By Dr. C.J. Munford:
On the world scale, historical evolution has molded "race relations" as the essential problem of international exploitation and oppression. Throughout the first half of the twenty-first century, if not longer, there will be no avoiding serious "racial conflicts.” They are inevitable because white racist supremacy has relegated people of color to an oppressed status, with human entitlements far below those enjoyed by whites. The most severe "racial conflicts" in the future will continue to pit Blacks against whites, because both continental and Diaspora Africans are singled out for the worst treatment in the racist world system. We must prepare ourselves for a titanic, decades-long contest of strength and will between the so-called "North" and the "South.” The future demands that Black people persevere in a struggle between an international "lower class" of Black, Brown and Yellow peoples, and a global "upper class" of whites. If it means anything in today's world, the concept of world revolution means the eventual triumph of the downtrodden peoples of color in Africa, the Americas and Asia, over the emerging great white league now stretching from North America right across Europe, uniting white folks from Russia to Australia, NATO with the former Warsaw Pact countries. Five centuries of white supremacy have given world history a racist character. The North-South contradiction has become implacable. It is the inescapable political contradiction on earth today. The once vaunted class contradictions have been subsumed under the racial contradiction, swallowed up in race conflict. While the question of power within most African states may well have to be sorted out on the basis of class struggle, we are concerned here with the fundamental international racial-color contradiction between white supremacy and Black empowerment. The fight against white racism, not class struggle, now functions as the driving force of the development of society.
Third World peoples are the only remaining global revolutionary force.
The only crisis for which we as a people are striving, the only one that would bring Black folk salvation, and the only one imminent in our own historical struggle, would be the crisis of white supremacy, not the proverbial “general crisis of capitalism” which might merely replace racist capitalism and the rule of the imperialist bourgeoisie with a socialist economic order which might itself be racist.
From this situation we draw a major theoretical conclusion: On the racial battlefield, fundamental transformatory alleviation, viz. liberation, can never be incremental. Concessions, like those embodied in the 1960s civil rights statutes, and in court decisions like Brown in 1954, may make it seem that radical change may result from gains piled one on another. But appearances are deceptive. If we wish lasting alteration in the power equation between our strivings for empowerment on one side, and white supremacy on the other, the shift must be in the nature of a socially transforming seachange alteration. Had the piecemeal reformers of the second half of the twentieth century put an end to second class citizenship, we would not now be crying about nearly the exact same persecutions. Police brutality and kangaroo courts have replaced lynching by mob action. Ballot disfranchisement has been replaced by dismantlement of minority-majority jurisdictions. We weep about the same injustices our forebears were weeping about since the Civil War, and through 250 years of slavery before that. We do not protest merely because we have acquired the habit of complaining. We certainly do not raise such loud voices in remonstration because it is advantageous to think of ourselves as “victims,” as the sorry gang of Black neo-conservatives run around telling everyone. The Black community is neither psychotic, nor hallucinatory, nor running a scam, as our racist enemies try to pretend. Actually, they know better.
Dr. C.J. Munford
Professor Emeritus
Department of History
University of Guelph
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The Global Afrikan Congress is a Pan-Afrikan organization of activists, scholars, and community organizers from around the world open to Afrikans and their descendants. It is an organization dedicated to providing information, encouraging intervention and supporting reparations for Afrikan people regardless of their national ties.
For more information go to:
http://www.globalafrikancongress.com/
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