Neutering the Black Power Movement: The Hijacking of Protest Symbolism

Abstract

W. E. B. Du Bois’s quotation imagines a self-contained community in which organized cultural production continually affirms and reinforces connections among individuals and institutions. The Black Arts Movement (BAM) was, in many respects, a concrete manifestation of the type of organized cultural production that Du Bois advocated, and the relationship between the BAM and the Black Power Movement (BPM) roughly paralleled the type of synergism envisioned by Du Bois. The principal thesis of this investigation is that external manipulation and co-optation of important cultural symbols effectively neutralized the potential of organized community-based cultural production to promote BPM objectives. The analysis focuses special attention on the role of blaxploitation films in diluting the potential of important cultural symbols to facilitate political mobilization and collective action. This particular mode of cultural counterattack involved systematic imposition of invisibility on the BPM and/or the misrepresentation of the BPM as dysfunctional, disorganized, opportunistic, and impotent. The propagation of this imagery complemented direct physical assaults and disinformation campaigns waged by governmental officials against BPM organizations and their leaders. The systemic disruption of cultural production as a means of neutering the BPM set in motion a continuing pattern of compromised cultural production that continues to constrain contemporary efforts to develop and implement mass-based resistance to racial oppression.