RACE AND BLACK NATIONALISTIC HISTORICAL WRITING

RACE AND BLACK NATIONALISTIC HISTORICAL WRITING

Racism against African Americans has been a virulent undercurrent in American society for hundreds of years. In various forms, it insinuates itself into all aspects of African American life. But many people shy away from the debate on race and racism, especially across racial lines. American people’s behavior on the race and racism debate is as if they try to ignore the facts of racism, in order to make these facts no longer exist. books like The End of Racism, by Dinesh D’Souza (1995) and The End of Blackness, by Debra j. Dickerson (2004) have shown that people are more and more neutralizing the debate on race and racism on the one hand, and on the other, they are reducing the needs and desires of black people for an assertive collective agency to a system of thought that distracts and neutralizes agency formation. But the history of African Americans’ presence in America proves that the debate on race and racism can neither be emotional nor superficial. in history, the predominantly marginal living conditions of African Americans did not happen by hazard. They exist from much forethought, planning, and a historical process of exclusion by American society. According to Claud Anderson, European whites who came to America in 1607 were the first power group in America coming from a foreign land. They wielded power in a manner that is natural to any human race. They had the chance to start a new government in a country filled with resources and potential for wealth. They structured a government and a system of economic growth that subordinated and exploited the black race to secure their advantages and increase power.138 So, the history of slavery and the struggle for equality since then served as a base for the future of African American lives in America. They have always been a key capitalistic element in the American empowerment plans as a source of unpaid labor. But they are also the forgotten chapter of American history. Anderson posited that: In race matters, history matters. It is amazing then, that White authors can write millions of books to chronicle how the United States of America was established and developed, yet make no mention of Black people. When the accomplishments, contributions and struggles of a people are omitted from history, it is as if they did not exist. History has omitted and obscured Black people. They are like a  herd of black cows in a field on a moonless night. You can hear them so you know they must be there, but you cannot see them at all. 139 But the history of African American people in America goes beyond the boundaries of the American nation as Stephen G. Hall said. One of the pioneers of Black history is the Black Nationalist William Wells Brown. Wells Brown was a fugitive slave and a fierce abolitionist who fled to London to escape recapture after the fugitive slave law of 1850. In 1876, he authored a powerful book that accounted for the injustices Black people suffered during slavery and in the antebellum period. That book The Black Man, (1863) played a tremendous role in announcing to the whole world the contribution of men and women of African descent. That first book was a compilation of the narratives of prominent African American men’s and women’s lives in America. Later, as a contribution to the Civil War, The Negro in the American Rebellion (1867), dealt with the heroism of the Black soldiers. So Brown’s account of African American presence in America had always been positive and optimistic. Brown wanted to herald the coming of a new Negro in America with the freeing of the former enslaved Africans. He was less concerned with slavery and its legacy. Instead, he focused on the history of the race in new terms, and from the vantage point of a new race caught in the Civil War, a war that did not belong to African American and did not bring him any significant change in his life. Brown standpoint was aimed at documenting African Americans as subjects in the history of America. He wanted readers to think about the African American history positively. He also recognized the scantiness of the sources of Black history. He wanted the reader to appreciate the difficult task of writing African American history but at the same time to show that the difficulties of that task were related to limited sources.

ANTECEDENTS TO BLACK NATIONALISM 

Black consciousness was born out of the unrelieved suffering and the psychological trauma of Africans who were subjected to overt and covert racism in the United States for nearly four hundred years. There were excluded from the white world. Therefore, they only had superficial and necessary connection with the dominant culture. Not only their experience as an oppressed people gave an insight into their predicament vis-a-vis the white culture, but it also enabled that the “true facts of their lives” and the values of the white society cannot hang together.Their silent suffering , their unexpressed and stifled desires concealed under a mask, their suppressed and subdued reactions made them develop another mode of thinking, of being and of acting that was different from that of the white man. They then develop a different consciousness or different types of consciousness: one that tried to draw away from the white culture, and another one that was alienated from their own culture and was closer to the white man’s.148 They were excluded from the dominant society and culture they had always tried to identify themselves with as Americans. But not all African Americans wanted to integrate the larger American society. Some of them had always expressed their desires to live in a separate society or even to expatriate to Africa. That expression of separation was the early manifestation of Black Nationalism. Black Nationalism in a broader sense is an expression of black identity. It provides not only an important model for political and social change, but also for profound personal transformation. Black Nationalism is an African-centered critical consciousness to selfdetermination that can be retraced as early as the eighteenth and nineteenth century as embodied by early spiritual black leaders such as Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Harriet Tubman, and later by Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, Martin Robinson Delany, David Walker, Alexander Crummell and Samuel Cornish. It can also be defined as cultural assimilation for some reasons I will explain further. Black Nationalist thought manifests itself in the twentieth century in W.E.D Du Bois’ and Marcus Garvey’s literary production to liberate oppressed Black people in America, and their political commitment to a Pan-Africanist struggle advocating Black consciousness as a foundation for national liberation. But Marcus Garvey was more radical because he preached for a return of African Americans to the mother land Africa. Later in the 1960s the Nation of Islam, then in Malcolm X’s the Muslim Mosque, Inc., and Martin Luther King with the Civil Rights movement would echo the same Black consciousness with different freedom fighting strategies. Malcolm X’s Black Liberation ideology will be continued by the Black Power and the Black Panther Party movement and some cultural nationalists like LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Mawlana Ron Karenga and Molefi Kete Asante with the Afrocentric school of thought in the 1980s. Malcolm X’s radical revolutionary ideology and practice is almost always overlooked by history makers who put more emphasis on Malcolm’s attempt to reconcile with integrationists of the Civil Rights movement or by some authors like Manning Marable, who in a so-called attempt to humanize Malcolm X, engage in an Ad Hominem attack which is degrading and mostly rumor- like. Yet with the creation of Organization of the African American Unity (OAAU), Malcolm had continued a tradition a resistance and Black Nationalism inherited from earlier leaders of Black Nationalism mentioned above and the training he received from the Nation of Islam. As far as Martin Luther is concern, his civil disobedience strategy has been critiqued by many hard liners who think he was too conciliatory with oppressive American regime. But in the context of the South where Black people were historically denied any kind of freedom compared to the North where they could enjoy tokens of liberties, it would have been critical to talk about self-determination or use physical confrontation with ruthless police. The literature on the history of Black music in its relationship with Black Nationalist ideologies in America has shown that there has always been a musical genre created that endorsed the political struggle of African-American in their history in America. The adaptation and change of Black music according to circumstances suggests that its original mission was not only the expression of sorrow, despair, and hope of an oppression people. It also connoted that Black protest and resistance which started on the plantations is rooted in the music which was the only cultural form the oppressor could not take from the oppressed. Angela Davis said that: During the period of slavery, music alone escaped the devastating cultural genocide wrought by the slaveocracy on the lives of Africans who were involuntarily and forcibly transported from their homeland to the shores of North America. While Black people were denied the right to speak in their native tongues, to engage in their traditional religious practices, to build their traditional families 84 and communities, they were able to sing as they toiled in the fields and as they practiced their newfound Christian religion. Through the vehicle of song, they were able to preserve their ethnic heritage, even as they were generations removed from their original homeland and perhaps even unaware that their songs bore witness to and affirmed their African cultural roots. 149 The reason why Black people were allowed to used their music while working was that the masters wanted to allow enslaved African to sing, and occasionally dance and celebrate because they did not understand the culture of Black people and considered their music as not having any dangerous impact on the white community. In their narrow view of the world of the enslaved, they also consider letting Black people celebrate as part of their management of their bondsmen. Satmpp stated that: A former slave thought that the occasional festivities and holidays were an essential part of the master’s system of control. They kept the minds of the bondsmen “occupied with prospective pleasures within the limits of slavery… These holidays are inseparable from the human mind, when reduced to the condition of slavery.