African-American Ideas

Several ideologies salient among African-Americans require explication. Here, ideology is considered as a systematic theory of society composed of a relatively coherent set of interdependent concepts and values that adherents construct into historical narratives and contemporary discourses to articulate their interpretation of a social groups' economic, political, social interests, and cultural beliefs to rationalize particular public policies. The emergence and salience of African-American ideologies are conditioned by three broad factors: the sociohistorical context, the contemporary discursive matrix, and the black intellectual tradition. It is important to contextualize African-American ideologies historically because they develop during particular historical moments, and their discourses are designed to resolve or, at least, to respond to historically specific problems. Moreover, sociohistorical context not only shapes the emergence of specific ideologies, it also conditions the form and salience an ideology takes at a particular moment. African-American history can usefully be considered as a succession of different racial formations. Black racial formations represent African-Americans' distinct position within the U.S. political economy, polity, and civil society during particular historical periods.

African-American history can be divided into four periods: (1) slavery, 1619–1865; (2) the plantation economy, 1865–1960s; (3) proletarian and urbanization, 1940s–1979; and (4) the new nadir, from 1980 on.

Within the realm of ideation, African-American political thought evidences the dynamic interplay between African-American discourses and the dominant and emergent ideas circulating during particular historical periods. Contemporary events and discourses present in the United States and the world establish the contemporary examples and discursive matrix with which these African-American ideological discourses engage. Perhaps more pertinent, however, is knowledge of past debates among the black counterpublic and how previous black intellectual traditions have influenced historically specific policy formulations.

Because racial oppression is a system constructed around a matrix of domination, discrimination, and degradation, an appraisal of African-American political and social thought reveals that black activist intellectuals have mainly engaged two issue clusters: those that revolve around questions of identity and those concerning questions of liberation: "Who are we?" and "What is our present situation, and what should be done about it?" During slavery, the system of racial oppression attempted to destroy African identities, ethnic memories and cultural practices, and the collective and personal identities that derived from them. Since slavery it has sought to make African-Americans nonpersons, requiring, therefore, the search for and (re)assertion of new identities woven from the residue of African survivals and self-interested adaptations, a process that transcends the limits of what is derisively called "identity politics." Identity questions for oppressed racialized communities are fundamental to the pursuit of liberation. These overarching questions about identity, the present situation, and what should be done to create conditions of freedom, self-determination, and social transformation have elicited different answers from different groups of black activist intellectuals.

Allowing for terminological differences, most scholars of black history and politics would agree that African-American activist intellectuals have justified their political action via an interpretative repertoire drawn from one of the following five interrelated ideological approaches: (1) autonomic, (2) incorporative, (3) black conservatism, (4) black radicalism, and (5) black feminism.