Page 12 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

Introduction
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intermediaries were given one-fourth of the expropriated Oromo lands, while three-
fourths of the lands became the property of the Ethiopian colonial settlers.As a result,
the majority of Oromos became landless tenants, sharecroppers, and poor.
What the American racialized capitalist system did to African Americans, Ethiopian
settler colonialism and global imperialism did to Oromos by introducing an entire
population to previously unknown slavery, semislavery, tenancy, sharecropping, and
poverty.The struggles of these two peoples to escape these conditions should best be
regarded as an integral part of anticolonial forces that emerged to challenge racial/eth-
nonational stratification in different parts of the modern world. However, these two
movements have not received adequate attention. As African American nationalism
developed to resist racial segregation and oppression,colonialism and racist democracy,
Oromo nationalism developed to overthrow Ethiopian settler colonialism and its set
of oppressive institutions in Oromia. Both African Americans and Oromos have been
struggling against the racist policies of the United States and Ethiopia, respectively. In-
directly, Oromos also struggle against U.S.-led global imperialism that sustains
Ethiopian colonialism.
The nature and role of the state in the capitalist world system have changed because
of the challenges from globalizing structures and actors, such as transnational elites,
multinational corporations, technological transformation, the revolution in interna-
tional communication and information, and forces of ethnonational diversity and mul-
ticulturalism. In this context, studying competing nationalisms in the state is necessary.
The state was invented as the capitalist world system evolved.With the further intensi-
fication of globalization and the movements of the oppressed ethnonational groups,the
character of the state and its role will be further changed. Hence, the kind of compar-
ative study presented here will increase our understanding of nationalism and the forces
that struggle to change the nature and the role of the state in the global context.
I come to this project with distinctive autobiographical and intellectual insights,
rooted in my forced exile from Ethiopian colonial domination,my participation in the
Oromo struggle, and my work as a critical Oromo/African scholar in the United
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States.As an Oromo who was born and raised in Oromia, and who has lived in the
United States since 1981, I have been fascinated by the similarities of world system -
imposed oppression and exploitation experienced by these two distinct peoples and
the parallels and similarities of the national struggles of these two ethnonations.As an
Oromo scholar who is seriously interested in Oromo and Ethiopian studies and the
Oromo national plight, I am familiar with the factors that affect the Oromo struggle.
While researching and teaching in the United States in the areas of the political econ-
omy of the modern world system, race and ethnicity, the sociology of development,
and multicultural studies, I began to develop a keen appreciation for the literature and
the history of the African American experience that influenced me to further study
the African American struggle and to compare it with that of the Oromo. My reason
for writing this comparative book is to show how the modern world system operates,
how African Americans and Oromos respond to it, how their struggles to achieve a
level of self-determination have been effective, and how to make these players in the
global system aware of each other so that they might share the insights that I have dis-
covered through experience, research, and teaching.
I also decided to write this book on the assumption that it is in the two peoples’
interest to critically understand their respective stakes in the struggle against U.S. im-
perialism and global racism and for revolutionary multicultural democracy; lack of