Black Power: The Text
From Social Justice Wiki
Black Power opens with the thinly veiled threat that “this book…represents the last reasonable opportunity for this society to work out its racial problems short of prolonged destructive guerilla warfare”. However radical the opening may be, the text proposes concrete and tangible solutions to the problems afflicting black America based on past examples. The authors liken the relationship of blacks and whites to that of colonial subjects to their colonizers due to a history of economic exploitation and indirect rule. Carmichael and Hamilton thus argue for changing fundamental structures in order to advance the black race. Racism has been institutionalized and is the underlying cause of ghettoization, unemployment, poor education, and tokenism.
Black Power is a particularly rousing text as it does not merely lay out problems or point fingers; rather the authors devote the book to the articulation of concrete solutions. Political mobilization in the form of an expanded political base and the creation of a third party that represents the issues of black people is the first necessity; having black teachers, professors, and leaders that stem from the communities they work in is another recommendation; forcing businesses that profit off of the black people to reinvest in the indigenous community; a “community rebate plan” as it is referred to in the text; finally, ensuring that token politicians and sporadic black faces in power are not opiates, but rather stimuli to work harder to find people to represent black America.