Amos Wilson: The White Brotherhood Collective

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 14 "Race and Economics" from the book "Blueprint for Black Power." By Dr. Amos Wilson. [MORE]

The White Brotherhood Collective

The archetypal White brotherhood collective, like the brotherhood collectives which characterize other ethnic groups, has taken and takes many different forms such as bands of warriors, priesthoods, monastic orders, guilds, consortiums, and the like (Smith, 1990). These collectives, based on commonalities of ethnicity, cultural values and goals, take advantage of the group-mind their association breeds to "create a wide variety of rule-governed social practices such as language, games, trading, and markets, and mythic structures such as law. politics, and religion" (Smith. 1990). Generally, all the members of the brotherhood are considered to be equal to each other and strive to achieve homogeneity. They are disturbed and disrupted by difference and therefore are motivated to deny it and to exclude or marginalize those members within the group whose biological and/or cultural differences may be too obvious. For these reasons such groups tend toward racism and sexism.

Black men, particularly if they insist on not denying their Afrikan descent, will rarely, if ever, be accepted as the same as White men by the White brotherhood collective. Their achievement of equal status within this brethren is highly unlikely or impossible. The White brotherhood collective as such, functions primarily as the central instrument of White power — a power in good part based on its subordination and exploitation of Afrikan and other non-White peoples, as well as the lower classes of White peoples. Therefore Blacks cannot simultaneously be at one with and at the same time separate subjects of White power.

As J.C. Smith contends, "monopoly is the essence of power." The exercise of power by the White American ruling elite requires that it retains a monopoly of three kinds of power — physical or military power, economic power, and ideological power. "Physical power entails the capacity to use brute force on other persons [or peoples]. Economic power entails the capacity to grant or withhold economic benefits, whether in terms of money, property, or resources. Ideological power consists of the capacity to affect other people's actions by persuasion" (Smith, ibid). It is the monopolistic possession by the ruling White brotherhood collective of a combination of physical, economic, and ideological power which enables it to dominate the other white classes and the Afrikan American community. That this view of power monopolies allows the White brotherhood collective to dominate American society is in essence the same as that advanced by C.W. Wright Mills in his seminal and controversial analysis of power in America, in his popular book The Power Elite. Power in America, according to Mills, is possessed and controlled by a single, interlocking structure of power — a power elite whose power is concentrated at the top of three domains: "the corporation chieftains, the political directorate [governmental organizations], and the warlords [military organizations]. Other important institutions are subordinate to and generally supportive of those three major institutions of power.

The brotherhood in which we are most interested at the moment is the corporate brotherhood of the White male collective — "the brotherhoods of producers, merchants, and bankers [who] organize and control economic power" (Smith, ibid).  These brotherhoods together represent the apex of the White pyramidal structure, since economic power is the primary means of directly and indirectly controlling military and ideological power. The insatiable drive to accumulate wealth, which characterizes capitalism and the White male corporate brotherhood, is synonymous with the drive to dominate, to exercise power primarily through the withholding or granting of capital. Thus the "free market" capitalism, the central source of power of the White Brotherhood collective, cannot be truly free and access to it not be really freely available to all other groups — especially to a brotherhood collective of Afrikan males, members of a subject people. The market system as created and monopolized by the White Brotherhood Collective is an economic instrument by which the White male corporate elite disciplines and orders American society; by which it maintains its quintessential class and race-based social order. The market system is the White Brotherhood Collective's instrument of power and social control, its primary instrument for maintaining the racial and social inequalities that are essential to its very existence and functionality. Capitalism is a social and political regime wherein those who own and control property — e.g., the means of production (land, capital, equipment and other resources) enter into unequal contracts with the propertyless (i.e., workers, laborers), with classes of people who are unable to secure a living unless they can gain access to privately owned resources or wealth, and who in exchange for wage payments, must surrender all claims to the products of their labor to the owners of capital.

What is of essence under capitalism is that gains from whatever origin normally accrue to the owners of capital, not to workers, managers, or government officials.

The American market economy, dominated as it is by the White Brotherhood Collective, is not a "free market," for access to it is withheld or granted by this brotherhood based on any criteria it chooses — one exclusionary criterion includes being of Afrikan descent. Consequently, the White man's "free market" imprisons the Black man — when it does not enslave him. It is a system that by its very logic, structural dynamics, rules, and the ideology which justifies it, operates to maintain the supreme power of the White Brotherhood Collective which monopolizes it. The power of the White Brotherhood Collective is coterminous with the power of the market forces themselves, power which rests on conventionalized responses to its movements by the propertyless, their programmed acceptance of its legitimacy and ready obedience to its demands. This aspect of the capitalist market system leads Heilbroner to conclude:

that economists take for granted that the dispositions of the market will not be resisted by other means of material allocation, such as force. If men and women are unable to enter into successful market relations — whether as workers or consumers — it is assumed they will acquiesce in social defeat even though the enforcing agency is only the impersonal authority of the exchange mechanism itself. The assumption is amply borne out in reality: Only on the rarest and most desperate occasions do unsatisfied individuals attempt to disobey the market system by violating its dispensations. In the vast majority of cases, its provisioning arrangements are accepted without question; and the law, which silently stands behind the market, remains uninvoked — but not on that account unneeded.

The capacity of the market to secure acquiescence in a provisioning process in which the surplus automatically accrues to the property of only one class obviously makes the market mechanism an executive instrument for a particular social order, precisely as the dispositions of command or reciprocity make these systems the instruments for the reproduction of their respective social orders. Put as simply as possible, this is to say no more than that capitalism, like tribal societies, imperial kingdoms, feudalisms, or socialist states, are at bottom regimes of power and privilege, built on the granite of family ties, community norms, and above all, on a deeply inculcated "habit, of subordination."

The White Brotherhood Collective's uncontested monopoly of capital and the dominating power it undergirds rests largely on a would-be Black Brotherhood Collective's "habit of subordination", on its atomized individuality, and its vitiating ambivalence in regard to its collective identity and unwillingness to use its identity as a basis for acquiring capital and property, and deriving from them the power to challenge that held by its White counterpart. Every ethnic or immigrant group that has gained a significant foothold in the American market system and has gained substantial economic and political benefits for itself and its members has done so by making full, practical use of its ethnocultural resources. The problems which face all immigrant and subordinate groups in America who are concerned with achieving power and prosperity, or just good, decent wages, have been how to gain and maintain control over their ethnic resources, over access to their markets, and how to harness the power potential contained in their ethnicity to activate and direct it for achieving their social, economic and political goals. While these groups have made and are making use of their ethnicity to found brotherhood collectives as means of advancing their economic and political interests, Black Americans are discouraged from utilizing the same mechanism, most often by their well-meaning "friends", and by an uninformed, assimilationist, bourgeois leadership establishment.