Page 141 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization
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This can be an important lesson for the Oromo movement. “One critical inter-
vening process which must occur to get from oppression to resistance,” S. M. Buech-
ler asserts,“is the social construction of a collective identity which unites a significant
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segment of the movement’s potential constituency.”
Like that of the African Amer-
icans, the Oromo collective identity has been constructed from past cultural memory,
political grievances, popular historical consciousness, and the hope for freedom and
democracy. Oromos also have different religions, various cultural and economic expe-
riences, class divisions, and different ideologies, as do African Americans.“If the social
construction of a collective identity is an ongoing, never-completed task in social
movements,” Buechler writes,“this is because movements are often composed of di-
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The African American
verse and heterogenous individuals and subgroups. . . .”
movement to a certain degree recognized the importance of collective identity and
diversity, which contributed to its legal success during the first half of the twentieth
century. However, the Oromo movement has only focused on collective identity and
paid less attention to movement diversity until now.
This comparative study demonstrates that in the capitalist world system, one of the
central contradictions is the racialization/ethnicization of state power.The racializa-
tion of state power undermines accountability and multicultural democracy. In the
United States and Ethiopia, African Americans and Oromos respectively have been
struggling to dismantle racial/ethnonational hierarchy, colonial domination, racial
hegemony,and those institutions that have been legitimated by the ideology of racism.
The movements of African American and Oromo peoples show the necessity of the
construction of a legitimate state that can be accountable and democratic and that re-
flects a multicultural society. The solution for racial/ethnonational problems in the
global system lies in recognizing cultural diversity, genuinely promoting self-determi-
nation, and expanding genuine multicultural democracy by eliminating the racializa-
tion/ethnicization of state power in the world.Although small steps have been taken
toward these goals in the United States mainly because of the Black movement, the
forces of reaction are currently active in destroying this important progress. As for
Ethiopia, because of the violent nature of the Ethiopian elites and their racialized state
and due to the alliance these forces have with the West, particularly the United States,
the Ethiopian empire is empowered to conduct more state terrorism, leading to crisis
and disintegration.