we will talk about the way white people is in part four.
Solidarity forever.
So I'm sitting here listening to some "Smooth Jazz". This is not my usual choice but every now and then...you know. But as read this essay I realized another example of "Woke"
"The principle political action of neoliberalism is taking radical thought and processing it until it is more palatable for capital interests. "
Vicks, A. (2020, November 24). On Racism - Part 3 The Black Bourgeoisie and the Power of Pessimism. Retrieved November 25, 2020, from https://onone.substack.com/p/on-racism-part-three-the-black-bourgeoisie
The "radical thought" of traditional Black music has once again been made "more palatable" and commercialized. So I'm going to re-calibrate my Spotify to Christian Scott - aTunde Adjuah.
Peace my Son
Babu