Like Chocolate for Water: Liberation from Ideological Conscription

Traditionally, protest groups lack access and eschew forbearance. Groups protest when a dearth of resources prompts despair about the present and cynicism regarding the future. Dispossessed groups seek alternative conditions to actualize equitable possible worlds. A recent spate of protests, however, complicates the standard narrative. In the last decade, protest groups proliferated after the Great Recession, as maladaptive federal government transitions of power materialized and pandemic-induced economic stratification intensified. Political and monetary instability led to student indebtedness, industry consolidation, state surveillance, voter suppression and state-sanctioned misuse of lethal force. Given the consequences, social movement critics struggle to distinguish reactionaries who exploit access from intentional radicals. The allure of freedom from isolation, subsidies, householding, e-commerce, videotelephony, and violence nudged eager participants and emboldened opportunistic voyeurs. Corporate social activism commenced as dissidence yielded dividends for protest groups like Black Lives Matter (BLM), National Black Justice Coalition and National Action Network, among others. The difficulty of distinguishing participant-motives and determining who deserves justice invites an analysis of assumptions about the standard protest narrative. A narrative that privileges pathology, agency and impatience obscures the undifferentiated discourse model upon which movement critics assess motives and desert. The standard public political discourse framework privileges ideology critique, as if all criticisms are self-referential and unable to withstand the predations of capital. What practices, if any, can resist such ideological capture? The following evaluates an argument for liberation from ideological conscription during and subsequent to the Civil Rights era. Practices from this period reveal a way to differentiate criticisms and mitigate the logic of late capitalism.

To be sure, distinctive group ideologies can neither alienate capital nor guarantee liberation. Moreover, critics struggle to align specific ideologies with particular radical practices. Social movement theorists legitimate protest practices that sustain groups within movements and avoid, albeit in retrospect, the conscripts of ideology. Legitimations for an ideology recur to the experiences of one group representative. Groups devise experiential stances to interpret and resist the dominant culture. Protesters with singular ideological commitments to nationalism, Marxism, liberalism or pessimism, for example, did not comprise a majority during the decade of BLM-related protests. Predicting the ideologies of protesters became unachievable and unnecessary. Ideological criticism became ineffectual yet pervasive. Ideological criticism, as a result, is the water in which protesting publics swim. Many accounts of recent movements emphasize the necessity of recognizing “being wet” through attentiveness to traditional narratives that incite anger about injustices. Such accounts determine the pervasiveness of ideological criticism less through legitimating beliefs about individuals. Groups that endorsed an aforementioned ideology did not experience a legitimation crisis. Nationalists were not preoccupied with the threat of tolerating black angst. Marxists were not devoted to race-based resource redistribution. Liberals were not committed to the integrity of black institutions. Likewise, Afro-pessimists were not sanguine about societies sans group identities.

For radicals, anti-black racism, instead, served as the discursive sine qua non. Merely naming what theorists and practitioners know—that anti-black racism persists—encourages opportunists to use a direct approach. Money became the stick more than the carrot. Companies diverted funds to DEI initiatives and activist NGO’s. As protests became objectionable, resource incursions abated thus revealing the strategy of multi-national conglomerates and well-endowed foundations; marshal monies to placate radicalism. Such strategies correlate the negation of radicalism to the benefits of inclusion and remuneration.

Prior to the decline of BLM, scholars who attempted to embrace group differentiation and resist capital engaged in genealogical ideology critique. Keeanga Yahmatta Taylor argues that BLM should aim for liberation while Christopher Lebron argues that BLM is based in a tradition of equal dignity that values racial progress. Racial progress, since the early 1980’s, has been effectively nonexistent. As an ideal, equality is not sufficient to motivate pursuants of justice who demand more than the same opportunities. Although liberation is a desirable goal, Taylor’s rich historical account avoids proposing it as a method. A black particularity of liberation offers ways to use Taylor’s differentiating aim as motivation, not merely a teleology, and politicize Lebron’s appreciation of dignity. Locating a multi-causal account of liberation in particular practices eschews ideological capture by providing chocolate for the water in which protesting publics swim; that is, particularity for ideology. After briefly situating black particularity in the context of genealogical ideology critique, this paper argues that James Cone's theology of liberation illustrates a practice of existential discovery that resists ideological conscription.

The argument is based on a critique of Raymond Guess's quadrilateral typology of ideology and expansion of Harry Singleton's defense of Cone. Cone views radical practices that employ collective rage and grief as more meaningful than the instigation of such processes. He channeled discontent in ways that were impactful even though Black Power was episodic. The loss of social and financial capital presents scholars with the opportunity to describe why the last decade—from roughly 2012 to 2022—accommodated Black radical causes. The standard assimilationist-preservationist, integrationist-segregationist, diasporic-domestic, nationalist-socialist and neoliberal-communist paradigms are insufficient frameworks for such descriptions. 

Moreover, the proliferation of African American intellectual histories signals a shift in the ways scholars interpret recent movements for Black lives. Such scholars evaluate options for understanding liberation by identifying religious intellectuals who endorse radicalism for liberation. Instead, the accounts identify figures whose norms are liberative.  By describing what preceded recent movements and explaining why the shift became necessary, this paper criticizes contributions to African American intellectual histories that render prophetic thought only good for protest.