There’s a cer­tain lib­eral opti­mism about race in the United States, and last night’s Fer­gu­son grand jury ver­dict unmasked the com­pla­cency that lies under­neath it. For decades we’ve watched as the legacy of anti-racist move­ments has been chan­neled towards the eco­nomic and polit­i­cal advance­ment of indi­vid­u­als like Barack Obama and Bill Cosby. And we’ve watched such indi­vid­u­als lead the attack against social move­ments and mar­gin­al­ized com­mu­ni­ties – today, they are the ones urg­ing restraint.

No seri­ous chal­lenge has yet arisen to this co-opting of the anti-racist legacy. Within the acad­emy and within social move­ments, intel­lec­tu­als and activists have ren­dered our­selves totally impo­tent. We’ve reduced pol­i­tics to the polic­ing of our lan­guage, to the ques­tion­able sat­is­fac­tion of pro­vok­ing white guilt. And we have allowed our present to become the age of Oscar Grant, Troy Davis, Trayvon Mar­tin, and Mike Brown.

There is a rebel­lion tak­ing place in Fer­gu­son, which has spread to Chicago, Philadel­phia, New York, and Oak­land, and this rebel­lion shows that it’s time for us to wake up. Once upon a time, move­ments against racism came to under­stand that it was not enough to make space for black and brown peo­ple in the Amer­i­can dream of social mobil­ity; it was nec­es­sary to make a demand for power – Black Power, and all the mil­i­tant move­ments of Chicano/a and Asian-American com­mu­ni­ties which emerged along­side it. The action that took place in the streets last night should remind us of the uni­ver­sal and ongo­ing sig­nif­i­cance of this his­tor­i­cal rupture.

Mal­colm X’s famous analy­sis of the “House Negro” in “Mes­sage to the Grass­roots” was not merely a rhetor­i­cal response to indi­vid­u­als who tended towards lib­eral com­pro­mise. It was a com­plex analy­sis of the struc­tural role played by black lead­er­ship, and its sup­pres­sion of autonomous mass action. “They con­trolled you,” Mal­colm said. “They con­tained you; they kept you on the plantation.”

Malcolm’s analy­sis was cut short by his 1965 assas­si­na­tion by the cul­tural nation­al­ists of the Nation of Islam, with whom he had bro­ken after con­nect­ing with rev­o­lu­tion­ary anti-colonial move­ments in Africa and Asia, con­stantly invoked in his speeches. He had deep­ened his struc­tural analy­sis of white supremacy and the eco­nomic sys­tem on which it rested. As Fer­ruc­cio Gam­bino has demon­strated, this is not sur­pris­ing when we look at Malcolm’s life as a laborer – as a Pull­man Porter, or as a final assem­bler at the Ford Wayne Assem­bly Plant, where he encoun­tered the ten­sion between the work­ers’ antag­o­nism towards the employer and the restraint imposed by the union bureaucracies.

“It’s impos­si­ble for a white per­son to believe in cap­i­tal­ism and not believe in racism,” Mal­colm said in a 1964 dis­cus­sion. “You can’t have cap­i­tal­ism with­out racism. And if you find one and you hap­pen to get that per­son into con­ver­sa­tion and they have a phi­los­o­phy that makes you sure they don’t have this racism in their out­look, usu­ally they’re social­ists or their polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy is socialism.”

When the Black Pan­ther Party fol­lowed through on Malcolm’s analy­sis, they extended it to cul­tural nation­al­ism, which they called “pork chop nation­al­ism” – an ide­ol­ogy which claimed that redis­cov­er­ing some pur­port­edly uni­tary African cul­ture would spon­ta­neously lead to black lib­er­a­tion. Its ulti­mate tra­jec­tory was fig­ures like “Papa Doc” Duva­lier, dic­ta­tor of Haiti – it erased the polit­i­cal and eco­nomic con­tra­dic­tions within the black com­mu­nity. The “rev­o­lu­tion­ary nation­al­ism” of the Pan­thers was nec­es­sar­ily social­ist – as Huey P. New­ton put it, “if you are a reac­tionary nation­al­ist you are not a social­ist and your end goal is the oppres­sion of the peo­ple.” The Black Pan­ther Party, he said, had to draw a “line of demar­ca­tion” between the “black bour­geoisie” and “the black have-nots.”

As Angela Davis has remarked, “It doesn’t sur­prise me that aspect of the black nation­al­ist move­ment, the cul­tural side, has tri­umphed because that is the aspect of the move­ment that was most com­mod­i­fi­able.” She points to its “con­nec­tion with the rise of a black mid­dle class,” and reminds us that the “tra­di­tion of anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist strug­gle… is one that has to be fought for and recrafted continuously.”

Iden­tity pol­i­tics has often seemed an innocu­ous, if some­what humor­less, pro­gres­sive phe­nom­e­non. But as black youth con­tinue to be sent to prison or mur­dered by police, as black com­mu­ni­ties are kept in states of uncon­scionable poverty, as migrant labor­ers con­tinue to be exploited in obscene work­ing con­di­tions, and as our first black pres­i­dent con­tin­ues to wage impe­ri­al­ist wars, it becomes clearer that a pol­i­tics which unites us with Obama and Cosby is not sim­ply inad­e­quate – it is crim­i­nal. It is part of the reac­tionary legacy of cul­tural nation­al­ism, and it has been fueled by the grow­ing eco­nomic inequal­ity of cap­i­tal­ism that the Black Power move­ment so pow­er­fully condemned.

The revolt in response to the Fer­gu­son ver­dict is a sign that a col­lab­o­ra­tionist lead­er­ship can never wipe out the grass­roots. As autonomous action lights up the streets, those of us who care about jus­tice have a respon­si­bil­ity to fol­low its lead – it is time for us to pro­claim once again that the strug­gle against racism requires a mass move­ment against cap­i­tal­ism, and when peo­ple who are exploited and dom­i­nated take the ini­tia­tive to act, this pos­si­bil­ity is put on the table.