Of course, black power has come to the fore before. The protests worked, up to a point. Forty years on the US civil rights movement, for example, can be sceptically seen as mere adaptation, incorporation into American capitalism – political/civil rights subordinate to the right to mall out one’s mind. The logic of expansion made the black community obvious candidates for assimilation. Jeff Chang points out in his history of hip-hop that from the early 70s the older generation looked down on what the new kids were doing, in merely fighting for the right to party. But this was part of much wider patterns in the spectacularisation of mediated society. And in any case the political force of any minority ethnic movement was systematically and deliberately watered down and made subject to other forces by those heroic state troopers sheltered on Capitol Hill or in city halls.

Globalisation has inadvertently created the network, roots and potential for a mass awakening. The black world – from London and New York to Kingston and on to Abuja, Accra and Johannesburg – has never been so much in sync, so alive to the same references, as it is now. The new righteousness of someone like Damian Marley is turning heads on everywhere. It is ‘they’ who can create the critical mass, pushing a political as well as cultural/anti-imperialist agenda, much more than mature white cultures whose bourgeois majorities are far too satisfied with their lot to push against the pricks.

Within aspects of black culture now there is so much to be admired – so much goes beyond the mere enjoyment as release and transcends the material circumstance. After 50+ years of popular music whose fundamental motor has been black-made, boundaries are still being pushed. Whether it’s in the remixed riffs and riddims or vocal versions it’s dancehall or grime, not techno or ‘rock’ which is doing the most to alter our perception of what can be populist and innovative. But Joe Bloggs won’t always get it and this is deliberate too – so much of the output is made as inaccessible and alien to Average White Man as possible. This is noteworthy – not everything should be so easily understood and not everyone should make slavish, easy-to-consume product. And where the society of the pornographic spectacle is ever more of a reality, often there is no shying away from salaciousness or excusing the lewdness that’s prevalent in almost any modern culture today. No apologies. (And only those who see things in the most literal way will not be able to see that grime is the new punk – that harshness of sound and approach is the real-deal portrayal. That way of spitting is the way it is – two lads on either side of the back of the bus, swapping the phone back and forth, lining up a beat to go over. Ok, there’s wheat and chaff but the most established emcees and producers have made major strides for UK rap-oriented music, in a way anyone would have thought impossible even five years ago. This is all the while why the industry pushes music that refers to stereotype, 50 Cent fantasy gangsters, lazy one-trick-pony producer moguls like Pharrell, Snoop-style porn freaks, playaz like So Solid who couldn’t tell the difference between the life and the artifact. This is lousy art based on self-reflection by subsidised unit shifters.

The quest for spirituality among the postmodern trash culture, though laudable, is merely the first stage of the flight, and the best protagonists regardless of race realise this.

In Africa it’s the original intentions of West-led globalisation that are holding mass movements back, such as the IMF’s peddling of assisted privatisation programmes and the twisted logic of import/export tariffs that make goods from the poorest parts of the world more expensive than the West’s protected offerings. Not to mention the propping up of dictator twats and the subsequent cronyism, the imperial legacy (we’re still a long way from seeing the back of that), the exploitation of materials and resources (Shell and co’s sterling work in Nigeria), etc. A mass black-led, pan-regional movement would go way beyond faux-national borders – the expanded frames of reference would be like the Arab world’s united umma (a necessary construct because of their own subjugation issues; though any mention of the ‘arab street’ is banned) or, as in South America, of pan-American solidarity – only natural when, for example, a second-or third-generation West Indian still has to justify himself by the patronising Black Briton term and there are all sorts of other implicit and sly denunciations of identity. Seeds of the black uprising, and therefore the world’s sorely-needed mass movement of change, will probably not come from LA or Paris but from places like Jamaica and Nigeria, where the stakes are much higher for the multitude. The culture’s connection with a further political awareness has always been there – now it is time to make that explicit…