TO CHANGE OUR WORLD FIRST UNDERSTAND OUR WORLD -

Many theorists, Black and white, products of the Western academy, are
afraid to acknowledge the validity of social laws in the self-creative
human activity through which human beings---especially Black
people---shape the historical universe, manifesting their human
potentialities, and in so doing shape themselves. The timid reduce
social laws to some loose, vague "statistical regularities," always
susceptible to the nullifying agency of some unpredictable free-willed
individual, usually pictured as a steely-eyed "great" white "founding
father" or statesman, or conceived as the sovereign will of the
democratic white majority. Philosophers who fight shy of social laws
have never once been able to demonstrate how in the concrete unfolding
of history this much-vaunted human freedom has cancelled or radically
altered the channeling framework, the limiting conditioning regularities
within which the great mass of humanity has gone about---and goes
about---making human history. Any more than conjure-slaves were able to
hoodoo white planters into ending slavery. It is easy to chatter on
about the "supremacy" of unpredictable human free will and its alleged
sway over social laws. It is not so easy to prove this in fact. The
reality of social laws is a basic premise of civilizational historicism.
It is this conforming to pattern that creates the potential for the
Black struggle at this juncture in history to turn possible super-racist
futures---some of them threatening our obliteration---into beneficial
actualities. An outcome that would bring empowerment and emancipation to
African Americans and other Black folk is now realizable only because
the historical imperative of the twenty-first century---an expression of
social law---is, at long last, the overthrow of white supremacy
globally.

Civilizational historicism is a system of thought, a philosophy, an
explanatory model with a specific purpose-a world view of use value to
Black folk.

Civilizational historicism posits race as the key law-bound
civilizational construct. It rejects any fetishized notion of race. The
notion of race endorsed here is one of a historical artefact. Ours is
not a biological concept. There is nothing essentialist about the
civilizational historicist outlook, neither phenotypally essential, nor
genetic, nor melanist. Race is a made-in-America potency which
determines how we African Americans are treated. Civilizational
historicism denies any speciation within humankind. The races of Man are
merely phenotypal varieties of one single Homo sapiens population, fully
modern Man---the only species of the genus Homo to survive several
million years of grinding history. Civilizational historicism thus
stands squarely against the polygenists---Black as well as white
ones---who, at least by implication, view the races as separate species.

The race which figures so prominently in the civilizational historicist
worldview is the kind of race DuBois wanted to conserve. It is the
non-genetic creation of history, and definitely not a phenomenon that
should instead be called "culture."

Our forebears were transformed into instruments to produce wealth and
power for white people on the basis of race. That form of race remains
with us today as the bottom line in the mistreatment of Black
folk---from the Jasper, Texas lynching to NYPD atrocities and slaughter
of innocent civilians, to racial profile stops and searches of Black
motorists on the New Jersey turnpike. Race is the single-most important
factor in the life of African Americans as a people.

Dr. C.J. Munford