Page 35 - 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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struggled for separation or cultural autonomy as nationalists since all those who strug-
gled against American apartheid were nationalists. Some revolutionary nationalists also
demanded true equal citizenship rights and multicultural democracy that would em-
power African Americans.“Behind the revolutionary phrases of the black power mil-
itants,”August Meier and Elliot Rudwick comment,“is usually a profound desire for
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an equal share and an equal status in American society.” Almost all scholars who have
studied the Black struggle have not recognized the existence of different ways to be a
Black nationalist.Whether they openly declared themselves as nationalists or not, all
Blacks who fought for freedom, democracy, human dignity, and true equality are con-
sidered nationalists for the purpose of this analysis. Let us locate our discussion in a
broad cultural, historical, and theoretical context.
The Foundation of Black Peoplehood and Nationalism
Without locating the enslavement, exploitation, and oppression of enslaved Africans
and their struggle for emancipation in the context of the racialized capitalist world
system, we cannot understand adequately the chains of historical and sociological fac-
tors that facilitated the emergence and development of their African American peo-
plehood and nationalism. The European-dominated capitalist world economy
developed in Western Europe and then expanded to America and Africa and incor-
porated them throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this process of
incorporation,some enslaved Africans were brought to America as slaves “to mine pre-
cious metals and to develop systems of mass crop production,which provided raw ma-
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terials for European manufacturers.” According to Clovis E. Semmes,“The resulting
triangular relationship between Europe, Africa, and the Americas gave a tremendous
stimulus to Western capitalism and Europe’s industrial revolution, while dooming
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African peoples to underdevelopment and dependency.” Racial slavery turned these
Africans into commodities, robbed their humanity, and denied all forms of freedom
for almost two and a half centuries. 18
The collective identity of African American peoplehood developed as a response
to the processes of racial slavery and cultural repression. The social construction of
African American peoplehood did not take place in a vacuum, but occurred through
revitalizing African cultural resources that had been carried over from Africa to Amer-
ica and through borrowing cultural elements from Native Americans and Europeans.
The Africans who were captured by African and European slave hunters from differ-
ent African ethnonational groups and shipped to America did not have a common
culture, language, religion, and history when they arrived in North America as slaves.
Sterling Stuckey notes that “slave ships were the first real incubators of slave unity
across cultural lines, cruelly revealing irreducible links from one ethnic group to the
other, fostering resistance thousands of miles before the shores of the new land ap-
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peared on the horizon.“ The African American peoplehood was formed from the
melting pot of various African and other ethnonational groups in America. Despite
the fact that White slavers made various efforts to break existing social and cultural
bonds and to prevent the formation of solidarity among enslaved Africans, they could
not stop the development of the African American peoplehood and nationalism. En-
slaved Africans developed their peoplehood and cultural resistance despite the fact that
slavers and their institutions separated families and relatives and suppressed cultural
communications among them.