libcom | Coexisting with this egalitarian ideology was the Civil Rights
movement's appeal to a functionalist conception of social rationality.
To the extent that it blocked individual aspirations, segregation was
seen as restricting artificially social growth and progress. Similarly,
by raising artificial barriers such as the construction of blacks'
consumer power through Jim Crow legislation and, indirectly, through low
black wages, segregation impeded, so the argument went, the free
functioning of the market. Consequently, segregation was seen not only
as detrimental to the blacks who suffered under it, but also to economic
progress as such. Needless to say, the two lines of argument were met
with approval by corporate liberals.[31]
......
Outside the South, rebellion arose from different conditions. Racial
segregation was not rigidly codified and the management sub-systems in
the black community were correspondingly more fluidly integrated within
the local administrative apparatus. Yet, structural, generational and
ideological pressures, broadly similar to those in the South, existed
within the black elite in the Northern, Western, and Midwestern cities
that had gained large black populations in the first half of the 20th
century. In non-segregated urban contexts, formal political
participation and democratized consumption had long since been achieved:
there the salient political issue was the extension of the
administrative purview of the elite within the black community. The
centrality of the administrative nexus in the "revolt of the cities" is
evident from the ideological programs it generated.
Black Power came about as a call for indigenous control of economic and political institutions in the black community.[33]
Because one of the early slogans of Black Power was a vague demand for
"community control," the emancipatory character of the rebellion was
open to considerable misinterpretation. Moreover, the diversity and
"militance" of its rhetoric encouraged extravagance in assessing the
movement's depth. It soon became clear, however, that "community
control" called not for direction of pertinent institutions — schools,
hospitals, police, retail businesses, etc. — by their black
constituents, but for administration of those institutions by alleged
representatives in the name of a black community. Given an existing
elite structure whose legitimacy had already been certified by federal
social-welfare agencies, the selection of "appropriate" representatives
was predictable. Indeed, as Robert Allen has shown,[34]
the empowerment of this elite was actively assisted by corporate-state
elements. Thus, "black liberation" quickly turned into black "equity,"
"community control" became simply "black control" and the Nixon
"blackonomics" strategy was readily able to "coopt" the most rebellious
tendency of 1960s black activism. Ironically, Black Power's supersession
of the Civil Rights program led to further consolidation of the
management elite's hegemony within the black community. The black elite
broadened its administrative control by uncritically assuming the
legitimacy of the social context within which that elite operated. Black
control was by no means equivalent to democratization.
