ABSTRACT
Blackness as an identity within American politics and society has always been imposed from without and constructed from within. African-American people are the product of historical forces and events which have given character and substance to their collective development and understanding of reality. Slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and ghettoization imposed structures of inequality and discrimination upon all black Americans. The institutional violence of race, which destroyed millions of black families over several centuries, was an integral aspect of an unjust social order. To be black was to be defined as unequal and inferior by the general standards of the white world. But blackness was also a symbol of hope, a means for asserting our cultural heritage and humanity. Under difficult conditions, African-Americans sought to overcome the burden of race, to redefine the boundaries of democracy, and thereby to reflect the multicultural spectrum of the total society. Thus black identity was inextricably bound to the values, traditions, and rituals of our people engaged in resistance and to the attainment of freedom.
