The End of White World Supremacy: Black Internationalism and the Problem of the Color Line

Notes

Notes INTRODUCTION: “THE HANDWRITING ON THE WALL” 1. Both Bell (1992) and Asante argue that racism is an intractable problem in U.S. society. See my summary of Asante’s position in Chapter 6, “Afrocentrism and Multiculturalism as Strategies for Black Liberation.” 2. The term hegemon is short for hegemonic power, which refers to a state that holds unchallenged dominance in the world economy; there have been three in the five-hundredyear history of world capitalism: the United Provinces, the United Kingdom, and the United States. 3. Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) was the leading exponent of the “Annales” school of history, which emphasizes total history over long historical periods and large geographical space. Braudel argued that time is a social creation and thus that it is of the utmost importance to understand the multiple forms of social time. First we have the short term which is the time of the event. The short term is the tempo of individuals, of our illusions and rapid judgments. It is the chronicler’s and journalist’s time. It is the most capricious and deceptive form of time. Second, we have the middle run (cyclical or conjunctural time) (10, 25, 50 yrs). It is the narrative of the conjuncture or cycle. We might think here of the long economic cycles of expansion and stagnation in the economy. Third, there is the long term (or longue durée). It is here that “structure” becomes key. The word structure for observers of social life implies organization, coherence, and fairly stable relationships between social realities and people over historical or long periods of time. Works: Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century (Three Volumes): The Structures of Everyday Life; The Wheels of Commerce; and The Perspective of the World. The Mediterranean And the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II A History of Civilizations Material Life and Civilization 222 Notes 4. Sekou Toure is the first president of Guinea, 1958–1984. In 1945–6 he became a leader of the trade union movement in French West Africa, founding the Confederation Generale da Travail (CGT), which he led for 12 years. He was alos a founder of the Parti Democatique Africain (PDG), and A member of the Guinean Section of the Rassemblement Democratique Africain (RDA), and in 1952 took over its leadership. See Wallerstein (1962) and Wallerstein (1966). 5. Melanie E. L Bush writes about everyday forms of whiteness in Breaking the Code of Good Intentions: Everyday Forms of Whiteness (Bush 2004). Many readers may be familiar with how Peggy McIntosh writes about how whites are carefully taught not to recognize white privelege in her classic essay “White privilege: Unpacking the White Knapsack (McIntosh 1988). 6. Omi and Winant (1994) explain the concept of the rearticulation of racial discourse in Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. 7. Historical capitalism is an historical social system, which means that it operates in a systematic manner across the historical long term or longue durre. The form that it takes is that of a capitalist world-economy. World-economy refers to a large economy with an axial division of labor and integrated production processes, but with multiple states and multiple cultures. This is different from a world-empire which has one state. What this means is that the economic processes always cross state borders and cannot be controlled by one state, no matter how powerful. The axial division of labor in this concept refers to the invisible axis which holds the capitalist economy intact binding together core-like processes and peripheral processes. This is what makes for the systemness of the world-economy. It does not necessarily mean world scale, but a social world, a self-enclosed entity. See Wallerstein (2004). 8. See also Scott (1993), Von Eschen (1997), and Plummer (1996). 9. As we shall see later in the book the meeting of representatives from 29 Asian and African countries at Bandung, Indonesia in 1955 had enormous geopolitical impact in their assertion of independence from the colonial powers whose colonies were now declaring or fighting for their independence. This was an important meeting at this time when the people of the dark world were asserting their independence. 10. This excerpt is from a speech made in 1963 after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. 11. The employee mentality is one which does what is minimally required to keep the job. One takes no initiative because one does not have a sense of ownership. 12...