The Two Central Contradictions Characterizing the African American Sociohistorical Experience

• In Event: Theory and History in the Making and Reshaping of Black Liberatory Thought

Abstract

The process of struggle, transformation, whitelash, and rapprochement that comprise the Black Racial Formation and Transformation (BRFT) interpretative framework is a consequence of the two central contradictions in the African American sociohistorical experience. The two central contradictions that shape the African American sociohistorical experience are historically determined structural relationships that generate enrichment and fulfillment for white people at the expense of Black people’s welfare and satisfaction. Conjuring the colonial imagery of dependency theory and world-systems analysis’ core-periphery metaphor, Black Power historian Lerone Bennett posited, “The underdevelopment of the circumference is a function of the development of the center.” The first contradiction between African Americans and the United States, Bennett points to is an “organic structural relationship,” a dialectical relationship, or as Walter Rodney put it, “the two help produce each other, by interaction,” in which the wealth, power, liberty, leisure, privilege, and prestige of the dominant white racial group, nationality result from the expropriation and superexploitation, powerlessness, enslavement and unfreedom, toil, destitution, and degradation of the subordinate Black racial group, nationality. The creation of an interpretative framework derived from and centered on the African American sociohistorical experience is essential to reinterpreting African Americans’ intellectual traditions. And more importantly, a focus on the two core contradictions has serious consequences for designing liberatory strategies for the rest of the 21st century.

Author

• Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, ASALH Executive Council and University of Illinois