Politics & Power Quote by Stokely Carmichael

“Black power” isn’t being offered here as a mysterious slogan in need of translation; it’s being treated as a Rorschach test. Carmichael’s line turns the usual demand for definition back on the demander: if you genuinely want clarity, you first have to stop smuggling in white panic as if it were neutral curiosity. The sentence is built like a trapdoor. “Can be clearly defined” sounds patient and reasonable, but the condition that follows exposes how often the request for explanation is really a request for reassurance.

The intent is tactical. In the late 1960s, “Black power” was routinely framed by mainstream media and politicians as code for violence, separatism, or anti-white revenge. Carmichael points to that interpretive reflex as the real obstacle. He’s not dodging the question; he’s naming the filter. The subtext is blunt: if you insist on reading Black self-determination through the anxieties of a society built on racial hierarchy, you’ll keep “misunderstanding” it in ways that conveniently justify repression.

There’s also a quieter psychological play. By calling those fears “white America’s,” Carmichael refuses to universalize them. Fear is not the baseline human response; it’s a historically produced one, born from the knowledge of what white power has done and the suspicion that the same rules might finally apply in reverse.

Context makes the line sharper: coming after the limits of civil-rights respectability politics, “Black power” signaled autonomy, community control, and dignity without permission. Carmichael’s sentence demands that the audience do the work of unlearning before they get the comfort of a definition.