For example, the fiftieth and seventy-fifth anniversaries of the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg centered on pageantry of surviving veterans of both armies in service to an overarching message of sectional reconciliation. Such ruminations are, after all, typically guided by presentist concerns. Nowhere is this clearer than in some of the discussions around the 150th anniversary of Emancipation and the crushing of the slave owners’ rebellion.
It masks the important fact that every advance black Americans have made toward equality, full citizenship, and racial justice has been enmeshed with broader struggles to advance egalitarian interests.Īnd so, in the past quarter century of neoliberalism’s rise, the James Brown Theory has entrenched itself as the normative foundation of antiracist cultural criticism. Typically under the sign of acknowledging and respecting black people’s agency, it has become unacceptable to suggest that black Americans’ advances have depended significantly on anything other than, against all odds, the perseverance and will of black people themselves and a small cast of white allies.īut this interpretive approach, which blends the several meanings of self-help, is totally consistent with neoliberal premises that eschew collective action in favor of individual voluntarism and deny the significance of social structures in shaping political opportunities. Nixon, he released the paean to black self-help, “I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door, I’ll Get It Myself).” In the nearly half-century since, especially during the last two decades of neoliberal hegemony, that self-help perspective has become the righteous antiracists’ standard for cultural criticism and political judgment. In 1969, after Brown had aligned himself politically with President Richard M. After decades of frustration with what Selmafilmmaker Ava DuVernay calls “white savior” narratives, antiracist progressives appear to have settled on an ideologically more appealing alternative - what we might call the James Brown Theory of Black Liberation.
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