Politics & Power Quote by Marcus Garvey

Garvey detonates a rhetorical bomb by borrowing the Klan label and then widening it until it engulfs respectable white America. The move is ugly by design: it’s less a confession than an accusation. By saying “call me a Klansman if you will,” he anticipates liberal outrage and flips it into a claim that white supremacy isn’t an extremist costume you put on, it’s the default setting of a society built to protect white advantage. “Potentially, every white man” isn’t a demographic statement so much as a diagnosis of a system: when Black people become “in competition” socially, economically, politically, white solidarity hardens, whether it wears a hood or a necktie.

The subtext is strategic and deeply cynical about interracial coalition. Garvey is arguing that white goodwill is conditional and collapses at the point where equality stops being abstract and starts threatening jobs, status, votes. That’s why the quote is packed with arenas of competition, not moral language. He’s describing racism as interest, not ignorance; power, not prejudice. “There is no use lying” is the closing sneer at polite rhetoric about progress.

Context matters: Garvey’s Black nationalist project, forged in the 1910s and 1920s amid lynching, segregation, race riots, and labor battles, leaned on a hard-headed reading of American politics. He even pursued tactical conversations with white supremacists, believing that both sides acknowledged separation as the real rule of the game. The intent here is to shock Black audiences out of faith in integrationist promises and into a politics of self-reliance and independent institutions. The cost is obvious: he normalizes the Klan as a metaphor and risks turning despair into doctrine.