Parts of Afterwords from “Black Power: The Politics of Liberation”

Obviously, we must raise serious and basic questions about the overall role played by federal funds in relation to the black liberation struggle. Our basic premise is that money and jobs are not the final answer to the black man’s problems. Without in any sense denying the overwhelming reality of poverty, we must affirm that the basic goal is not “welfare colonialism” as some have called the anti-poverty and other federal programs, but the inclusion of black people at all levels of decision-making. We do not seek to be mere recipients from the decision-making process but participants in it.

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…we clearly warned that visibility did not equal power. We can be more precise today and say the more visible the African politician, the less power wielded. We showed integration as an insidious subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy. The Democratic Party today proves this dictum.

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The book warned against individual advancement as a marker for progress. Over and over again, the book showed that the character of our struggle was mass-based. It is only mass struggle that advances us and only when the masses advance do we advance. Thus, the capitalist reforms of the government to stave of Revolution will inevitably bring it about.

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Many have attacked our analogy of regarding the African communities as colonies. Imperialism, trying to preserve itself in the face of the oppressed masses’ anticolonial struggle, presented neocolonialism to the masses. Neocolonialism means powerless visibility. You see an African president, but the entire country is controllable by France or Belgium or England—its former colonial master. In Los Angeles, after 27 years of reform (or colonial independence), and with an African mayor who was a lieutenant in the police force, racist police terrorism increases! If this is not raw neocolonialism, what is? This analogy should not allow us to lose sight of the fact that the U.S.A. is a settler-colony; only the indigenous people are its just owners.