White Supremacy’s Horcrux and Why the Black Power Movement Almost Destroyed It

Written to recapture the original purpose of Africana Studies, this analytic essay starts with an observation of US social movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Our culture highlights that which is associated with the classical Civil Rights Movement, when Africans called themselves Negro and freedom was equated with integrating into white society. What is left silent or disparaged is the subsequent Black Power Movement, in which Africans called themselves Black and understood freedom as regrouping on an independent, often African-centered basis. This pattern of highlighting Negro integrationists and vilifying Black separatists remains a refrain in the way US history is told. The author posits the notions of Negro and Black not simply as identity labels, but as subconscious orientations where antiblackness functions as the pathological source fueling White supremacy’s genocidal nature. This explains why White supremacy must erase blackness, prop up Negro-ness, and silence or disparage the Black Power Movement, whose affirmation of blackness carried the seeds of White supremacy’s destruction.