After decades of frustration with what Selma filmmaker Ava DuVernay calls “white savior” narratives, antiracist progressives appear to have settled on an ideologically more appealing alternative — what we might call the James Brown Theory of Black Liberation.

In 1969, after Brown had aligned himself politically with President Richard M. Nixon, he released the paean to black self-help, “I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door, I’ll Get It Myself).” In the nearly half-century since, especially during the last two decades of neoliberal hegemony, that self-help perspective has become the righteous antiracists’ standard for cultural criticism and political judgment.

Typically under the sign of acknowledging and respecting black people’s agency, it has become unacceptable to suggest that black Americans’ advances have depended significantly on anything other than, against all odds, the perseverance and will of black people themselves and a small cast of white allies.