What is "Black", Who is "Black" and what is the criteria you are using to determine

[It's Not All Good Now]

What is "Black", Who is "Black" and what is the criteria you are using to determine?

Is it that same ole slavetrade criteria?

[It's Not All Good Now]

Is anyone "Black"?

I look at my beautifully dark brown skin and wonder "am I black?', is anyone?
Or are we just copping to a race paradigm that's been socially forced upon us?
Have we discerned the paradigm fully, even as we speak of being 'enlightened', aware, and on the revolutionary path?

Aren't we just working, if that's work, working in a paradigm that's been calculated against us in every phase.

[TheStruggle]

Black is not a race. Black is a adjective to describe something.

[Langalibalele]

Originally Posted by It's All Good

Is anyone "Black"?

I look at my beautifully dark brown skin and wonder "am I black?', is anyone?
Or are we just copping to a race paradigm that's been socially forced upon us?
Have we discerned the paradigm fully, even as we speak of being 'enlightened', aware, and on the revolutionary path?

Aren't we just working, if that's work, working in a paradigm that's been calculated against us in every phase.

The idea and concept of Blackness came out of the Sixties, beginning with Malcolm X and then worldwide with the Black Panther Party. It was a political definition. In Africa, people had used black the way we used colored and negro here, but Malcolm X politicized the term to put distance between his developing Pan Africanism and the assimilationist civil rights movement. As the entire working class became inspired by Malcolm's militant stance they embraced the term, leaving the civil rights movement behind. We knew Malcolm X opposed the Vietnam War before the civil rights movement did, and for different reasons. Malcolm X didn't believe in non-violence, so that was not his reason for opposing the Vietnam War. And black people loved that position, since it articulated what we really felt, rather than MLK and his cronies' non-violent point of view.

It was more difficult, back then, to find out what black leaders were saying, but people managed. There was, as is today, censorship in the way of ignoring or boxing out certain positions. The media boxes out opinions for different reasons. Black opinions are boxed out (as in a basketball game) because they are dangerous, they threaten the status quo, they are articulate and they challenge Imperialism. If it doesn't challenge Imperialism, as Malcolm X did, it is not Black, okay! The white media marginalizes Jesse Jackson, on the other hand, because he does not serve Imperialism consistently enuf. It regards Sharpton similarly; both of these guys have to play lip service to the aspirations of the black colony to maintain their legitimacy there, otherwise the Imperialists have no use for them.

Until 1968, most of the middle class referred to themselves as negroes or colored. They were very skeptical about the term. But rebellions after King's assassination broke open a great deal of outrage. The middle class had to identify with the rebellious black workers. This is how the term began its decline as a political identity. Floyd McKissick declared, that year, that 'Black Power means Green Power, money!' He wasn't the only one in on the assault on blackness. The government pumped in millions to poverty pimps to displace the work being done by the Black Panther Party, which had started free breakfast programs, food and clothing drives, child-care for working women. This was the revolutionary answer to what was not available to working class people, it was the revolutionary inventiveness which ideologically defeated the government and what passed as strategies for colonized African people.

While the government smashed the Panthers and imposed its own stepped up housing, and welfare policies, it still did not offer child care for another thirty years or so until Clinton's repressive welfare reform. There was nothing repressive about what the Panthers offered, they only asked that people participate. Our opportunity to reclaim territory which was originally "Black" is coming back, and we will build new structures and more deeply rooted ones than the Panthers were able. In doing this, we will have sown the seeds of a new society while simultaneously digging Imperialism's grave.

[It's Not All Good Now]

You wrote a lovely lot of words here.

I, on the other hand, am a minimalist.
So I ask only one question.
Did you know that a "Black Panther" is really a dark brown leopard?
It even has spots.

[Langalibalele]

You are less than a minimalist.
You are irrelevant.

Originally Posted by It's Not All Good Now

You wrote a lovely lot of words here.

I, on the other hand, am a minimalist.
So I ask only one question.
Did you know that a "Black Panther" is really a dark brown leopard?
It even has spots.