This is a story about the forgotten architect
of the woke consensus on race. A long lost
godfather of the orthodoxy enforced by America’s
elite institutions. His name is Stokely Carmichael.
You might not know who he is, but you definitely
know his ideas.
Stokely Carmichael was a civil rights wunderkind. Barely out of his teens, he worked closely with
Martin Luther King, and rocketed to international fame after uttering this fateful phrase:
What does that mean? Well, that’s exactly
the question that caused him to split from
MLK.
MLK: “Well let me say first that this march
is non-violent…”
Reporter: “Mr. Carmichael are you as committed
to the non-violent approach as Dr. King is?”
Stokely: “No, I’m not"
Stokely: “In order for non-violence to work your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.”
A Marxist-Leninist, Stokely helps found the
Black Panther Party and seemed destined to
become an icon, the swaggering, militant alternative
to MLK’s hopeless naïveté.
He’s even anointed the next Malcolm X by
the New York Times... But then, all of sudden,
He vanishes. Stokely moves to Africa and virtually
disappears from American politics. He names
himself after a couple vicious tinpot dictators
and spends the rest of his life trying to
establish a continent-wide communist ethnostate.
And he ends his life in conspiracy-drenched
irrelevance.
Before Stokely left America, he engineered
a unique idea. A little drop of intellectual
arsenic that’s permanently poisoned our
politics.
Stokely: “The major enemy is the honkey
and his institutions of racism. That’s the
major enemy. That is the major enemy!”
There it is, on the very first page of his
manifesto. It’s a good description of Jim
Crow. Redlining. Poll taxes. These are institutions
of racism. But Stokely’s definition was
more expansive, writing that institutional
racism is “less overt, far more subtle,
less identifiable in terms of specific individuals
committing the act.” Stokely invents racism
without racists.
“‘Institutional racism’ attributes negative
outcomes in African American life to this force,
this implacable force that’s out there.
Racism. Racism. Over which nobody has any
control.”
“Starting with Stokely Carmichael ‘institutional
racism’ means institutions that are complicit
in producing disparate outcomes according
to race. So that means that if fewer black
people X than whites, then the institution
in question is racist.”
“What you’re also doing is moving any
responsibility for or agency over those outcomes
from the hands of African Americans. So calling
mass incarceration an expression of institutional
racism… Was it the legislature that made
the law that was racist? Was it the police
officers as they’re enforcing the law? Was
this the courts that were adjudicating claims
of having broken the law? Identifying the
racists who were responsible. I want to know
exactly what you’re talking about and people
don’t tell me that, they often don’t tell
me that.”
And blaming some free-floating oppressive
force has a perverse effect: the architect
of black power becomes the architect of black
powerlessness.
“African Americans are then reduced to bobbles
at the end of a string that’s being pulled
by powerful white people somewhere behind
the curtain. It seems to me that it invites
a kind of complacency, a kind of infantilization.
And here’s the irony of the ironies. The
very people in this situation who are agents
are the racists! And the politics of the institutional
racism monger reduced to making moral appeals
to racists to stop being racist.”
Stokely Carmichael crashed into the civil
rights movement and permanently set it on
the new trajectory. Martin Luther King framed
his fight as getting America to live up to
its own ideals.
For Stokely, America’s ideals are a sham,
a thin camouflage for its true purpose: a
grand white supremacist conspiracy.
MLK wanted to transcend race, seeing it as
a cosmically obscene source
of division.
Stokely didn’t reject racism; he flipped
it.
“Cause this is just another example of white
privilege, using your white privilege, and
what are you going to do with it other than
come into this space and take.”
“The second black leaders start putting
their fists in the air and chanting ‘black
power’ the civil rights movement goes off
into the deep end.”
“A balled up fist is not a jobs program.
It’s not decent housing. Laws are made by
majority vote. You must persuade the other
guys, otherwise you don’t get what you want.”
“Those other people produced results in
the world that we live in, the people afterward
were on stage. And there’s a difference.”
Stokely’s gift to America: the corruption of the civil rights movement. A new kind of wokeness
that sees whiteness and blackness as these
forces locked in eternal combat. With leaders
that don’t solve people’s problem,
they just make careers off of them.
“And the tragedy is that that way of looking
at things has been seen in educated circles
as the central way of being enlightened
and black. Stokely is smiling, definitely.”
