While there were some overlaps between the two movements, Cha-Jua and Lang argue that the conflation of the civil rights and Black Power phases present more difficulties and create more confusion than it is adding to our understanding of the period. In their view, the long civil rights movement paradigm fails to account for the transformation in the African American consciousness that occurred in the late 1960s. What some long civil rights movement advocates would fail to realize, Cha-Jua and Lang suggest, is that ideology, discourse, and long range objectives matter as much, if not more, than the specific inequalities against which the activists struggle over the course of time. While we may not agree with the strictly intellectual focus
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How we define activism, especially in the Jim Crow South, where Whites usually prevented African Americans from joining or forming labor unions of their own. This is one of the questions that Robin D.G. Kelley’s article “‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” raised more than twenty years ago. To this day, non-organizational activism still remains one of the civil rights movement scholars’ stepchildren, as few scholars have embraced the unconventional, interdisciplinary approach that Kelley proposed. As a result, historians tend to focus mainly on organizational forms of resistance and activism, as Hall does by locating the antecedents of the civil rights movement mainly in biracial labor organizations instead of the early, less formalized activism of African American women or in religious institutions and their affiliated …show more content…
Rather, it is also grounded in the perception of many White contemporaries, who were either not willing to see or admit that racial discrimination was a national problem. One of the reasons that this perception has not changed is, that except for parts of academia and social justice organizations, the notion of institutional and structural racism has never obtained much of a foothold among Whites. Moreover, as Ibram X. Kendi illustrates in his recent book, the self-interest of many Whites to uphold a racially exclusive system, makes it hard, if not impossible to address racism only through education. As such, we might reconsider the notion that racism among Whites would subside the moment historians provide an all-encompassing narrative of the scope and the depth of American racism—past or present. At the end, we ran into the danger of losing sight of the civil rights movement altogether, by indefinitely expanding it and using it as a powerful tool to revive activist alliances and to address all sorts of contemporary social and economic
How we define activism, especially in the Jim Crow South, where Whites usually prevented African Americans from joining or forming labor unions of their own. This is one of the questions that Robin D.G. Kelley’s article “‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” raised more than twenty years ago. To this day, non-organizational activism still remains one of the civil rights movement scholars’ stepchildren, as few scholars have embraced the unconventional, interdisciplinary approach that Kelley proposed. As a result, historians tend to focus mainly on organizational forms of resistance and activism, as Hall does by locating the antecedents of the civil rights movement mainly in biracial labor organizations instead of the early, less formalized activism of African American women or in religious institutions and their affiliated …show more content…
Rather, it is also grounded in the perception of many White contemporaries, who were either not willing to see or admit that racial discrimination was a national problem. One of the reasons that this perception has not changed is, that except for parts of academia and social justice organizations, the notion of institutional and structural racism has never obtained much of a foothold among Whites. Moreover, as Ibram X. Kendi illustrates in his recent book, the self-interest of many Whites to uphold a racially exclusive system, makes it hard, if not impossible to address racism only through education. As such, we might reconsider the notion that racism among Whites would subside the moment historians provide an all-encompassing narrative of the scope and the depth of American racism—past or present. At the end, we ran into the danger of losing sight of the civil rights movement altogether, by indefinitely expanding it and using it as a powerful tool to revive activist alliances and to address all sorts of contemporary social and economic