Page 33 - 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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movement. According to Anthony Smith, “Nationalism . . . involves four elements: a
vision, a culture, a solidarity and a policy. It answers to ideological, cultural, social and
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political aspirations and needs.” Since all forms of the Black struggle involved all these
issues that Smith mentions, the Civil Rights movement was an integral part of Black
nationalism.
The theoretical ideas and historical evidence presented in this chapter suggest a
need for reassessment of the African American movement. We cannot understand
comprehensively and critically the character of this movement without studying its
cultural and revolutionary forms, and how these forms were connected to the Civil
Rights movement, the movement that attempted to integrate African Americans into
a larger society politically, culturally, and economically.The legal success of the Civil
Rights movement had overshadowed the major issues that were raised by Black cul-
tural and revolutionary nationalists.This chapter explores the three forms of the Black
national struggle and demonstrates that the Civil Rights movement was an integral
part of Black nationalism, a part that cannot be understood adequately by itself. It also
reevaluates the features and impact of the Black movement in order to explain the
complex problems of the Black community in America.
Redefining African American Nationalism
As the enslavement of Africans occurred in global capitalism, their struggle for libera-
tion also developed as a part of the struggle of the enslaved and colonized ethnona-
tional groups in the racialized capitalist world system.Through colonial expansion and
racial slavery, global capitalism brought together various European,African, and indige-
nous population groups in a political unit that later became the United States.The Eu-
ropean colonialists racialized this political unit to commit genocide and perpetuate the
exploitation and oppression of the remaining indigenous Americans and enslaved
Africans by establishing racist structures and policies and by denying to these popula-
tion groups structural assimilation (access to political, economic, and cultural resources)
and civil equality. However, the American racist capitalist structures and institutions
could not totally crush the African American human spirit and cultural resistance.The
creation of a racial caste system (slavery and later segregation) and the denial of struc-
tural assimilation and equal citizenship rights to the African American people based on
the ideology of racism facilitated the emergence of Black nationalism.
Further, there were subjective and objective factors that dialectically interplayed
and contributed to the development of this nationalism. Although the enslaved
Africans were de-Africanized to a certain degree,isolated from their cultural roots,de-
prived of political and economic resources, and eventually dependent on White soci-
ety, they maintained their cultural resistance and developed their nationalism because
of social structural and conjunctural factors that dynamically interplayed with African
American human agency.As we will see, the transformation in American social struc-
tures due to domestic and global economic and political changes, urbanization, and
community formation, the development of indigenous institutions, and the emer-
gence of Black intellectuals who helped politicize collective grievances through pro-
ducing and disseminating social scientific and political knowledge facilitated the
development of Black nationalism.
The literature on the Black struggle does not explain adequately the features and
structures of the American racialized capitalist system and the different forms of re-