Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

350 // WALDO E. HARTIN, jit.
Africanism, the purported meanings and consequences of these ideologies for
the actual day-to-day realities of Blacks—especially their liberation struggle—
remained typically vague or nonexistent. In fact, the metaphysical, romantic, and
abstract qualities of these ideologies ultimately rendered them too unrelated to
mass Black consciousness and mass Black struggle. 17 While Third World coalitions
and Pan-African groups in the United States grew in number, they often had
limited influence and brief lives. Barriers to efforts to link the struggles of Third
World peoples within the United States (Native Americans, Chicanos/Puerto
Rican Americans, Asian Americans, as well as Blacks) often proved overwhelming.
Not surprisingly, therefore, direct links between the domestic Black freedom
struggle and those of people of color outside the United States often proved even
harder to forge and to sustain.
At each level of struggle and analysis, from the local to the national to the
international—Pan-African and Third World—the obstacles loomed larger. Just
trying to maintain balance within and across embattled movements given to ideological
exaggerations, political extremes, and militant posturing was an
immense challenge. In addition to external pressures and opposition, the problem
of internal contradictions and resistance also stymied attempts at coalition among
nations of color both within and outside the United States. Advocates of Pan-
Africanism and Third Woiidism like Carmichael often obscured and downplayed
these extremely difficult and important issues. Indeed nowhere were the prospects
and perils of Third Worldism and Pan-Africanism more apparent than in the late
sixties leadership and thought of Carmichael.
Among the many who aspired to fill the activist-intellectual vacuum created
by the assassinations of King and Malcolm X, few could match his commitment
to the cause, his eloquent bravado, and his ideological audacity. Much of what he
said and did in this period significantly advanced the African American liberation
struggle, notably his efforts to heighten African Americans' awareness of the
deep-seated mutual dependency between Blackness—their sense of racial identity
and consciousness—and Afticanness. Along with a host of nationalist intellectuals
and artists like Amiri Baraka, Carmichael helped Blacks to negotiate not
only their complicated relationship to Africa, but their equally if not more com-
plicated relationship to the Third World as well.
The ultimate problem proved to be the narrow and chauvinistic extremes of
nationalism. In a multiethnic/multiracial society like the United States, Black
advancement has historically necessitated alliances and coalitions with progressive
non-Blacks in addition to the race-based identity, unity, and power intrinsic to
Black Power, even Black nationalism. As previously argued, in light of America's
inherent diversity, American nationalism has to be seen as a composite of its constituent
nationalisms. Consequently, the fundamental problem was neither Black
Power nor Black nationalism per se, but the unmitigated failure of Americans as
a people to face up to the enduring and intertwined challenges of structural
inequalities rooted in differences like race, class, gender, and sexuality.