Two things prevented the New Left from fleshing out its understanding of empire. First, New Leftists had a most difficult time understanding that America’s domination of other nations was central to the internal life of the United States— to its social, economic, and political structures. Empire, New Leftists consistently believed, happened outside the United States. Capitalism happened inside the United States. Attempts at drawing up a class portrait of the United States foundered again and again on this distinction. Second, while leading New Leftists themselves acknowledged the black movement’s significance in opening up a skepticism concerning the United States’ good intentions in the world, New Leftists almost wholly ignored that movement’s intellectual work on empire: the thinking and practice of W. E. B. DuBois, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and SNCC. To the extent that SDSers paid attention to Malcolm, or to the Panthers’ Eldridge Cleaver or Huey Newton, they invariably stressed the black movement’s “thuggery over its theory,” in Errol Henderson’s apt characterization.10 This failure undermined the New Left’s ability to get a clear picture of the United States or of the world. Discounting black intellectual work on empire cut off the New Left from ideas far older and more deeply rooted than its own thinking. Just as important, this failure to respect black intellectual work maintained an imperial division of labor: intellectual work here, for whites; practical work there, for black people.

— A Hard Rain Fell by David Barber (Page 9 - 10)