Article Title
Black Internationalism and the End of White World Supremacy: An Analysis and Application of Rod Bush’s The End of White World Supremacy
Abstract
This essay authored by Bob Barber, titled “Black Internationalism and the End of White World Supremacy: An Analysis and Application of Rod Bush’s The End of White World Supremacy,” is a chapter in the anthology Rod Bush: Lessons from a Radical Black Scholar on Liberation, Love, and Justice, edited by Melanie E. L. Bush, and co-edited by Rose M. Brewer, Daniel Douglas, Loretta Chin, and Robert Newby (2019). Barber reviews Rod Bush’s The End of White World Supremacy: Black Internationalism and the Problem of the Color Line, published in 2009, which illustrates in detail that W. E. B. Du Bois’s maxim, “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” remains true in the twenty first century. The book is reviewed as a quilt, with many pieces assembled into a coherent pattern, the pieces here being Bush’s discussion of and dialogue with an array of Black and other intellectual and activists voices and tendencies, in their debates over time about what was the source of, and the solution to, the oppression of Blacks and other people of color, in the U.S. and around the world. Bush argues that under the world capitalist system that has arisen over the past 500 years, race and class cannot be separated. While focused on the role of Blacks in the U.S., Bush makes clear that the struggle to end white world supremacy and capitalism has been and will be led by a multi-dimensional leadership especially including women of color, and lays the foundation for understanding the emergence of that kind of multi-dimensional leadership in current social and political movements.