Page 38 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

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The Development of African American Nationalism
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by borrowing the Spanish word meaning “black.” In this way, the color of their skin
became their collective name, although African American “religious and educational
organizations used the prefix African in their names, providing a sense of cultural in-
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tegrity and a link to their African heritage.” At the turn of the nineteenth century,
African Americans who worked as house servants as well as those who had European
and African heritages called themselves “colored” to distinguish themselves from those
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Africans who worked in the field. When the American Colonization Society inten-
sified its racist activities to get rid of free Africans by returning them to Africa, the
term colored was almost accepted by African American leaders to fight the plan of this
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society.
In this case, colored was used for a practical reason.These Africans used this
name to disassociate themselves from Africa so that they would not be considered
Africans and forced to immigrate to Africa.
Many names were designated to refer to this people in the nineteenth century in-
cluding Negro, Nigger, colored, brown,African, Ethiopian, Free African, Children of
Africa, Sons of Africa, people of color, Colored American, free people of color, Blacks,
Anglo African, Afric, African-American, Afro-American, Afmerican, Aframerican,
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Africo-American, and Afro-Saxon.
According to Joseph E. Holloway, the debate
over the name “has come to full circle, from African through brown, colored,Afro-Amer-
ican, Negro, and black back to African, the term originally used by blacks in America to
define themselves.The changes in terminology reflect many changes in attitude, from
strong African identification to nationalism, integration, and attempts at assimilation
back to cultural identification.This struggle to reshape and define blackness in both
the concrete and the abstract also reflects the renewed pride of black people in shap-
ing a future based on the concept of one African people living in the African dias-
pora.” 43 Stuckey suggests that “the crisis over names—like the larger identity
crisis—was symbolized by the mark branded into thousands of Africans at the start of
slavery.The branding iron proved two-edged,searing into the slave’s consciousness and
an awareness that his identity was under attack and triggering a recoil from the at-
tempt to depersonalize that lasted, for large numbers of slaves, throughout history....
We must understand the African background to appreciate the emotional force be-
hind the names controversy, the cultural loss and confusion it reflects, and the spiritual
pain of those engaged in the controversy.” 44
Despite the fact that “the experience of domination has shaped and continues to
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shape the development of African Americans,” the study of their issues should not be
limited to racial oppression and economic exploitation and must explore the cultural
process that dialectically connects social organizations with culture and affects institu-
tional development.There is no doubt that slavery and cultural destruction debilitated
African social organizations and dwarfed their institutional development for almost two
and a half centuries. Plantation owners and their institutions imposed an alien cultural
form on enslaved Africans and negated their cultures and histories.The efficient ex-
ploitation and social control of African labor required the destruction of African cul-
tures and languages through imposing European cultural hegemony. 46 Clovis E.
Semmes notes that cultural and historical “negation and distortion became central to
the process of domination in order to weaken the ability of the victimized people to
sustain a self-conscious and self-directed sense of origin, evolution, and purpose.The
need was to force the victim to relinquish internal control (independence) in order to
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accept external control (dependence).” Although Africans and Europeans both had
influenced the formation of American culture since they arrived in America at the same