Black Nationalism and Black Empowerment in the Twenty-First Century: Decline, Recalibration, or Transformation? An Empirical and Critical Examination with Reference to Jamaica and the African Diaspora

Black nationalism and Black empowerment constitute two of the most consequential intellectual, political, cultural, and economic traditions to emerge from the historical experiences of African-descended peoples. From Marcus Garvey's advocacy of racial pride, economic independence, institutional ownership, and Pan-African solidarity to the civil-rights and Black Power struggles associated with Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and other liberation leaders, Black political thought has persistently sought to transform conditions produced by slavery, colonialism, racial capitalism, segregation, and White supremacy. The visibility of explicitly Black nationalist political leadership appears to have declined in several postcolonial and Western societies, generating questions about whether Black nationalism and Black empowerment have disappeared or merely undergone ideological and organisational transformation. Jamaica provides an especially important case because it is an overwhelmingly Black society that produced Marcus Garvey and later experienced the democratic-socialist politics of Michael Manley, yet contemporary socioeconomic policy is rarely articulated explicitly as a programme of Black economic empowerment. This paper argues that Black oppression cannot validly be described as uniformly greater today than under slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow, or formal racial disenfranchisement because substantial gains in legal citizenship, political representation, education, and civil rights have occurred. However, it contends that racial inequality has undergone a process of post-civil-rights racial restructuring, through which inequality increasingly operates through accumulated wealth, housing, labour markets, incarceration, education, colour hierarchies, institutional ownership, technology, and intergenerational transmission rather than exclusively through explicit racial laws. The current study therefore concludes that Black nationalism and Black empowerment are not dead but are being recalibrated through contemporary movements involving reparatory justice, Black entrepreneurship, community ownership, digital activism, Pan-African cooperation, technological sovereignty, and demands for substantive rather than merely representational equality.

Black nationalism, Black empowerment, Marcus Garvey, Michael Manley, Jamaica, colourism, racial inequality, racial wealth gap, Pan-Africanism, reparations, racial capitalism

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