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This brings us finally to the character, or more accurately to the ideological, philo­sophical, and epistemological natures of the Black movement whose dialectical ma­trix we believe was capitalist slavery and imperialism. What events have been most consistently present in its phenomenology? Which social processes has it persistently reiterated? From which social processes is it demonstrably, that is, historically alien­ated? How does it relate to the political order? Which ideographic constructs and semantic codes has it most often exhibited? Where have its metaphysical boundaries been most certainly fixed? What are its epistemological systems? These are the ques­tions that we now must address, relieved from paradigmatic and categorical impera­tives that have so long plagued Western scholarship and whose insistence stemmed largely from their uncritical application and the unquestioned presumption that regardless of their historical origins they were universal. Having arrived at a historical moment, at a conjuncture, at an auspicious time where the verities of intellectual and analytical imitation are no longer as significant to the Black ideologue as they once were, where the now current but dominant traditions of Western thought have once again been revealed to have a casual rather than systemic or organic relationship to the myriad transformations of human development and history, when-and this is the central issue-the most formidable apparatus of physical domination and control have disintegrated in the face of the most unlikely oppositions (India, Algeria, An­gola, Vietnam, Guinea-Bissau, Iran, Mozambique), the total configuration of human experience requires other forms. 

Our first skp is relatively easy because it was always there, always indicated, in the histories of the radical tradition. Again and again, in the reports, casual memoirs, official accounts, eye-witness observations, and histories of each of the tradition'& episode&, from the sixteenth century to the events recounted in last week's or last month's journals, one note has occurred and recurred; the absence of mass violence.' Western observers, often candid in their amazement, have repeatedly remarked that in the vast series of encounters between Blacks and their oppressors, only some of which have beeu recounted above, Blacks have seldom employed the level of violence that they (the We.\terners) understood the situation required/ When we recall that in the New World of the nineteenth century the approximately 60 whites killed in the N,1t T11mcr insurrection was one of the largest totals for that century; when we recall that in the massive uprisings of slaves in 1831 in Jamaica--where 300,000 slaves lived under the domination of 30,000 whites--only 14 white casualties were reported, when in ncvolt after revolt we compare the massive and often indiscriminate reprisals of the civilized nrnste-r class ( the employment of terror) to the scale of violence of the slaves (and at present their descendants), at least one impression is that a very different and 􀌏hared order of things existed among these brutally violated people., \Vhy did Nat Turner, admittt'dly a violent man, spare poor whites? Why did Toussaint escort his absent "master's" family to safety before joining the sLwe revolution? Why was "no while person killed in a slave rebellion in colonial Virginia"!' VVhy would Edmund Morgan or Gerald Mu!lin argue that slave brutality was directly related to accultura­tion, "that the more slaves came to resemble the indigent freemen whom they dis­placed, the more dangerous they became"?" Every century it was the same. The people with Chikmbwe in 1915 force-marched European women and children lo the safety of colonist settlement.􀑀 And in that tradition, in the 19:,os, James ambivalently found Dessaline5 wanting for his transgressions of the tradition. Dessalinl"s was a military genius, yes. He was shrewd, rnnning, but he was also a man whose hatred had to be kept "in check.":· 
There was violence of course, bur in this tradition it most often "Was turned inward: the active against the passive, or as was the case of the Nongquase of 1856, the community aga.in&t its material aspect. This was not "savagery" as the gentlemen­soldiers of nineteenth- and twcntieth-centmy Eumpean armies arrogantly reported 

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