A superpower undermined by social decay
The cultural sources of black radicalism


by Achille Mbembe

June 1992, online exclusive


‘Malcolm X’ by Spike Lee.
cc.VDO Vault

America is acting surprised at the violence of the recent riots in Los Angeles and at the immense anger that has been expressed, not only by African Americans but by other minorities (Latinos, Asians), too. Unable to look beyond the mostly reassuring image provided by Martin Luther King (a man whom it once had no qualms murdering), over the past twenty years America has chosen not to interest itself in the cultural work unfolding in the ghettos, whose political impact now flows well beyond the confines of black spaces. Indeed, here is one of the nation’s paradoxes: a minority of the population, practically stripped of its rights, can be credited with crucial innovations in the fields of culture, sports and the arts. It thus manages to exercise an influence that is disproportionate to its economic and material means, and to its objective political weight.

Here is one of the nation’s paradoxes: a minority of the population, practically stripped of its rights, can be credited with crucial innovations in the fields of culture, sports and the arts

To understand the deep roots of the new cultural radicalism in people’s minds, it is important to note what distinguishes it from other cultural currents within black communities and the way in which it defines itself with regard to great contemporary societal and political struggles. It especially sets itself apart from the ‘buppie’ (black upwardly mobile professional) wave — that ambitious group which, over the course of the years after desegregation (1965), proved itself determined to reap the fruits of integration by any means necessary. Big names of the black media elite (Bill Cosby, Michael Jackson, Prince, Oprah Winfrey, Eddie Murphy) fit within this trend, as well as those of sports (Michael Jordan, ‘Magic’ Johnson, Carl Lewis). Such artists and cultural figures have been co-opted into the dominant system and wield almost complete financial control over their product, even if the channels of its distribution still evade them.

The logic of co-option has spread to other domains. On a political level, thanks to multiracial coalitions, black mayors have been elected to head up several important cities (David Dinkins in New York, Coleman Young in Detroit, Andrew Young then Maynard Jackson in Atlanta, Tom Bradley in Los Angeles, Wilson Goode in Philadelphia). The same holds true in academic and intellectual fields: a black university elite has increasingly taken its place within institutions once exclusively controlled by whites, notably in law and social theory in general, as in the case of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Orlando Patterson at Harvard, Stephen Carter at Yale and the African American intellectuals gathered around the journal Reconstruction (1).

Although it is itself subject to subtle forms of racism and discrimination, this co-opted elite ultimately conceives of its future as being within the system and tries to escape traditional definitions of blackness, while insisting on the multicultural foundations of the American nation. Politically, its debates are closely related to the issue of civil rights and the advantages and pitfalls of affirmative action (2). It is also in these settings that most black neocons can be found, of which Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court justice, is the prototype.

The principal troops of the new black radicalism are recruited elsewhere, of course, in a trend known as b-boy. Its two primary supports are music and film, the visual language of images and oral language. A pure product of the ghetto, this trend marvellously combines the most explosive elements of urban poverty, street knowledge and the immense potential for anger, which, up until now, has neither been annexed nor politically exploited by any traditional institutional force. Its best-known musical form is rap (to rap literally means to cut, to strike, to bump, to put back in one’s place). It was around 1979 that the mainstream media discovered this art form, made of rapid street dialogue that is chanted and strongly rhythmical. This was back in an era when graffiti covered the walls of major cities and breakdance still took pride of place on the sidewalks. It was not until 1982, and the release of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s single ‘The Message’, that explicitly political rappers appeared.

From then on, the nebula of rap never stopped gathering power. It was able to take advantage of parallel events in the political sphere and shifts that occurred in ghetto culture. For example, Jesse Jackson’s two runs for the Democratic nomination in 1984 and 1989 spurred on the political awakening of a rap generation. The 1983 election campaign, with its overtones of the crusades, was the same, and saw the arrival of Harold Washington in Chicago’s mayor’s office; then, in 1984, there were the great campaigns for Boycott and Sanctions of South African goods.

Many incidents tinged with racism – and the system’s inability to sanction it – contributed to the radicalisation of this generation and to the emergence of new leaders (usually at neighbourhood level) who had more or less broken with the traditional black political establishment, which was accused of colluding with a system in which the right to vote does not appear to guarantee change, and whose racist structures have not fundamentally altered despite formal desegregation. That was the case in New York when, in 1986, a young black man was killed following a full-on manhunt by a gang of white thugs at Howard Beach, or later when, during the summer of 1989, Yusef Hawkins was shot down in the Italian neighbourhood of Bensonhurst. The names of Al Sharpton, C. Vernon Mason and Alton Maddox belong to this period.

The link to the legacy of the 1960s was no longer mediated by the figure of Martin Luther King, but by the heroes of insubordination banished from the United States’ collective memory (Malcolm X, the Black Panthers)

The power of rap’s appeal can also be explained by the fact that over the last ten years, influential intellectual currents have developed. They were, for the most part, facilitated by new cultural intermediaries, keen not so much to articulate the anxiety rising from the ghettos as to participate in academic debates from non-Western perspectives. This current, called ‘Afrocentrism’ (3), reigned supreme in Black Studies departments and aims to reclaim the question of African identity and the contribution of black people to universal history separate from Eurocentric views that have long obfuscated it. Such critical revisiting rests on the theory of the African origins of Egyptian civilisation, among others, and on the fact that Greek civilisation also borrowed the majority of the elements that made it great from Egypt (4). It is hard to comprehend the political impact of these debates without taking into account the fact they have a direct influence on the very definition of the American nation and of the respective places of its cultural components.

At the beginning of the ’80s, the nebula of rap also benefited from renewed creativity in the production of urban symbols and symbols of identity. In this respect, we note, for example, the proliferation of jeeps and other cars driving at high speed, music blaring out of boom boxes from 1987 on. T-shirts splattered with slogans such as ‘Black by popular demand’, or ‘It’s a black thing, you wouldn’t understand’ spread out of black universities. The famous slogan ‘No justice, no peace’ that was ‘discovered’ by the mainstream media after the LA riots also dates back to this period.

In parallel, we witnessed the growing rediscovery of Malcolm X. As early as 1986, you could see kids reading his autobiography in the New York subway and in public places. The writings of Elijah Muhammad, notably his Message to the Blackman, also enjoyed increased favour, while Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan was more and more often invited to speak on campuses by black student groups. The link to the legacy of the 1960s was now no longer mediated by the figure of Martin Luther King, but by the heroes of insubordination banished from the United States’ collective memory (Malcolm X, the Black Panthers). Most of their ideas concerning self-defense, economic emancipation and the rediscovery of the self and of one’s cultural identity echo the feeling that the black race has been subjected to a genocide and that it should, in the words of Malcolm X, defend itself, ‘by all means necessary.’

These themes were taken up and popularised in music, with most records selling millions of copies. So, when the band Public Enemy released ‘Bring the Noise’ in 1986, the song opened with Malcolm X’s voice declaring, ‘Too black, too strong’. The same band later stood out with two more hits: It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and ‘Welcome to the Terror Dome’. KRS-One directly attacked the criminal justice system in 1987’s By All Means Necessary. As for the band Niggaz With Attitude (NWA), it denounced the deterioration of towns and police violence in ‘Fuck tha Police’. Family structures didn’t escape criticism either. Most black young people in the ghetto had simply never experienced the family as represented in reassuring Bill Cosby series. This is the point the band MAAD drove home in ‘Fuck My Daddy’, in which life in prison is an important subject, as is daily life on the streets, in the underground worlds of drugs and cocaine. The band Mad Mutherfuckin’ Congatas also describes with candour and brutal honesty how ‘living hard and dying hard’ is the fate of young people in the ghetto. As for Niggaz4Life, he affirms, ‘Niggas know how to die/Niggas don’t know nothin’ else, but dyin’/Niggas dream ’bout dyin’’ (5).
It is no exaggeration to say that a parallel language has developed alongside conventional US English since the era of slavery

Conventional and puritanical language is done away with around issues of sex and drugs. Creative freedom is expressed through the use of graphics, excessive profanity, tales of blood, violence, and crime. This is the case for example with Puff the Buddah or NWA hits such as ‘I’d Rather Fuck You’ or ‘Findum, Fuckum and Flee’, ‘She Swallowed It’, ‘Just Don’t Bite It’, or ‘One Less Bitch’. Why this return to the word ‘nigga’? ‘Because police always wanna harass me/ Every time that I’m rollin’/ They swear up and down that the car was stolen/Make me get face down in the street/And throw the shit out my car on the concrete/In front of a residence/A million white motherfuckers on my back like I shot the President,’ replies one of the members of NWA.

This same reality feeds the cinematic work of artists like Spike Lee, Van Peebles, John Singleton and Matty Rich (6). The accounts listed above coexist with more about the violence of the ghetto, self-destructive behaviour, sexuality, new forms of phallocratic mentality and, above all, the police brutality and exclusion built into the American system. The project of rap and of the new black cinema is to create heroes for the ghetto and of the ghetto. But, in truth, the influence of hip-hop now extends to almost all components of black American culture. This is especially the case in the sphere of everyday speech, and it is no exaggeration to say that a parallel language has developed alongside conventional US English since the era of slavery, with its own turns of phrase and expressions, grammatical constructions, intonations, curses and ways of naming people, objects and things. This language is largely not understood by Americans of European descent and absent from the dominant modes of communication. It is this language that is taken up by rap and enriched, in order to set down — in a new context — the old problem of black emancipation in a society whose power and wealth structures have remained, for the most part, racist. That is also the case in the realms of style, hairstyle, painting, dance and theatre.

The new ‘intellectuals’ who articulate these discourses define themselves as ‘real niggaz’. Mixing anger and sarcasm, they are not immune to a form of neomaterialist nihilism and consumerism that the capitalist system can, in any event, accommodate.


Achille Mbembe
Translated by Lucie Elven.