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Black Visions byMichael
C. Dawson (University of Chicago Press, 2001)
Reviewed by Molefi Kete Asante
 Michael
C. Dawson, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Political Science
and the College, and director of the Center for the Study of Race,
Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago, has written
an outstanding study of black political ideologies. Over the past
decade Dawson has established a reputation as one of the best survey
researchers in the country and the leading authority on political
opinion in the African American community. Black Visions is Dawson's
most ambitious work to date. Nevertheless, as in some cases of survey
research, the lapse in the time of data gathering and the time of
data reporting plays havoc with conceptual synchrony. Dawson has
dealt with this issue by presenting a strong narrative analysis
of the data and warning that we must guard against assuming that
ideologies are "themselves fixed throughout time and place
(p. 7).
Black Visions is a well-written
book. It is lucid, clear, with a transparent narrative style that
allows the reader to participate in the author's method of analysis.
So the book receives high marks for presentation and style. More
troubling, however, is the fact that Dawson seems ambivalent about
his own data, particularly regarding the ideology of Black Nationalism.
It is as if Black Nationalism, one of the ideologies discussed,
should not have such importance in the African American community
but since it does according to the data, it must be explained in
terms that negate the data. Of all the political ideologies in his
framework Black Nationalism is the only one that comes in for redefinition
and re-organization. It is almost as if he is afraid to follow the
data. Nearly thirty years ago, John Gwaltney's work Drylongso established
in an anecdotal way the truism discovered in Dawson's interviews.
The majority of African Americans see themselves as a nation within
a nation, a people distinct and different from an ethnic group.
Dawson identifies "six historically
important black political ideologies" (p. 14) as Radical Egalitarianism,
Disillusioned Liberalism, Black Marxism, Black Conservatism, Black
Feminism, and Black Nationalism. As with all classificatory schemes
one could reasonably argue that Dawson's fixation on these six ideologies
is based on a misreading of the data.
Unfortunately there are two problems
with this classificatory scheme. In the first place Dawson misreads
the notion of "black political ideologies" and analyzes
instead ideologies that are accepted by some segments of the black
community. Indeed it is questionable whether one could reasonably
call Marxism, Liberalism, Feminism, or Conservatism, however swarthy
the adjectives, black ideologies. They are Eurocentric and European
ideologies that have been bought into by many black adherents. To
call them "black political ideologies" is a stretch of
the imagination.
Those ideologies are based essentially
on the writings and philosophies of Europoean theorists and philosophers
about white people. Conceivably, Black Nationalism is the only true
black ideology since it finds its source in the early writings and
discourses of Africans who resisted enslavement and racism. One
can argue that this ideology, admittedly with many variants and
interests, reflects the authentic sentiment of the overwhelming
majority of black people in the United States. The second problem
with Black Visions is that, even if one accepts Dawson's ideological
classifications, his discussion of the nature of their relationship
to each other and to the role of political life in the African American
community appears incomplete. For example, to say that Black Nationalism
is "the second oldest" (p. 21) ideology in the black community
is to mis-state the nature of the early affirmation of culture and
resistance to racism articulated by the first Africans to land in
the English colonies. All indications from history are that the
earliest enslaved Africans felt a burning need to return to Africa
and to escape the horrible condition of servitude in which they
had been brutally subjected. They were not interested in some "radical
egalitarianism" with whites. This radical egalitarian type
of thinking would come only after many years when some Africans
had moved away from the daily routine of surviving whippings, abuse,
rape, violence, and degradation during the enslavement and when
they had been introduced to European concepts of equality. On the
other hand, they were always nationalistic, believing as Davd Walker
understood that the "white Christian Americans" were the
cruelest and most barbarous people on the earth (Walker, p. 627).).
I believe that Dawson's work is
driven by his conceptualization rather than the data. What I mean
is that it appears that the data are forced to fit the conceptualization
rather than the other way around. He has a clear idea of what it
is he wants to establish and discovers in his data answers to his
questions. The works of Robert C. Smith, FeFe Dunham, and Ronald
Walters have frequently used other ideological themes that could
have been important in Dawson's analysis. An orientation to data,
not the data themselves, often reveals more about a study than anything
else. In this case, the terminology long established in the African
American intellectual tradition for political ideologies such as
Integrationism, Accommodationism, Separatism, and Nationalism are
abandoned by Dawson but may have been useful in providing a clearer
understanding of how African Americans perceive themselves. Integration,
Accommodation, Separatism, and Nationalism are terms that have grown
out of the African American tradition; in fact, they are clearly
conceptualizations from an internal agency. What is clear in Dawson's
work is the absence of a conceptual framework based on Afrocentric
agency. Without an appreciation of the agency of African Americans,
that is, the role African people have played in defining political
ideologies, it is easy for Dawson to misunderstand history and to
impose an external framework on the data.
Thus, it is easy for Dawson to
claim a "vulgar and brutal misogyny" (p. 41) for Eldridge
Cleaver and Stokely Carmichael. This terminology clearly does not
apply to Carmichael and in the case of Eldridge Cleaver only applied
to him prior to his "black nationalist' days. To argue that
their misogyny, hatred of women, fueled the black feminist camp
organizations and literatures is overreaching. The evidence does
not show this conclusion. This comment on Black Nationalism, like
so many misrepresentations of the dominant African American ideology,
is an aggrandizing bow to feminism. I am not familiar with any theoretical
or philosophical discourse in the Black Nationalist ideology that
is anti-woman. On the other hand, Black Nationalists, as opposed
to the radical egalitarians who tend to be mostly Christians, have
advanced an African idea of gender complementarity.
Nevertheless, Dawson's l993-1994
National Black Politics Study (NBPS), developed prior to the Million
Man March or the Million Woman March, is a remarkable survey. The
data was obtained from telephone interviews of 1,206 people, over
the age of 18. Each interview lasted about forty-five minutes. The
study was conducted between November 20, 1993 and February 20, 1994.
The principal aims, according to Dawson, were to provide instrumentation
for the analysis of the relationships between black ideologies and
their determinants and consequences, and the relationship of black
worship to black public opinion.
The overwhelming conclusion in
this study supports the view that the black population remains committed
to the ideology of Black Nationalism. In this sense, it would have
been possible, had Dawson's study been reported earlier to predict
the success of the marches on Washington and Philadelphia. Given
the fact that the data show a powerful ideological commitment in
the African American community to Black Nationalism, Dawson seeks
to create an elaborate classification of the ideological tendencies
and to redefine the nature of the dominant Black Nationalism by
introducing the term, "community nationalism" (p. 120).
He accepts the idea that community nationalism is "black empowerment
politics" (p. 120) but seeks to advance Louis Farrakhan as
the model Black Nationalist.
This is problematic in and of itself
inasmuch many nationalists see Farrakhan as a fringe part of the
movement. More importantly, I am at a loss to see how community
nationalism differs from other forms of Black Nationalism that seek
to present the calling cards of self definition, self control, and
self determination as the principal icons of the ideology. Trying
to isolate Louis Farrakhan from the equation is unnecessary to the
main argument of the data in this survey. When Dawson claims "the
community nationalist variant of black "nationalism" enjoys
strong mass support" he follows his data (p. 101). Delimiting
separatism and withdrawal from the state from community nationalism
increases the numbers of adherents. But to include separatism and
withdrawal from the state in any current definition of Black Nationalism
is to assume that there is no shift in the ideology. What is called
community nationalism is perhaps the only salient nationalism of
the 1990s. Dawson's redefinition of Black Nationalism generally
and the shift to community nationalism may be more decoration than
anything else in his construction of the black community's interest.
Separation and withdrawal from the American state became a part
of the rhetorical discourse during the intense period of KKK racial
activities in the early turn of the 20th century and remained a
part of the discourse until the 1960s. After the deaths of Malcolm
X in 1965 and of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, Black Nationalist
ideology banked away from the theme of separation and withdrawal
of the state due to increase participation in electoral politics.
Yet the essential core concerns of the Black Nationalist ideology
remained constant as Dawson's data show.
It is Dawson's aim to supply answers
to questions such as what political ideologies are supported by
blacks? Who is most likely to support what ideologies? How does
residential location shape ideological orientations? How do black
ideologies shape black public opinion? What is clear after one reads
the analytical narrative is that one cannot measure what one did
not conceptualize. In the dissertation "More'n a Notion: The
Determinants of the Appeal of Black Nationalism in the Post Black
Power Era,"and a conference paper, "Countenances of "Collective
Grace and Communal Availability": The Appeal of Black Nationalism
in the Post Black Power Era", National Council for Black Studies,
San Diego, March, 2002, FeFe Dunham demonstrates that "the
appeal of Black Nationalism is a result of that part of the culture
that nourishes and affirms collective grace and communal availability"
terms first used by Lerone Bennett.
Just as the African American community
has undergone an evolution in self-identification from African,
Negro, Colored, Afro American, Black, African American and back
to African again, we have also experienced a similar movement in
ideological commitments, nomenclature, and purposes. Take the term
"radical egalitarianism", for example, it is referred,
with the same coordinates, is "capitulation" by some Black
Nationalists. What is called Black Nationalism, on the other hand,
is called "black separatism" by some Radical Egalitarians.
This has not been adequately sorted out in Dawson's work. This is
not a criticism that needs to stand in way of appreciating the monumental
way he has grappled with the issues of African American ideologies.
He admits in the preface to his
book that he is a political scientist and not a historian (p. xiii)
and while this is a reasonably good admission it nevertheless handicaps
how one can use what he has discovered in this study.
There are many useful attributes
of Black Visions. Clearly, Dawson's discussion of identity and black
feminist ideology challenges the reader to rethink much of what
we see as group identity politics. One would have wished, however,
that Clenora Hudson-Weems' notion of Africana Womanism might have
been examined more closely since Hudson-Weems argues for a pro-female
stance that is not anti-male. This is certainly a growing movement
among African American women who are not feminist, but who are pro-woman.
Other women writing in this vein are Patricia Dixon and Yaa Asantewa
Reed. Dixon's book and Reed's dissertation are two works that suggest
the mass of African American women are supportive of women's rights
but are also not anti-male. Concentrating on feminism as an ideological
theme without attention to Africana Womanism is a major problem
for many readers.The book is a triumph in many ways but it is clouded
by provocative dislocations about Black Nationalism based primarily
on the same old traditional canard about Black Nationalism being
a response to disillusionment about being outside of white America.
This is a total misunderstanding of the legitimate affirmation of
culture and respect for identity and heritage that has little or
nothing to do with white people. Dawson is worried that the liberals
have nothing to offer because "there is little sign of a vibrant
mass movement, and clearly there are high levels of disillusionment
in the black community about race relations in America. As always,
particularly with the collapse of the left and the isolation of
the feminists, the nationalists are waiting in the wings" (p.
280).
Black Visions will be an important
book despite its many flaws because it is a reasonable attempt to
make sense out of very complex data. However, Dawson's work might
be seen as an attempt to explain away the dominant ideological current
in the Black Community as only a reaction to not being "accepted"
by whites. If this is the case it is an unfortunate rendering since
it means that they will never understand the internal agency of
those who just plain like being who they are without reacting to
anybody else!
References:
FeFe Dunham, "Countenances of "Collective
Grace and Communal Availability": The Appeal of Black Nationalism
in the Post Black Power Era", National Council for Black Studies
Annual Conference, San Diego, March, 2002.
David Walker, "Appeal to the Colored
Citizens of the World: Our Wretchedness as a Consequence of Slavery,"
in Molefi Asante and Abu Abarry, African Intellectual Heritage.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996.
Note:
Molefi Kete Asante is Professor, Department
of African American Studies, Temple University, and the author of
more than fifty books, including The Afrocentric Idea.
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