This past July, Robert L. Allen passed away at 82. As an undergraduate student, Allen had a very large impact on me. I took three courses with Dr. Allen, and I still remember the enthusiastic way he would say my name: “Ah, Thomas!” My appreciation of Allen’s scholarship and influence has continually burgeoned as I have continued my studies over the past two decades. Each year, it becomes even clearer how much I have benefited from being his student and being exposed to his work.
Robert Allen was born in 1942, growing up in Atlanta, GA, next door to Morehouse College’s campus. As he often remarked, as a child, the form of segregation surrounding him was so pronounced that he knew only the Black world and had no conception of a white world beyond it. In his adolescence, this condition would be altered. Developments such as the murder and mutilation of Emmett Till (who was only a year older than Allen) would prompt him to begin to make sense of the broader world he inhabited, as well as the significance of Blackness within it.
Like many Black intellectuals, as a student, Allen was initially most interested in mathematics and natural sciences, and he would major in math and physics as an undergraduate at Morehouse. But during this period, he would also increasingly grapple with the significance of racism. Awarded a scholarship to study in Europe for a year, he quickly learned—as he would detail in an excellent oral history—that he was the target of racism abroad, often articulated not as anti-Black but as anti-Arab racism.
In his senior year, Malcolm X visited Morehouse, and Allen found his presentation extremely impressive and compelling. Upon graduating, Allen was offered a lucrative job with IBM, but something drew him instead to New York, where he briefly enrolled in a graduate program. Once in New York, he began frequently attending meetings organized by Malcolm X in the latter’s post-Nation of Islam era, and soon withdrew from Columbia and took a job as a social worker in Harlem. As it happened, Allen attended the meeting scheduled for the fateful date of February 21, 1965; Allen was thus in the room when Malcolm X was assassinated (for his recollection, see pp. 44–46 of the oral history linked above).
Realizing his passion for understanding the social world, Allen started graduate studies in Sociology at the New School for Social Research. On the anniversary of Malcolm X’s assassination, he also sought out a place to publish the account of the event he had written in the days that followed it. He found his venue in The National Guardian (later simply The Guardian); they were so impressed they offered him a job on the spot, covering the Civil Rights movement and the movement against the Vietnam War. He completed his M.A. and then moved to San Francisco, where he was tabbed with running the San Francisco office of The National Guardian and enrolled in the doctoral program in sociology at University of California San Francisco.
This work laid the foundation for Allen’s first book, Black Awakening in Capitalist America, first published in 1969. Black Awakening is a text that is at once a top-notch work of journalism on internal developments in American politics and economics and a cutting and cogent analysis that merits status as a classic of both political theory and African American Studies.
The analytic framework of Black Awakening is rooted in the notion of domestic colonialism as best characterizing the Black condition in the U.S. This notion can plausibly be traced at least as far back as Harry Haywood’s engagement with Vladimir Lenin’s discussion of oppressed nations, concluding that Black people in the U.S. constituted precisely that. In Black Awakening, Allen works through the accounts of domestic colonialism explicated in the 1960s by Harold Cruse, Malcolm X, and Jack O’Dell, affirming their viability as descriptions of African-American reality. However, while such a diagnosis suggests the prima facie desirability of Black nationalism as a source of African-American decolonization, Allen, throughout the work, documents how Black nationalism was emerging, instead, as a source of re-colonization through attention to the class politics of the Black bourgeoisie and white corporate elites.
Allen turned to Frantz Fanon’s classic account of the perilous dynamics faced by decolonization movements and their aftermath. He affirmed that Fanon’s diagnosis applied to what was occurring to Black America in the 1960s U.S. In short, Allen argued that in this period, the U.S. was undergoing a shift from domestic colonialism to domestic neocolonialism.
Allen’s argument rested on a class analysis of colonialism fortified by journalistic attention to many oft-neglected phenomena of the period. In Allen’s analysis, the imperatives of a colonizing society were ultimately those of its ruling classes, which in the context of U.S. domestic colonialism in the post-WWII era were the white corporate elite within the context of monopoly capitalism. As their class interest rested on reliable access to both laborers and consumers, as with their peer groups engaged in forms of external colonialism elsewhere, the revolt of the disaffected threatened not only the bottom line but the structural basis of this class’s hegemony.
To defuse such a threat would require the corporate elite to grant a measure of decolonization but without the full termination of colonization. This end could be achieved through an alliance with another class, the black bourgeoisie. This latter class generally lacked access to economic capital, and thus largely depended on perpetuating its alliances with white elites. (Though Allen does not cite E. Franklin Frazier on this particular point, his analysis fits with Frazier’s contention that the Black bourgeoisie constitutes a lumpenbourgeoisie outfitted with cultural capital but not significant productive economic capital.)
Allen argued that Black nationalism was not a phenomenon unique to the 1960s but was rather one that had always been part of the fabric of Black political responses to conditions in the U.S. What generally caused specific forms of Black nationalism to wax or wane was the relative standing of the Black bourgeoisie: its modest successes in advancing social standing would prompt it to try to dampen the nationalism of the Black masses, but when elites spurned the Black bourgeoisie, they would tend to unite with the Black masses and articulate a form of Black nationalism attenuated to the historical moment.
The 1960s, Allen showed, were a period in which the ambiguous position of the Black bourgeoisie and the revolt of the Black masses produced a particular eruption of Black nationalist consciousness. Malcolm X had offered an analysis of domestic colonialism that was deeply rooted in the consciousness of the Black masses, of Black workers and the Black lumpenproletariat. Yet this analysis was also taken up by intellectuals whose position, Allen argued, reflected the ambiguity of the Black bourgeoisie. The intellectuals of the Black Power movement were firmly opposed to prior generations of accommodationist Black middle classes. However, they vacillated as to whether Black Power would ultimately call for an anti-capitalist orientation. One consequence was that the notion of a “revolutionary” Black nationalism came to be deployed equivocally, sometimes denoting a commitment to social revolution as such but at other times representing something more akin to an aesthetic commitment that politically would be compatible with modest reformism.
Thus, Allen concluded that urban politics in the U.S. was being reshaped by dynamics that would serve the interests of a corporate elite seeking to further consolidate its economic domination. On the one hand, this would mean the intense militarization of urban police forces, often going hand in hand with coordinated national efforts to professionalize such forces, creating uniform national standards (particularly in the area of riot control) that would trump the U.S.’s tradition of local control. Alongside this, Allen prophetically noted, would be the trend toward privatization of public works and public resources, as these would constitute another area for the expansion of monopoly capitalism.
On the other hand, this would mean promoting a new class of Black leaders organically linked to the corporate elite through their funding and education. The classic neocolonial strategy would be manifest through promoting Black faces to positions of leadership in local and eventually even state governments, as well as by advancing the effort of incrementally diversifying American higher education. In short, then, domestic neocolonialism would take the shape of including a Black bourgeois class among the ranks of those dominating and exploiting Black people.
As with any neocolonialism, this modest concession would be taken to support asserted denials of the continued colonial condition. But as Allen’s journalism and predictive social scientific conclusions correctly noted, the institutions that Black people were now coming to inhabit were hollowed-out versions of their predecessors. Whereas the system of governance in the U.S. has traditionally been a federalist one, the core policies and orientations toward funding would now be shaped by networks of corporate elites. Local control would mean local liability for the excesses of police trained according to national standards and techniques and for the excesses of bait-and-switch privatization schemes; it wouldn’t, for the most part, mean self-determining policies about urban policing and services.
Indeed, despite the brief prominence of the notion of “internal colonialism” as a descriptive framework for racial oppression in the 1960s, the very fact of this framework’s general disappearance in the 1970s and beyond supports Allen’s thesis. The symposium celebrating Black Awakening’s fortieth anniversary, subsequently published in Volume 40 of The Black Scholar, amply demonstrates how the succeeding decades empirically substantiated Allen’s position while pushing American social theory further away from the analytic framework he had employed. (Allen’s reflections on writing the text in that symposium are alone worth the price of admission.) Hasty rejections of the internal colonialism framework in the 1970s were widely accepted in sociology, political science, and ethnic studies. As Michael Calderón-Zaks shows, such rejection rested on Allen’s text being universally neglected by critics of internal colonialism theory—despite, or possibly because, it had anticipated and refuted their criticisms.
In short, what could better illustrate Allen’s thesis that domestic colonialism was becoming domestic neocolonialism than the nation’s political and scholarly institutions universally rejecting the domestic colonialism thesis despite its ongoing sociological viability?
After the publication of Black Awakening, Allen began teaching in the brand-new African American Studies department at San Jose State University. A few years later, he moved on to Mills College in Oakland. During this period, Allen would collaborate with his then-wife Chude Pamela Allen—a groundbreaking feminist activist and educator—on a study of American social movements. The product was Reluctant Reformers: Racism and Social Reform Movements in the United States, first published in 1974. This tour-de-force study works through six movements in U.S. history that sought to produce a better society. Each, Allen and Allen show, ended up stopping short of more sweeping reform because of the peculiar dynamic interaction of racism and opportunism.
The six case studies in the text stand on their own as a classic of historical sociology. Simply put, anyone interested in the history of social movements in the U.S. should read Reluctant Reformers. That recommendation becomes even more urgent for one seeking to understand how such movements relate to racism.
What puts Reluctant Reformers in a class of its own, though, is its final chapter. The historical data in the text, were it presented by an author today, might be coupled simply with an appeal for the U.S. to reform its racist ways so that true reform could commence. Or, perhaps the same data could be presented as substantiating an Afropessimist thesis in which, ultimately, it is affirmed that it would be impossible for genuine reform to be achieved in the U.S. because its antiblack racism is ontologically necessary. Allen and Allen, though, ground their study in a rigorous philosophical conception of ideology that pushes them to go further. They contend that any ideology derives from material conditions of some sort. But they also note that ideological formations are sufficiently durable as to function outside of the material conditions of their origins. So, on the one hand, that means they view racism as an ideological formation irreducible to the machinations of a Eurocentric Marxian dialectic. But on the other hand, they see even the somewhat autonomous aspects of racist ideology as undergoing historical shifts in relation to changing material conditions.
The final chapter of Reluctant Reformers, thus, offers an analytic framework for making sense of the changing and dynamic way in which racist ideology interacted with social movements responding to particular material conditions. Allen and Allen characterize both racism as an ideological formation and capitalism as an ensemble of material conditions as emerging on the basis of European colonialism and the European slave trade in African peoples. Tracing the development of capitalism, they argue that the shifts to monopoly capitalism and the post-WWI rise of the importance of the “Western culture” as part and parcel of legitimizing colonial domination bring with them concordant changes in the articulation and manifestation of racist ideology. The shortcomings of the various social movements in U.S. history, then, were rooted not in a timeless racial prejudice nor in a permanent American ideology but rather in a historically dynamic framework of antiblack racism.
Robert Allen had also begun in this period to work for The Black Scholar, the pioneering and fiercely-independent journal of Black Studies. The journal was started by Robert Chrisman and Nathan Hare as a product of their being fired from San Francisco State University for supporting the student strike that would culminate in that institution’s pioneering Black Studies department. When Hare left in 1975, Allen became senior editor and, along with Chrisman, ran the journal for nearly half a century. In a world where most academic journals are funded by grants and home-bases in research universities, Allen and Chrisman were able to keep The Black Scholar independent, figuring out a model that allowed the journal to remain remarkably affordable to readers while publishing top-notch scholarly work that was made to be accessible across both disciplinary and class lines. (For an initial remembrance of Allen by The Black Scholar, see here. For a special issue of The Black Scholar dedicated to Black Philosophy, see here.)
In the 1970s, Allen also conducted extensive research on the Port Chicago disaster of 1944. Coming across references to the incident by chance—initially, during his antiwar activism in the 1960s—Allen put his studies in qualitative sociology to use by spending a year on buses across the U.S. seeking out survivors of the disaster. Allen interviewed many of the 258 African-American sailors who stopped work when ordered to continue munitions loading under the same conditions that had just killed over 200 African-American sailors weeks prior, in a context plainly shaped by the racism of the commanding officers. The incident culminated in the court martialing of the “Port Chicago 50” who refused to return to their deadly assignment and were eventually found guilty of mutiny. Despite its being headline news at the time and the NAACP having launched a campaign championing the accused, the incident had been wiped from the histories of World War II. Allen sought to rectify this, publishing an account in the Black Scholar in 1982 (as part of a special issue devoted to the topic) and later a book on the topic, originally appearing in 1989. (Additional resources can be found here.)
In the 1980s, while continuing the Port Chicago research and running The Black Scholar, Allen started and briefly ran a boutique publisher, Wild Trees Press, with Alice Walker. In the 1990s, with Herb Boyd, Allen and Herb Boyd co-edited Brotherman: The Odyssey of Black Men in America, a massive, 900 page anthology constituting one of the first books in the field now known as Black Male Studies.
Allen began to teach at UC Berkeley in the 1990s, where he would teach in both African American Studies and Ethnic Studies. Allen’s popular courses were a staple of undergraduate education in both disciplines in this period: I took three courses with him, and students I knew from other majors often told me they had taken one of his courses and learned immensely. One of the trademarks of his courses was ending each semester with several weeks of student presentations, as he wanted students to connect their activism and research interests to the material covered in the course—and also for students to learn from each other’s interests and about each other’s causes and organizations.
Allen retired from both teaching and The Black Scholar in 2012, though he continued his research and writing. In 2015, he published the culmination of another decades-long research interest, The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters: C.L. Dellums and the Fight for Fair Treatment and Civil Rights. Though the book only appeared much later, Allen sharing this research (and reflections on his research methodology) in his courses had a very formative influence on my understanding of the interrelation of race, work, and class, as well as philosophy of social science and philosophy of Black Studies.
Allen’s long and remarkable life included much else that, in the context of another remembrance, would bear mention or further elaboration. Here, I have reflected on what speaks most to the person and scholar I am today. But I hope that this brief account will facilitate engagement with Allen’s writings and the massive volume of work he has brought to publication, with confidence that such engagement will, in turn, prompt an appreciation deeper even than what I have been able to convey here.
Dr. Allen, we miss you (and will continue to miss you) dearly. Nonetheless, we are heartened by the knowledge that your guidance and scholarship will live on among those who take seriously the revolutionary challenge of building a genuinely humane world.
Thomas Meagher
Thomas Meagheris Assistant Professor of Philosophy atSam Houston State University. He specializes in Africana philosophy, philosophy of race, phenomenology, political theory, existentialism, and philosophy of science. Meagher earned his PhD at the University of Connecticut in 2018 and has previously been a Visiting Assistant Professor at Quinnipiac University, Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, and a W. E. B. Du Bois Visiting Scholar Fellow at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
