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.”