On Robert L. Allen's Black Awakening in Capitalist America: "the Black Middle Class, Forty Years After" (Critical Essay)

ROBERT L. ALLEN'S Black Awakening in Capitalist America was published in 1970 (New York: Doubleday, 1970). Its analysis, documentation and location of basic dynamics driving US capitalism and within it, the captive formation of black America, remain as flesh today as they were forty years ago. I am considered in my use of the term "formation," because I have yet to locate a precise term to characterize the phenomenon of blacks in the US. Though colonized, blacks are not a colony in the classic sense, for we do not possess land or other natural resources. Blacks were an imported, enslaved labor force which brought with it from Africa the highly sophisticated and resilient social forms that contributed greatly to the social cohesion blacks have today. Although not a nation but replicating national forms, this formation is driven by caste and class dynamics which in turn operate in a reciprocating fashion with the caste and class dynamics of a multi-ethnic America. Allen's succinct political history of black America deftly records its twists and turns, its various reformulations from ideologies of revolutionary black nationalism, cultural nationalism, and on to economic and social integration, its movement from early civil rights leaders such as Dr. King and James Farmer on through the national and international manifestations of black power and its ambiguities.