476

ENDNOTES

Chapter 1

(1) Interview with Juan:ta Jackson Mitchell by Andor Skotnes (session 2), March
19, 1987, (session 3), August 5,1987.

(2) Interview with Sigmund Diamond by Andor Skotnes (session 1), April 19, 1988.

(3) Barbara Jeanne Fields makes the term "middle ground" a central metaphor of
her exemplary study, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during
the Nineteenth Century (New Haven: 1985).

(4) In this study, the terms African American and Black American are used to refer
to Black people in the United States. In this context, Black is capitalized because it
refers to a people, an ethnicity and is not a simple physiological or "racial"
descriptor; it is the rough parallel of the terms German American or Irish
American (although Black Americans today have far stronger common life as a
people, and a far longer tradition zs> Americans, than German Americans or Irish
Americans). The term white, when referring to white people is, however, not
capitalized. White is a simple "racial" descriptor (and the notion of race in this
sense is entirely ideological) and indicates location on one side of the color bar.
The analog to white, in this regard, is not Black, but non-white, a term that, to my
knowledge, nobody capitalizes. Because racial/ethnic terminology has complex
theoretical and political ramifications, there is no unanimity on the use of this
terminology, even among like-minded people. A choice, however, has to be made,
and, in making my choice to capitalize Black, I point for further support to the fact
the Black freedom movement struggled well into the twentieth century to get the
dominant culture to capitalize the term Negro.

(5) Perry Anderson, "What Should History Teach Us?" presentation at The
Agenda for Radical History; A Colloquium Celebrating the Dedication of Eugene
Lang College" New School for Social Research, New York, October 30,1985.

(6) Fields, Middle Ground, xii-xiii.

(7) Immanuel Wallerstein's classical formulation of his "world systems analysis" is
found in his The Modem World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the
European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: 1974), chapter 7.

(8) Using terms such as "structural" or "structurally" today, in the context of the
ascendancy of post-modernist theory, inevitably raises the specter of mechanically-
conceived "structuralism," and courts misunderstanding. Nevertheless, from the
viewpoint of this study, structure does exist as Jean Piaget once defined it — as
fundamental systems of relationships in constant transformation according to