Chapter 2 gangsta culture a piece of the action
Like their unenlightened white female counterparts who supported feminist movement until white males allowed them a piece of the action, a cut of the monetary power pie, unenlightened black men supported black liberation until they were offered their cut. After the slaughter of radical black men, the emotional devastation of soul murder and actual murder, many black people became cynical about freedom. They wanted something more tangible, a goal that could be attained. Historically, the goal black men had defined as needed for the restoration of their patriarchal masculinity was equal pay for equal work. Prior to the black power movement most black men wanted jobs—equal pay for equal work—which was the vision of basic civil rights. They wanted the economic power to provide for themselves and family. Black power militants were ruthless in their critique of capitalism. They unmasked the corruption in the labor force in America announcing for the black man that whether or not he had a legitimate job, one that would give him value in the eyes of white folks, no longer mattered since nothing about the capitalist system was legitimate. Within that system everybody was a thief, everybody a gangster, everybody on the take. This was the struggle Lorraine Hansberry had prophetically predicted would take place in her play A Raisin in the Sun. Critic Margaret Wilkerson explains in her introduction to the collected last plays of Hansberry that a conflict about the type of manhood black males would choose was waged in A Raisin in the Sun. Rather than using the insurance money for better
