by Francis A. Kornegay
“The task of African-American nationalism is to fashion a nation without a state within the fabric of a restructured American federalism.”
In an earlier BAR, executive-director Glen Ford lamented how African-Americans, reacting to America’s Hispanic ascendancy, have chosen to “sulk or rant in our long-standing impotence” as a “function of the death of our own movement, a generation and a half ago.” In so doing, he revisits the message of Crisis Katrina: the Black Freedom Movement is urgently “in need of resurrection.” The pregnant question arising, however, is what kind of movement will it take to address today’s complex challenges? For in the incipient Age of Obama, that emerging celebrity phenomenon of the newly resurgent Democrats and an African-American of Kenyan immigrant descent to boot, how would a prospectively resurgent black movement that never mastered the duality contradictions of the civil rights and Black Power eras, sort through the increasingly complicated political demography, let alone, ideological muddles of the first decade of the 21st century? Illinois Senator Barack Hussein Obama, in many ways, embodies these complexities confronting black America’s future. The fact that he is already being propelled into ‘frontrunner’ status in the Democratic party’s presidential sweep-stakes should add further urgency to these questions.
The media establishment’s interest in a potential Obama – or for that matter, a Hillary Clinton – presidency has more to do with a celebrity politics of novelty as a departure from what Newsweek called “white male Christians” whose leadership record has “not been stellar of late.” As a result, “voters might be in the mood to try something historic and possibly redemptive.” Perhaps, but apart from whether or not an Obama candidacy will actually fly, to what extent would an Obama presidential bid, let alone win, actually be in the interest of black America generally and a black movement revival in particular beyond its novelty for white voters and a media looking for “something historic and…redemptive”?
For Obama, in his ‘post-racial’ transcendancy, and the new political Hispanic wave, are but different aspects of the same American conundrum: one in which the unresolved biracial ‘black-white’ fault-lines of America’s socio-racial ethnic dynamics are being complicated by a new multicultural political demography of Hispanic, Asian, Arab, Caribbean and African immigrant pressures – not to mention Native Amerindian – while the urban bastions of the black electorate come under siege from the gentrified momentum of white Corporate America’s bid to reclaim the nation’s cities – the America of Gore Vidal’s one-party regime which he dubs “The Property Party” with its two Republican and Democratic right wings. Now, on to this stage emerges Obama: one foot in his Rift Valley roots of the east African cradleland of humankind, the other in the ‘heartland’ of what could well be a fading ‘American Dream.’
“To what extent would an Obama presidential bid, let alone win, actually be in the interest of black America?”
Will Obama’s complexity amid all the other multicultural contradictions surfacing on the political landscape pre-empt the resurgence of a new era of political blackness? Or will his political ambitions trigger some thoughtful stirrings of the African-American political imagination toward the fashioning of an optimum strategy for navigating the hybrid biracial-multicultural terrain of a still dominant but declining White America? Further, how will the brainstorming that these Rumsfeldian ‘known unknowns’ must surely generate among the progressive black intelligensia interact with a newly fluid American partisan political map; one whereby Republicans are allegedly threatened with becoming a declining neo-Dixiecratic regional faction of Bible Belt America’s old Confederacy, factoring in earlier observations about how Democratic and Republican factions appear to be trading places in intra-white class terms, and where new political prognostications are emerging to the effect that a new Democratic party majority can be welded in a manner that writes off the South?
Raising these questions merely forces one to revisit the reflections of Ron Daniels in the run-up to the 2004 presidential election on past strategic miscalculations of the Rainbow Coalition viz-a-viz the Democratic party; the fact that “within the Rainbow Coalition, I think our tactical mistake was to take all that energy inside the party” whereas “you’ve got to have pressure from outside to keep the inside honest” which, in his view prioritized the need for independent campaigns since “independent campaigns can put forward new issues and compel new voters.” Daniels was, in effect, simply updating the late Harold Cruse’s critique of an earlier African-American nationalist lack of political imagination during the late anti-poverty period; the fact that there was a nationalist tendency to complain about Federal power not delivering, while these self-same nationalists would “refuse to launch an independent political party of their own in order to deal more effectively with the Federal power.” The question now is whether or not the new fluidity emerging from the 2006 midterm election will generate renewed black political thinking and pro-activity on how this situation can be exploited to advance a progressive black agenda, factoring in the dovetailing independent campaign-cum-political party ruminations of Daniels and Cruse, 37 years apart.
Obama’s rise would appear to make such an African-American independent course all the more compelling given the ambivalence many among the progressive wing of the black political class are likely to have about his – let alone the Democratic party’s white establishment’s – commitment to a ‘black agenda’ within the context of what most assuredly, for Obama, has to be an all-American agenda dictated by his state-wide senatorial – and potentially national – electoral constituency. It is within this context that a recent New York Review of Books essay on Obama’s latest musings under the heading The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (Crown, 2006) turns up some intriguing ideas concerning Obama’s apparent search for avenues toward reconciling and transcending conflicts and contradictions in American life that may at least inadvertently hold implications for where a future resurrected Black Freedom Movement should be headed. Aptly titled “The Phenomenon” by Michael Tomasky (NYRB, November 30, 2006), the review is indicative of the extent to which Obama is beginning to be placed under the spotlight as he unveils his inner thoughts for presumed political consumption in positioning himself for a possible presidential run in 2008.Resurrecting the Black Movement in the "Age of Obama"
“There should exist points of convergence, though not total alignment between a prospective Obama presidential bid and a prospective black movement revival.”
What is particularly intriguing about Tomasky’s take on Obama, based on his reading of The Audacity Of Hope is his detection of a pattern of equivocation revealing “the author’s deep ambivalence about contemporary American politics” resulting in the following template in successive chapters: “here’s what the right believes about subject X, and here’s what the left believes; and while I basically side with the left, I think the right has a point or two that we should consider, and the left can sometimes get a little carried away.” Among other possible interpretations for Obama’s equivocations, Tomasky raises the prospect that Obama may not be a “political warrior by temperament” or even “as the word is commonly understood, a liberal.” Rather, Tomasky sees Obama as being “in many respects a civic republican” as in “a believer in civic virtue, and in the possibility of good outcomes negotiated in good faith.” Civic republicanism is a tendency that Tomasky suggests is “consonant with liberalism in many respects, but since the rise in the 1960s of a more aggressive rights-based liberalism, which sometimes places particular claims for social justice ahead of a larger universal good,” there exist a tension between the two. Obama, meanwhile comes across as a man “trapped inside political and ideological systems that are at once too small for him in their poverty of spirit and too large for him in their power to make everyone succumb to their rules” in which case, becoming liberated from this trap may require of Obama a platform larger than the Senate – the Presidency.
Apart from Obama’s political ambitions, the ambivalences Tomasky detects in the freshman senator may mirror a larger playing field of ambivalences embedded in the body-political psyche of black America, the assimilationist-separatist/nationalism contradiction among them; contradictions that will have to be reconciled in some viable form or fashion if a resurrected black movement is to become a reality, the reconciling of which will have to also take on board what are sure to be black political ambivalences about Obama and his agenda as well (an ambivalence already being played on by the media which never ceases to point to his – and Colin Powell’s – immigrant roots in making their rise exceptional compared to the rest of the black political class). Moreover, assuming that Obama is going to be a force to be reckoned with by any prospectively resurgent black movement, whether black progressives relish it or not, it would appear crucial for some sort of quid-pro-quo to be arrived at between such a movement and Obama and his allies, especially since he represents perhaps the leading persona of the left-wing of the Democratic faction of Gore Vidal’s ‘Property Party’ at this juncture. Therefore, presumably, there should exist points of convergence, though not total alignment between a prospective Obama presidential bid and a prospective black movement revival.
This potential may be incubating within what Tomasky sees as Obama’s articulation of an evolving civic republican tendency where the liberal political sensibility can be maneuvered in a direction that breaks the mould of America’s currently constraining “political and ideological systems” toward some new paradigm. If this is, in fact, where Obama may be headed – for this does not appear to be his consciously articulated ideo-philosophical statement of belief as much as Tomasky’s interpretation of his evolving thought – civic republicanism could, irrespective of where Obama is headed ideologically (which, indeed, may be nowhere given the non-ideological pragmatism of Democratic party ‘liberalism’), provide a new left-wing paradigm for a black movement in search of its own approach to reconciling and transcending the assimilation/integrationist-separatist/nationalism fault-lines of duality that bedevil the fashioning of a viable African-American political identity within 21st century America. The challenge is that civic republicanism or not, black politics will have to devise a coalitional strategy of leveraging checks and balances of power within the changing ethno-political demographics of the shifting American electoral landscape. This is where independent campaigning-cum-political party building could emerge as strategic instruments of black movement revival within a broader progressive American pro-democracy movement of renewal, inclusive of a new foreign policy and national security direction for the country.
“African-American nationalism will need to develop a foreign policy role informed by an inter-American as well as a pan-African internationalism embracing Africa and the Caribbean.”
Resurrecting the Black Movement in the "Age of Obama"From an African-American nationalist perspective which, according to Harold Cruse, must “activate a dynamism on all social fronts,” such an independent campaign-cum-political party politics would need to entail an expansive long-term dual strategy of (1) communal ‘nation-building’ within black America interacting with (2) promoting and participating in an all-American pro-democracy reformation – that (3) ultimately gives impetus to an inter-American ‘transnational democratic revolution’ beginning within the NAFTA community with a potential to resonate through social movement and progressive state linkages in the rest of the Americas where there is a need to support Amerindian-Mestizo ascendancy against Euro-Latin American white minority socio-racial reaction; a tendency that is already being reflected in incipient secession challenges in the Andean community. These linkages, in fact, are already in play via Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s ‘citizens diplomacy’ of providing heating oil to poor and working-class Americans at substantial discounts. It is for this reason that African-American nationalism, informing the core of a black movement revival within the context of developing alternatives to globalization, will need to develop a foreign policy role informed by an inter-American as well as a pan-African internationalism embracing Africa and the Caribbean. In short, the playing field for a black movement revival is transnational and inter-American, not simply confined within the boundaries of the continental United States.
Hence, the corollary necessity of a progressive national democratic coalition among African and Hispanic-Americans motivated by domestic issues of common concern interacting with the issue of immigration. These should provide points of connectivity between domestic and foreign policy in terms of America’s intra-hemispheric relations. For this reason, the stakes are especially high for the African-American political class and intelligentsia to avoid the racial separatist trap that Harold Cruse counseled against when he warned that “if the Negro leadership is hampered by deficient conceptualizing of the American group reality, then the Negro movement will defeat itself in the long run…by encouraging other unassimilated ethnic groups to turn against the Negro minority, in a pro-Anglo-Saxon Protestant ‘racial’ coalition.” Herein, in fact, may lay one of the potential assets of Obama for a black movement trying to resurrect itself and in need of arriving at some modus vivendi with strategic black political actors like Obama within the Democratic party political establishment while, at the same time reaching out to other allied or potentially compatible social forces.
“America needs a democracy movement outside the Democratic party with an allied but independent black partisan movement informed by its own strategic pragmatism.”
The trajectory of Obama’s politics will be nothing if not coalitional. Of necessity, it will mean cultivating the Hispanic electorate which xenophobic Republicanism has virtually handed to the Democratic party on a silver platter. The pro-democracy dimensions of an African-American politics of black movement revival should cultivate Hispanic and other minority group constituencies in tandem with Democratic party electoral constituency-building while gearing its outreach to a policy agenda that is independent of and to the left of the Democrats. For the Democratic party’s infirmities must be borne in mind as well as how the black movement was, for all practical purposes, co-opted and dismantled by this very party – the alternative right wing of Gore Vidal’s ‘Property Party’ one-party dictatorship. All the more reason why America needs a democracy movement outside the Democratic party with an allied but independent black partisan political – as opposed to charismatic protest activist (without necessarily ruling out a role for activism) – movement informed by its own strategic pragmatism that does not rule out selective engagement with the likes of Obama, while mindful of Obama’s and the Democrat’s limitations. And here, to briefly digress, it might be useful to revisit memory lane in summary fashion to outline what happened to the black movement apart from the multifaceted COINTELPRO repression of its most militant formations.
A Smothered Movement
The rapid emergence of a ‘black elected officials’ (BEOs) political elite during the waning days of civil rights/Black Power activism and urban militancy in the late 60’s paved the way for the momentum of the movement to mainstream itself within the Democratic party since most BEOs were Democrats (though it is possible that the seating of the Mississippi Freedom Democrats at the Democratic National Convention of 1964 foreshadowed this mainstreaming). Perhaps the cap-stone of this co-optation was the 1970 launching of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) at the national apex of the BEOs, backstopped by the very bipartisan establishment-linked Joint Centre for Political – now Political and Economic – Studies (JSPES) headed up by former foreign service officer, Eddie Williams. Although, in the run-up to the Caucus’ founding, such congressional members as the flamboyant Rev. Adam Clayton Powell of Harlem had given prominence to the Black Power activist elite and their pro-third world, anti-imperialist sentiments, the ideological trajectory of the Caucus, once founded, can only be described as one of non-ideological liberal pragmatism apart from Caucus founder, Charles C. Diggs’ anti-apartheid crusade which ultimately paved the way for congressional sanctions against South Africa in the mid-1980s. Otherwise, the increasingly Democratic party-aligned co-optive mainstreaming of the black movement inevitably robbed the movement of its autonomy as it had failed to build an autonomous institutionalised base of political and economic leverage outside the framework of the two-party – or two faction – system within the ‘Property Party’ dictatorship.
“The fate of the black movement was sealed within the smothering embrace of a Democratic party.”
One last gasp at black movement political independence was made in the 1972 bid to launch a National Black Political Assembly (NBPA) of BEOs and non-BEO activists which foundered in a shambolic welter of disunity, among other things, torpedoing in the process, Diggs’ initial bid to launch a broad-based, black-led – but not exclusively black – Africa lobby. By default, the fate of the black movement was sealed within the smothering embrace of a Democratic party which, especially post-McGovern’72, was reactively moving to the right. The Caucus and the national BEO network, more broadly-speaking, became the conveyor belt of Democratic party co-optive dominance as they provided a source of black leadership recruitment into the Carter and Clinton Administrations as highlighted in Rev. Andrew Young´s UN Ambassadorship while the National Urban League´s Ron Brown became Bill Clinton´s Commerce Secretary. Both Young and Brown rhetorically and politically foreshadowed the forerunner of neoliberal evangelism as part of the Democrats ideological transition to a post-New Deal/Great Society policy course, assiduously courting the corporate business community, first under Carter and then Clinton via the southern-based Democratic Leadership Council (DLC).
DLC neoliberalism emerged as a successor to the disintegration of the New Deal/Great Society, welfare state Liberal Consensus which became the bipartisan regime flowing from the Roosevelt era. Ironically, to begin with, it was black movement activism that aided in the shattering of this consensus, reinforced by the Democrats’ foreign policy crisis presented by the Vietnam war against the backdrop of white youth counter-cultural rebellion – all of which converged within the disastrous show-down within the Democratic party national convention in Chicago in 1968. The resulting comprehensive debacle triggered the ‘white backlash’ counter-revolution that has had the liberal establishment within the Democratic party and within the mainstream media on the back-foot ever since. Meanwhile, the demise of the Lyndon Johnson – and assassinated Kennedy – Democrats hastened the untimely end to what amounted to a ‘Second Reconstruction’ in Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty.’ (This summary leaves out many other important dimensions such as ethnic-organized crime-big city machine politics and COINTELPRO machinations, interacting with the Malcolm X, Kennedy and King assassinations and, beginning in the mid-1970’s, the selective decapitation of the most internationalist leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus.)
But it was not the GOP that closed the curtain on the Liberal Consensus as much as the Democrats; first under Carter, later under Clinton who formally ended welfare-state capitalism with his ‘triangulation’ reforms while pursuing neoliberal free trade strategies and aggressive commercial expansion globally, ushering in the current era of American-dominated neoliberal globalization. The late Ron Brown, as Clinton’s Commerce Secretary, was in the forefront of this movement until his untimely death in the Balkans. Andy Young foreshadowed Brown in his steadfast opposition to sanctions against South Africa and his general pro-corporate allegiance. By the same token, the Cold War liberalism that influenced Carter’s covert initiatives in Afghanistan against the Soviet intervention to prop up its pro-Moscow regime in 1979, paved the way for the ‘Reagan Doctrine’ of covert support for anti-communist insurgencies in Angola and Nicaragua as well as in Afghanistan; the Afghan intervention planting the seeds of the global Islamist ‘blow back’ currently being experienced.
The Bush II administration, with its quagmired interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, accompanied by the general militarist and diplomatic unilateral thrust of its foreign policy, has pushed to the extremes the interventionist liberalism presaged by Clinton’s Tony Lake-driven ‘democracy expansion,’ inclusive of free market neoliberal reforms in the developing world that became the ‘Washington Consensus’ against which much of the developing world is now rebelling. This is especially so with the leftist trend in Latin America, whereas in Africa, China’s emergence is introducing new political space for escape from the neoliberal straight-jacket. But for Africa to avoid becoming a long-term economic province of Asia in general, China, in particular, a strong diasporic pan-African link between Africa and a changing inter-American system is crucial. This is why African-American nationalism linked to a black movement revival must develop a strong internationalist and independent foreign policy thrust and break free of the narrowly African affairs pigeon-hole carved out for blacks by the Council on Foreign Relations-led foreign affairs establishment.
“African-American nationalism linked to a black movement revival must develop a strong internationalist and independent foreign policy thrust.”
Generally put, U.S. foreign policy is in deep crisis as Bush’s unilateralism erodes American global hegemony amid the emergence of a new multipolar post-Western world order driven by a Sino-Russian counter-hegemonic geopolitics of energy. Meanwhile, the absorption of the black movement into the Democratic party along with the erosion of internationalism within the Black Caucus appears to have muted, if not undermined, the Caucus’ one-time move toward a more independent, pro-developing world foreign policy posture – something that a revived black movement will have to revisit given the globalist interplay between domestic and foreign affairs; a challenge that will also confront the intellectual substance of a Barack Obama foreign policy. This raises several pointed questions.
How far does Barack’s Iraq anti-war position extend? To Iran as well? Will he buck the Democratic party’s subservience to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in fashioning an alternative Middle East policy and join former President Carter in likening Israel’s occupation of Palestine to apartheid which has brought the wrath of the Israel lobby down upon Carter – including a rebuke from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi? Will he be able to acknowledge the rise of the global South in a departure from the general American foreign policy establishment tendency to deny its existence or importance amid diplomatic and economic efforts at ‘divide and rule’ in the developing world? Or will his strong familial Kenyan connection enable him to revitalize U.S.-Africa policy while actively engaging the African Union on the implementation of its African diaspora initiative in a manner that opened up new options for pan-African engagement between African-Americans and the continent while bridging the divides that have opened up in the U.S. between African-Americans of slave descent and African-Americans of immigrant descent? Will Obama, with the support of powerful Caucus members like Charlie Rangel move for normalizing U.S.-Cuban relations in a bid to head off white Cuban-American racist ‘regime change’ in Havana? These are just a small sampling of questions that will challenge the conceptualizing capacities of an Obama presidential bid.
More importantly, they pose challenges to the capacity of a black movement revival to expand beyond chauvinistic parochialism in embracing an internationalism that links politically to the “other unassimilated ethnic groups” comprising the American group reality that Cruse counseled must be accommodated in any black movement calculus. For these reasons, which have everything to do with the globalizing linkage between domestic and foreign affairs, opportunistic xenophobic expressions of black anti-immigrant sentiment do not bode well for a politics of black movement resurrection. For the African-American nationalist challenge is to navigate a black politics of independence interactively with a broader progressive politics of interdependence in effecting a democratic renewal that resonates both domestically and internationally. In effect: to align America with the new geopolitics of multipolarity accompanying the emerging global South in which Africa’s hoped for renaissance (inclusive of the African diaspora) is embedded, and which mirrors America’s emerging non-white/non-Anglo demographics, while African-American nationalism simultaneously works towards fashioning a domestic politics of democratic multipolarity within a substantially restructured federalism. The objective should be to fashion a new federalism that rebalances the American system of checks and balances toward an equilibrium between rural/small-town small states and communities tending toward being predominantly white and monocultural and urban state/big city metropolitan regions where blacks are concentrated and that tend, demographically to reflect a more multicultural social terrain.
This could be conceptualized as an embedded African-American nationalist/pro-democracy paradigm wherein the black movement develops an interlinked duality of pursuing a ‘nationalist’-cum-communal ‘nation-building’ agenda within the context of a broader re-democratizing process. This movement must aim to radically restructure and reform the electoral system and the representational terms of seats allocated in the US Senate and/or the promoting of ‘home-rule’ autonomy for cities within states where out-state rural, small-town and suburban interests tend to override the interests of more diverse urban constituencies. Otherwise, blacks and “other unassimilated ethnic groups” are increasingly disenfranchised. This is the message of Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004! Only an independent black political party movement operating as a progressive power balancing agent of change at local, state and national/federal levels can effect such a dual strategy of promoting a black agenda interactively with a broader progressive program aimed at shifting the Democratic party’s centre of gravity more towards the left and away from being, in essence, simply a ‘Property Party’ alternative right-wing faction.
“The aim should be to institutionalize an independent black political infrastructure outside the two-party system with the aim of changing that system.”
In short, the aim must be to move America away from a two party (or ‘two in one’) dictatorship of corporate capital toward a genuinely multi-party system of democratic decentralization and multipolarity within a transformed federalism. But this is hardly an agenda that can be shouldered by one national black political or independent progressive party. From an African-American nationalist perspective, there would need to be some sort of national umbrella in the form of a ‘national congress’ or ‘assembly’ as an ideological, policy and programmatic point-of-reference for what, in reality should be a plurality of roughly aligned independent party-cum-political movements. These would necessarily reflect the diversity of black and “other minority” circumstances influenced by the local and regional political dynamics reflecting the diversity of the continental United States. Existing black political action committee initiatives could help kick-start a black-led independent political party-building movement process. The aim should be to institutionalize an independent black political infrastructure outside the two-party system with the aim of changing that system.
While the focus of priority is an unquestionable need to secure what may be an eroding urban base of black politics as power bases from which to pressure for change within the Democratic party and between it and the Republicans – without aligning with the latter – there is no need to start completely from scratch as there are precedents that could, potentially, be resurrected. Thus, starting in the South, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party might not only be resurrected as a progressive ‘third force’ in state politics, but could inspire similar state Freedom Democratic parties (or FDPs) in Alabama, Louisiana, Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and the border states. On the West Coast, the resurrection of the Peace and Freedom Party could be contemplated while revisiting a similar revival of the Freedom Now Party in Manhattan. As all-black or black-led local and/or regional independent parties, they could align themselves within an ‘African-American national assembly’ which, in turn, could be aligned within a broader North American ‘national progressive democratic front’ with transnational political potential within the NAFTA community.
A Common Program
To the extent that a common urban program for progressive political and economic renewal could be agreed upon, an urban black or black-led independent political party could unite a resurrected black movement in several cities. Such convergence could revolve around a program of consolidating an ideological and policy-programmatic power base for leveraging change within the factional dynamics of the two-party system and in terms of influencing policies at the Federal level as they impact on state and local government. The timing for a black movement revival taking shape around the fashioning of an independent, pluralistic partisan political strategy is particularly propitious at this time of flux in American politics. The midterm elections that rebounded to the benefit of the Democrats constituted a growing backlash caused by the gross misgovernance of a Bush administration that was well on its way to constructing a one-party Christian nationalist regime front for a wing of American corporate capitalism anchored in an intertwining of special interests joining the military-industrial-congressional complex and the oil and natural gas industries. This building backlash has given expression to diverse dissident local and regional policy initiatives in opposition to the ultra-conservative Republican hegemony in Washington such as the June 2005 movement of mayors from across the nation who unanimously agreed to join the Kyoto Protocol limiting climate-changing emissions at a national meeting in Seattle. Or Librarians from across the country who publicly refused to comply with the USA Patriot Act. Several states, led by California have begun setting their own automobile-emissions standards while similar initiatives embrace other areas of policy such as legalizing stem cell research.
“The Bush administration was well on its way to constructing a one-party Christian nationalist regime front for a wing of American corporate capitalism.”
With implications for Barack Obama’s unfolding politics of bridging divides and reconciling contradictions, this new dissident localism and its implications for African-American political autonomy tends to override the conventional left-right divide. “After all,” notes Rebecca Solnit (author of Hope in the Dark and Field Guide to Getting Lost) writing in Asia Times Online, “small government had long been (at least theoretically) a conservative mantra as was (at least theoretically) left-wing support for the most localized forms of ‘people power’,” which, taken together, is indicative of the scope of decentralized democratic cultural pluralism that an American democracy renewal movement informed by a renewed sense of civic republicanism could take in an era of what Solnit foresees as the “Latino-ization of the United States.” In this sense, there is a ‘double-edged sword’ quality to civic republicanism since, with regard to the race question, the Federal power at a national level has always been required to override local and regional autonomy in the South where white conservatism sought to uphold ‘state sovereignty’ in matters of race. Thus, Steven M. Levine, writing in The Old Time Review Politics on “A Republican Left” (January 2004), stresses that “the emancipation of black Americans has gone hand in hand with the strengthening of national power” at the expense of ‘intermediate structures’ of self-determination like the Jim Crow era Southern states.
These, as “decentralized centers of self-determination,” became “centers of exclusion and domination” espousing ‘states rights.’ This meant that “the only way to press the claims of black Americans (and other disenfranchised groups) has been to press for their rights as individuals” at the expense of – which Levine doesn’t mention – the rights of blacks as a group, thereby, in the process de-legitimizing the empowering American group dynamic as it concerns African-Americans compared to other ethnic groups. This dubious exceptionalism has consigned blacks to focusing on individualistic assimilationist integration at the expense of empowering group-based integration. Meanwhile, ultra-nationalistic tendencies such as the Garvey movement exacerbated this marginalizing of African-American nationalism by simplistically aligning with the white racist ultra-right – in this case of Ku Klux Klan – on the basis of an alleged equivalency between autonomous self-segregating racial autonomy and a racially imposed segregationist dictatorship. Hence, the continuing need for congressional renewal of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 even as the group implications of ‘the black vote’ is anything but individualistic. Rather, the black vote has become germane to the strategic importance of electoral group power-bases in determining the ideological, political, economic and foreign policy trajectory of American politics.
Levine’s answer to the right-leaning reactionary potentialities of civic republicanism is a ‘left civic republicanism’ that de-emphasizes the decentralization of centers of self-determination in favor of the “pluralization” of such centers in which “a thriving society should have many levels of political (and therefore economic) determination operating from the local to even the international.” This, then could, theoretically, become the point at which left and right become transcended by a democratic renewal informed by the need to radically reform the American electoral system and the terms of the federalist compact which should become the protracted struggle priority of a pluralistic black or black-led independent political party movement. Only by resolutely waging such an admittedly up-hill struggle, can the African-American group potential become more effectively aligned with the historic reality of the mobilization of ethnic power on its own behalf and on behalf of the political, economic and cultural transformation of the substance of American democracy.
“The black vote has become germane to the strategic importance of electoral group power-bases in determining the ideological, political, economic and foreign policy trajectory of American politics.”
As America becomes demographically less and less non-Hispanic white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, liberal establishment thinkers like Arthur Schlesinger and Samuel Huntington perceive such prospects threateningly as the multicultural ‘balkanization’ of America and/or its bilingualization in an erosion of the ‘White America’ essence of the U.S. But for African-Americans, the setting in train of a transformation based on the revival of the black movement on the terms argued for here, may yet result in the kind of political settlement of the biracial ‘race question’ that has long eluded black America, the so-called ‘Second Reconstruction’ civil rights decade of the Sixties notwithstanding. This finally brings us back to the conundrum of black-Hispanic relations and the question of African-American nationalist identity. It is not for nothing that the emphasis has been placed on ‘African-American’ as opposed to ‘black’ nationalism in as much as the author considers himself an African-American nationalist as opposed to a black nationalist although there is – and must be – an undeniable ‘blackness’ attached to African-American identity. That said, ‘black nationalism’ connotes a ‘race’ nationalism which ultimately founders on the scientific reality that race-cum-subspecies has no interpretive validity in defining human difference. In any case, Africa owns humanity’s global identity, testimony to the fact that science has become the biggest ally of Africans and peoples of African descent!
Biological differences within humanity are not of a magnitude warranting racial or sub-specific status since no one human population group has been isolated from other human populations long enough to assume such distinctions since the species underwent a genetic bottleneck some 70,000 years ago when modern humans nearly went extinct. Modern humans are so closely related genetically that the notion of humanity as a ‘family’ is hardly far-fetched. But science is one thing, political reality and the historical embedding of ‘race’ as a fault-line in human relations by Euro-centric white supremacy is another. Therefore, the socio-political definition of ‘races’ or more appropriately ‘socio-racial’ groups remains a reality that continues to have operational validity as a political instrument in black struggles for political and economic self-determination. However, it is the cultural formation of an ‘ethnic’ as opposed to a ‘racial’ identity that ultimately defines a people according to the historical contingencies that shape that people’s experience. Hence, the African-American nation comprises a socio-racial ethnic group identity.
“African-Americans are an Afro-Amerindian-Mestizo people reflecting an inter-American Afro-Amerindian-Mestizo historical dynamic.”
The very fact that many if not most African-Americans personify, in one variation or another irrespective of skin-deep phenotype, the triangular dialectic of encounter between West Africans, Europeans and Native Amerindians in the shaping of North America speaks volumes for the existence of a unique African-American ethnicity. Conceptually, this three dimensionality is also suggestive of an alternative paradigm for actually re-interpreting American – and inter-American – historical reality.
Seen in this context, ‘black history’ is a cul-de-sac. In effect, African-Americans are an Afro-Amerindian-Mestizo people reflecting an inter-American Afro-Amerindian-Mestizo historical dynamic of conflict and accommodation between European, Amerindian and African throughout the Western Hemisphere. This is what defines the inter-American, including the U.S., historical dialectic which, in fact, should inform a new approach to the historiography and political study of the Americas. This is also why the African-American struggle cannot be de-linked from the demographic ‘reconquista’ unfolding in the western U.S. or from the need to be pre-emptively vigilant less right-wing forces in the U.S. foolhardily try to re-impose a racist white hegemony on the majority black population of a post-Fidel Cuba.
African-American nationalism, therefore, is very much a legitimately integral part of the U.S. and inter-American future and therefore should serve as the center of gravity of any new attempt at resurrecting a black movement. It’s task is to fashion a nation without a state within the fabric of a restructured American federalism; one that affords black America sufficient space to develop our political and economic identity within a changing inter-American geopolitical-economic and cultural landscape. There are many aspects of such a movement that would converge with a wider radical democratic reform agenda which this resurrected black movement must agitate for in effecting the direction of the ‘two-party’ political mainstream. This terrain necessarily forms the arena in which the Barack Obamas and Harold Fords must find their footing and their future. African-American nationalism must, therefore, critically, selectively and strategically engage this broader terrain and shape its dynamics to our own needs and priorities. A complicated brief, but in essence the challenge of resurrecting a Black Freedom Movement alongside the unfolding ‘Obamamania.’
Francis Kornegay is a senior analyst for international affairs at the Centre for Policy Studies, Johannesburg, South Africa. He is a native of Detroit, Michigan, and served on the staffs of Rep. Charles C. Diggs (D-MI) and Washington, DC Delegate Walter Fauntroy (D). He can be contacted at [email protected]