Page 159 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

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Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization
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allying with antiracist, anticolonial, antisexist, and anticlassist forces on local, regional,
and global levels.The movement of the oppressed people should not justify another
form of cruelty and inhumanity,and it must discredit all oppressive social relationships.
“To testify to a history of oppression is necessary,” Edward Said notes, “but it is not
sufficient unless that history is redirected into intellectual process and unversalized to
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include all sufferers.” Elitist policies that are not based on critical social scientific un-
derstanding of oppressed people cannot play emancipatory roles. Since African Amer-
ican and Oromo studies emerged as projects of liberation, they need to produce and
disseminate critical social scientific knowledge that can help to build society from the
bottom up by establishing a single standard for all humanity, challenging all forms of
oppressive ideologies and relationships, and promoting revolutionary multicultural
democracy.
Both African American and Oromo studies need to promote both the idea of
building a democracy of knowledge and the principle of revolutionary democratic
multiculturalism. Exploring how the struggle for revolutionary democratic multicul-
turalism attempts to solve the question of oppressed people from the bottom up in the
United States by linking questions of culture and identity to the structure of White
power and privilege, Marable says that radical democratic multiculturalists “emphasize
the parallels between the cultural experiences of America’s minority groups with op-
pressed people throughout the world. Discussions of culture are always linked to the
question of power, and the ways in which ideology and aesthetics are used to domi-
nate or control oppressed people.The goal of revolutionary democratic multicultural-
ists is not the liberal inclusion of representative numbers of blacks, Latinos and others
into the literary canon, media and cultural mainstream, but the radical democratic re-
structuring of the system of cultural and political power itself. It is to rethink the en-
tire history of this country, redefining its heritage in order to claim its future. It is to
redefine ‘America’ itself.” 55 Revolutionary democratic multiculturalism recognizes
that human cultural identities change with the dynamic interaction of large social
structures and human agency in the globalized world system;it fights for genuine egal-
itarian democracy by challenging the hypocrisy of bourgeois democracy.
Revolutionary democratic multiculturalism goes beyond nationalism. Revolu-
tionary and progressive elements of oppressed people and groups need to start to re-
think how to organize civil society so that groups cannot be subordinated to
dominant institutions, particularly political and religious institutions. As the discus-
sion in chapter III indicates, Oromos had constructed an egalitarian type of institu-
tional form prior to their colonization.Therefore, there is no reason why we cannot
build a humane and egalitarian democracy on a larger scale. Oromo political philos-
ophy rejected the idea of hierarchically organizing and exploiting people; it endorsed
the principle of popular decision making through public debate, full knowledge, con-
sensus, and active participation of Oromos and non-Oromos who were brought into
contact with Oromos through conflict,geography or economic interest.Oromos rec-
ognized the significance of popular or egalitarian democracy and the necessity of the
transfer of enriched cultural and political experiences from Oromo society to an-
other and from another society to that of the Oromo through reciprocal cultural bor-
rowing based on democracy, equality, and social justice.
As the Oromo movement can learn much from the African American movement,
particularly from its struggle for radical democratic multiculturalism, the African
American movement can learn from the experience of precolonial egalitarian Oromo