We Testify with Our Lives by Terrence L. Johnson

Author:Terrence L. Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHI019000, Philosophy/Political, SOC001000, Social Science/Ethnic Studies/African American Studies
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2021-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

Our basic need is to reclaim our history and our identity from what must be called cultural terrorism, from the depredation of self-justifying white guilt. We shall have to struggle for the right to create our own terms through which to define ourselves and our relationship to the society, and to have these terms recognized. This is the first necessity of a free people, and the first right that any oppressor must suspend.19

As one can see from this, the existential concerns are far more daunting than classical Afro-Modern political thinkers such as Frederick Douglass or Maria Stewart articulated. Achieving human dignity is an impossible goal within liberalism. Yet somehow SNCC members do not appear to see a contradiction between voting rights and Black Power. Nonetheless, the employment of Black Power signaled the doom of racial liberalism and, by extension, gestured to the demise of white participation within SNCC.

Carmichael linked these two—the erosion of racial liberalism and white allies—in an essay printed shortly after his Mississippi speech. “Negroes are defined by two forces, their blackness and their powerlessness,” he wrote in “Toward Black Liberation.”20 To overcome these forces, Carmichael said, Blacks need to “reclaim our history and our identity from the cultural terrorism and depredation of self-justifying white guilt.” As he saw it, liberal philosophy established itself on a fundamental contradiction: liberal doctrines were established in conversation with and based on political justifications of Native American subjugation and African slavery. This created the economic and political contradictions of liberalism prior to the Black social protest movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

In a speech delivered in 1968, Carmichael lays out a guiding “ideology” for the emergence of a new people, one freed from the racist white/Black binary. In “A New World to Build,” he encourages his audience members to look inward before imagining the contours of liberation. In doing so, they will discover a necessary but often overlooked social fact: “Black people are a colonized people.”21 He establishes two dialogical moves for dismantling colonization: entertainment and education. What Carmichael characterizes as entertainment is better described as performance, the discursive and inventive rhetorical strategies typically inaugurated during social protests. Pejorative terms and categories such as “Whitey” and “burn this city down” symbolize rhetorical weapons designed to perform a menacing “Blackness” to a white audience. This form of public engagement, Carmichael asserts, illustrates a necessary “sort of catharsis” to repair the psychological distress among a disinherited people.

Carmichael also calls for transformative education, one that can prepare the people for “revolution.”22 Retrieving ideas from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, he exhorts audience members to reject aesthetic values and historical narratives premised on the inferiority of Blackness and by extension Africa, African Americans, and the Third World. Instead, he urges them to embrace education as a form of “reestablishment and the reinforcement of values and institutions of a given society”23—specifically African American “communitarian” traditions, the third principle of this educational model in Black communities. Revolutionary education is a form of “undying love.” On

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