The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto

After laying out the proposition, push, and pull, Blow takes a step back to assess and reconcile the ideas that permeate the national conversation when charting a path forward for Black people. To strengthen the value of his ideas, Blow makes a practical and moral argument against paths charted by Black intellectuals before him. Rooted in many of these theories is assimilation and assent to white systems of power, which Blow categorically objects to. Perhaps no better target for derision is the major progenitor of these theories: Booker T. Washington.

While admitting his admiration for Washington’s support for historically Black colleges and universities, Blow challenges Washington’s belief system by arguing it does nothing to actively challenge white supremacy. Blow likewise takes issue with other Black power intellectuals whom he felt sacrificed their core principles in consideration of white toleration or of ineffective goals, such as W. E. B. Du Bois’s elitist “Talented Tenth” theory (179). Blow also holds today’s leaders accountable, noting that President Barack Obama drew “a harmful false equivalency between Black people’s anger over centuries of anti-Black, white supremacist terror and white people’s anxiety in response to the relatively recent phenomena of economic stagnation and displacement, affirmative action and crime” (171).

Blow repeatedly mentions his trepidation about elitism in Black intellectualism throughout The Devil You Know. In Chapter 5, Blow expresses his frustration outright: Elitism is inherently exclusionary, and even a Black elite in a white supremacist society will be uncertain if it is outright opposed to great changes in the system (179). When Blow announced his intention to move back to the South, his privileged acquaintances challenged his decision and characterized it as a betrayal of his social class; for Blow, this was a stark example of ingrained racism in his own life (180). Blow reflects that the challenge is not to self-divide, even as intellectual camps have with Washington and Du Bois, King and Malcolm X. Rather, the struggle for Black empowerment is based upon a community effort.

In reflecting on the inherent drive within the Great Migration, Blow argues that there is no better time to act than now. Urgency and immediacy weigh heavily on his mind, due both to the exhaustion caused by an oppressive society and to historic inaction. By that measure, he criticizes the cancerous demurring that results from rooting one’s desire for racial equality in the good-heartedness of white people, which Martin Luther King Jr. called “passive white supremacy” (174). While changing demographics point to a supposed “browning” of America, and to an increasingly tolerant society in turn, Blow asserts that Black people cannot place their faith in nor wait for such a possibility (154).

Chapters 5 and 6 feature Blow’s recurring reflection on the benefits of a majority-Black community. Blow joyfully remembers being a “Coleman kid,” referring to the Gibson-Coleman school system he attended in Louisiana, which originated as a Black college established to educate the children of formerly enslaved people. This builds on his Chapter 4 reflection on choosing to attend Grambling State University because of his need to invest himself in his own community (145). He cautions against living by white standards and white systems, noting their deleterious effects on the Black community at large, where colorism is rampant: “To many, being part white was still better than being all Black, especially when considered through the white gaze” (166).

Community also offers support to Black people. When considering the trauma he and other Black people experience, Blow again reflects on Samaria Rice and her oscillating struggle with her son’s murder. Although Blow and Samaria shared similar upbringings, she was raised in a broken environment marked by poverty and violence. Blow accuses the Great Migration’s failures of shaping Samaria’s life and cites her story to stress the need for a stable Black community. He writes, “I wanted for Samaria what I’d had for myself: a sense of security and control, a community that nurtured and nourished you, a government beholden to you and responsive to you” (195).

Blow contrasts Samaria’s experience with the natural joy present in his friend Janean. Like Blow, Janean had a troubled upbringing yet enjoyed the support of a southern majority-Black community. While Janean remained in the South, Blow moved to the North, where he joined upper-class circles. While this afforded him more success and greater opportunities, Blow also had to contend with the system of white supremacy that undergirds these elite circles. Because of this, Blow senses that Janean has “always lived more life” because she “reaped [happiness] from an environment that honored her” (198-99).

Blow believes there is a “spiritual, restorative need for the collective Black family to reunite” (199). While Black people could create meaningful density anywhere, Blow believes that “there is so much Black blood soaked into the soil of the South that it belongs to us as much as anyone” (204). It is the fertile earth from which Black power, Black pride, and Black self-determination is attainable.