Liberation Circle & Reading Summaries from D.A.T.T. Freedom School
Summer 2015 – Week 2
Socialism
The Storify this topic’s Liberation Circle tweet chat can be found HERE.
Summary of “Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan Africanism” by Kwame Ture/Stokely Carmichael – Chapter 7: The Dialectics of Liberation
In Chapter Seven of his seminal work, Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism (1965), Kwame Ture, also known as Stokley Carmichael, elucidates the connection between autonomy—as an ideal—and the institutional structures that affirm, legitimize, and undergird autonomy.
This “Dialectic of Liberation” distinguishes between an “individual racism and an institutionalized racism” (p. 78). The political injustices related to every milieu of Western society –from public health to the edifice of academia—is abstracted by what Kwame Ture notarizes as “distant and dismissible statistics” (Memoirs, p. 421). In this way, the Pan-African struggle to disentangle from the neo-colonial handmaiden of capitalism is decontextualized of intergenerational oppression— and the germs of wrought imparted by hegemony. In other words, Ture’s referendum on the “pure theater” (p. 420) of individualism within Western politics, catalyzed by his premise that the integration of black diasporic peoples into white hegemony does not decentralize power from the white establishment. In fact, integration merely casts a wider net of influence upon the governed. He cautions that individual reciprocals of oppression (e.g., low-income schools that pathologize students as nouns, rather than adjectives) or segregation, are not ameliorate as a result of integration into districts, gerrymandered by classist inflections. Proposition 13, which severely hampered the ability for post-civil war, black municipalities in California to appreciate tax wealth, was a prime example of corporate tools employed in colonial wedlock. As a result, black neighborhoods were blighted and the social proximity between low and high-income neighborhoods began to mirror that between predominantly black and white schools. Thus, integration failed to meet a semblance of financial equilibrium as instruments of capitalism were harnessed to influence propositions that swiftly catapulted the status of white neighborhoods—and by proxy, “white” schools—despite the SCOTUS decision in 1954. Continue Reading
“The modern collapse of “Reason” & “History” into all things European represented a failure of reason & history that required self-deception regarding Europe’s scope. Put differently: Europe sought to become ontological; it sought to become what dialecticians call “Absolute Being”. Such Being stood in the way of the human being, of a human way of being. It thus presented itself as a theodicy. Theodicy (from theos, meaning god, & dikē, meaning justice) is the branch of inquiry that attempts to account for the compatibility of an omnipotent, omniscient, & good god with injustice & evil.” – Lewis Gordon in What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction To His Life & Thought (2015:19)
