CECI N’EST PAS UNE BOÎTE
THE HIDDEN GENIUS OF STOKELY CARMICHAEL’S “BLACK POWER” MANTRA
When activist Stokely Carmichael reclaimed the label, “Black,” he was deliberately ambiguous. His chant of “Black Power!” metamorphosed from mere bombastic rhetoric into a special kind of incitement, an incitement to revamp black consciousness. In Carmichael’s mind, “Black Power” is not represented by a kind of personal power, as you might find exemplified in, say, an Oprah Magazine. Nor is it political power, as exemplified by Obama’s presidency. It is also not economic power, as exemplified by more blacks in the professions, as corporate executives, lawyers, doctors, astrophysicists, etc. Carmichael’s use of “Black Power” was also not defined within a more incendiary framework. “Black Power” did not explicitly promote incendiary action, that blacks should take to the streets, take up arms against whites, launch into a revolution. The truth is, Carmichael never really specified what “Black Power” meant. Just as Malcolm X never really explained what means were in fact necessary.
Maybe that ambiguity is the point. Maybe the point is not to know, to not be able to classify it. The genius in Carmichael’s mantra might be how very Foucauldian it is: that black identity ought not to be grounded in any stable reality or fixed Truth. It might be that “blackness” does not refer to a natural kind, but rather stands in opposition to the white power structure that seeks to define “blackness” in a way congenial to their interests. “Black Power” is a statement of refusal, a resistance to the image of the black man as a delinquent, a petty criminal, a drug dealer, a thief, a hustler. More importantly, it is a defense against the African-American community foisting a subjugated identity upon themselves based on the naturalized system of oppression, the reification stemming from the white-supremacy mental model developed over centuries through the practice of slavery.
What I’m gesturing at is the idea that Stokely Carmichael’s “Black Power” is not merely a positive affirmation but also constitutes a positionality vis-a-vis the normative. The “Black Power” mantra can be experienced as a mechanism to upend the conventional understanding of black identity and create a horizon of possibility without any rigid vision of what a new society would look like. It invites us to understand and experience the Self as itself a resource for liberating our own subjective agency.
