Things Fall Apart: Black Struggle in Imperial America and the Need for an Adequate Theory of Emancipation for the 21st Century

Abstract

the larger society, or with the needs of those who control the society. But, essentially, it always reflects a racial double standard, which is why Malcolm opined that, in the case of America, democracy is hypocrisy. America has claimed, for example, to be a nation of laws. But just look at some of these laws! American law prohibited slaves from testifying against their masters. When the slaves became nominally free, America passed codes that forbade blacks to testify on their own behalf, so that we were judged by all-white juries, until the courts finally ruled that our exclusion was unconstitutional. Then prosecutors used peremptory challenges to continue to keep us off the jury. And when courts said that, too, is not just, America's law allow the use of changeof-venue tactics as with Rodney King's baton-swinging police assailants who were not tried in Los Angeles where the beating took place, but in their own bedroom community of Simi Valley, California. Ditto with Amadou Diallo, the unarmed Guinean man shot forty-one times by New York's finest. The trial of his slayers was moved from the Bronx, and a likely black judge to an upstate, Buffalo court presided over by an ex-cop who instructed the jury for hours and at great length, upon the multiple rationales for acquittal.