Black Power: Angela Davis Was Wrong
The revolutionaries that rose up against the corporatist, nationalist, and white supremacists in the 1960s thought that capitalism was the problem. Angela Davis, as insightful and brilliant and courageous as she was and remains today, continues to mistake capitalism for systemic racism.
Capitalism is merely an expression of people’s values. No one would trade a dollar bill for a pile of excrement. When people are racist or sexist or homophobic, the free market reflects these defects in human ethics. In this sense, capitalism is a mirror, not a cause or a systemic deficiency in and of itself.
Angela Davis never looks at herself as an individual fighting for individuals, but as an instrument of history floating on the waves of a revolution destined to topple the elites that have enjoyed power atop a system predicated upon oppression, racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on. This Hegelian error in reason, in perception, isn’t maleficent. It’s just mistaken.
If knowledge is power and power is the ability to do work, then Black Power is not only predicated upon education but upon economic liberty! The ability to do work should not come with a government license, nor a government check. No one should have to ask for permission. Perpetuating that system may help Blacks at the top, but it will never help Black Communities.
The real crisis in the Black Community is that there is a racist Justice System hovering over them at every turn, thwarting their every exercise of their God-given freedom. The real crisis is in a legal system that deems the sins within the Black Community as somehow more serious and warranting greater punishments than the sins found in the White Communities.
If knowledge is power and power is the ability to do work, then the Black Communities must insist upon the reduction of barriers between them and their ability to be paid righteously for their work. Whites, Asians, and Hispanics too should demand this.
Resources must be reallocated.
Just as the police departments have been asked to do too much, to address problems they have no business addressing, so too has the rest of society been mismanaged. Police Officers have no business interacting with the mentally ill. We need to fund mental health interventions in this country.
Also, education needs to be funded, privately, or publicly, whichever model produces the best results. Knowledge is power. No one can do work without knowledge.
Sadly, in this unfree society, all the knowledgable people are swallowed up by governments and corporations and paid with public and private funds to suit the power of governments and corporations and benefit the general welfare of none.
If you want a revolution, then you have to fight for systemic change. If you refuse to address your systems, if you think your systems will be amicable toward your efforts at changing them, then you are insane.
But capitalism is a mirror. If you are looking to government to give you the power previous governments have denied you, then you are looking to the source of sin as the foundation of your future virtue. And that is insane. It will never work. It never has.
Black Power is going to be found in freedom and free markets, in equal opportunity and equal justice under the law.
If not, then Black Power will only be realized once Blacks successfully subjugate all the other races that have subjugated them. There are two choices here if blacks really want to be free: Embrace freedom for all or enslave and subjugate all the other races to your will. There is no middle ground.
No Justice. No Peace. No Equality. No Peace. Know Justice. Know Peace. Know Equality. Know Peace. No Racist, Police. No Prejudice anywhere, Please.
Empower us all through liberty and justice for all.
I am terrified that none of the lessons that ought to have been learned have been learned. I am absolutely terrified that oppression will be the response to oppression, as it always has been throughout history.
Angela Davis believes that Communism is somehow the answer. Deprive everyone of everything and spread the nothingness around equally. Maybe everyone else will hate poverty, then, enough to change.
But we all know that hate perpetuates hate. It never breeds love or hope or liberty or change; and those are all the things we need right now, that we’ve needed all along, and that we’ll need in the future. We shouldn’t accept less that love, hope, liberty, and equality for everyone. Otherwise, this entire American experiment was just a gigantic waste of time.
