Page 20 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

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Introduction
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long-term social changes. As the French Revolution shaped the nature of the nation-
state and as the emergence of various national movements spawned many nation-states,
the failure of various nation-states to transform themselves into multicultural democra-
tic states has facilitated the emergence of oppressed nationalism in the modern world
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system. Nationalism can be divided into oppressor and oppressed nationalism.While
oppressor nationalism maintains racial/ethnonational hierarchy, oppressed nationalism
seeks self-determination for dominated ethnonational groups. Oppressed nationalism is
a form of opposition politics that serves as an ideology of resistance against a racialized
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or an ethnicized state within either a country or an empire.
The present work has set out to demonstrate that the processes of colonialism and
racialization/ethnicization of the global division of labor have denied or limited the
access of African Americans and Oromos to cultural, political, and economic resources
within the US and Ethiopian states. Exploring the features of racial/ethnonational and
gender stratification,Wallerstein has observed that “capitalism developed an ideologi-
cal framework of oppressive humiliation which had never previously existed, and
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which today we call . . . racism.” The European colonial powers and their collabo-
rators created stratified multiracial or multiethnic societies in which they practiced
racial dictatorship, known as “Herrenvolk” democracies, in countries such as the
United States, South Africa, Brazil, and Australia. Gloria Marshall argues that “scien-
tific and lay concepts of race have served to support the economic and political priv-
ileges of ruling groups who regard themselves as superior by virtue of phylogenetic
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heritage rather than because of the accidents of cultural history.” Some academic and
other elites invented and theorized the issues of race and ethnicity presenting them as
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natural phenomena. As a result, race was seen as a biological phenomenon that de-
termined a hierarchy that could not be changed. 67
This discourse was promoted as “scientific,” although it ignored historical facts.
Rather than explaining the problem of discrepancies among “races”as a problem of the
last five hundred years associated with global capitalism, some Euro-American scholars
and their collaborators in peripheral areas of the world have attempted to present this
problem as a naturally given social process. Noting that several precapitalist empires,
such as the Egyptian, Roman, and Muslim empires, brought together various peoples
who had different cultures and physical characteristics without developing the ideol-
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ogy of racism, Winant comments, “The five-hundred years of domination of the
globe by Europe and its inheritors is the historical context in which racial concepts of
difference have attained their present status as fundamental components of human
identity and inequality.” 69 Pseudoscientific discourses were produced, for instance, in
American and Ethiopian studies, which promoted and maintained the privileges of
Euro-Americans and their collaborators. Such studies used themes such as civilization,
progress, and cultural universalism to justify racial/ethnonational stratification and thus
negate the history, culture, and humanity of the colonized peoples of the world.The
African American and Oromo peoples provide case studies in this latter category.
Negative views of subjugated people prevented knowledge elites within the colo-
nial system from perceiving the needs, aspirations, and humanity of those people.
Some social scientists took it upon themselves to promote the interests of the colo-
nizing “races” or ethnonational groups at the cost of the colonized peoples.Thomas
W. Heaney remarks that “with the writing of history, knowledge became power, or
rather an expression of power and a tool for maintaining it. History, and later, science,
were frequently used not merely to understand, but to legitimize historically shaped