Page 143 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

•
Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization
134
a different stage. Because of the institutional violence of the Ethiopian state and the
support that this state secures from the imperial interstate system, the Oromo move-
ment faces a very difficult situation. Both of these movements have been progressive
and revolutionary in the march toward human liberation; they have been attempting
to dismantle colonialism, underdevelopment, and racial/ethnonational hierarchy and
to promote social justice, self-determination, and multicultural democracy.
Both the enslaving and colonizing groups and the enslaved and colonized groups
interacted within a single capitalist world system. In this process, Euro-Americans and
their descendants created and maintained institutions of racial dictatorship and racial
hegemony. In the same global process, Oromos were also enslaved and colonized by an
alliance of European and Ethiopian colonizing structures. As historical actors, these
globally linked oppressors have been producing and reproducing the racialized capital-
ist world system to maintain their group and class privileges, and the privileges of their
collaborators. But they do not have absolute and permanent control over the process
of societal reproduction.When the dominant Euro-Americans and their collaborators,
such as Ethiopian elites,consciously attempt to maintain their privileges,the colonized,
enslaved, and oppressed groups seek total liberation from racial dictatorship and hege-
mony.The African American and Oromo movements have been the products of these
processes.“For very long and very short time spans, and from very deep and shallow
perspectives,” Immanuel Wallerstein comments,“things seem to be determined, but for
the vast intermediate zone things seem to be a matter of free will.” 2
The collective identity of African American peoplehood that was formed through
racial domination and oppression, and a new set of political opportunities that built
on preexisting forms of social institution and organization in African American soci-
ety, facilitated the expansion and consolidation of the Black struggle in the mid-twen-
tieth century. African Americans have played decisive roles in challenging various
forms of racialized capitalist social structures and the racialized U.S. state, although
they have not yet reached their final destination of emancipation and development.
However, the contradiction between the core capitalism of the North and the pe-
ripheral capitalism of the South created conducive conditions during the 1860s to
give a final death blow to racial slavery.The resistance against slavery by slaves, freed
African Americans, and the abolitionists provided ideological and moral justification
for core capitalists and their leaders to outlaw slavery.The end of slavery was the first
step in African American history toward liberation.Without the end of this system, the
Black movement could not have developed.
In the decade between 1866 and 1877 during the First Reconstruction, the dom-
inant forces tried to reform racial relations, but after they established their hegemony
in the South they allowed the emergence of racial segregation.The Civil Rights Act
of 1866, which stated,“All persons within the jurisdiction of the United States shall
have the same right in every State and Territory, to make and enforce contracts, to sue,
be parties, give evidence, and to the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings
3
for the security of persons and property as is enjoyed by white citizens,” reflected
some aspects of the First Reconstruction. But with the emergence of Jim Crow laws,
this Civil Rights Act was abandoned and racial segregation was institutionalized with-
out the opposition of the U.S. government until the 1950s and 1960s, when the Black
movement challenged it. Because of the structural limitation that the federal govern-
ment and Southern states imposed, the abolition of racial slavery did not bring full
freedom for the Black people.They were neither slaves nor free. However, the elimi-