The More These Mongolian Eyes Stare at It, The More Black America Looks Like a Country Under Occupation
Black America is a nation. It technically fits almost all the prerequisites of those warranting nationhood. It has its own dialect, its own cuisine, its own religious traditions, its own literature, its own art and music, its own history with its own heroes and villains. And so much more. Half of all UN members have been recognized with far less of what Black America has. Black America is a nation, but it is not a country, for it has everything except a sovereign territory.
Black America in itself shows the ephemerality of nationhood, and how easily the smallest of foundations can transform into the greatest basis for independence. White America is Serbia, White America is Turkey, White America is Romania. Black America is Kosovo, it is Kurdistan, and it is Székelyföld. All Presidents of the United States thought they were leading a monocultural nation (or at least a monocultural mosaic in which all of its minorities left their cultural inscriptions on) akin to France, but the reality is more like Belgium.
The irony of this is that White America had sieged the developmental opportunities of Black people and refused them equality for so long that Black people had no choice but to create the sovereign ecosystem of sub-nationality that is “Black America” within the negative spaces of white culture and within the alcoves of white neglect, and this self-sustaining identity had no choice but to be based on gaining empowerment from rejecting the aesthetic illusions of white middle-class normativity, famously referred to as “acting white”. The race relations of the United States are incomplete without seeing it through this paradigm.
By nature of both Americas existing within a status quo where one is politically subsumed by the other, its cross-cultural interaction has always possessed an element of the larger and more empowered nation exploiting and leeching off of the smaller, disadvantaged one. For Black Americans, living in the United States has always been akin to living under military occupation. Where depoliticization is rampant, where they cannot ever help but feel their rights are nowhere as concrete as those of its occupiers. Where they must either subscribe to the hegemony of its occupiers and hope for the best or try to escape into that negative space of White American culture to accommodate for themselves a properly self-actualized living within a community it can identify as its own without preconditions. Black Americans have never had the privilege of taking public institutions for granted because those public institutions have been so adamant in Black exclusion for so long that the assumed reality and inevitability of exclusion has become as inseparable as folklore.
Tales like these can be found everywhere else on the planet. The countless Turkic, Mongolic and Uralic minorities of Russia ready to be accepted as “Russian” when they flourish without challenging the Slavo-supremacist structure, but thrown into the meat grinders of war and forced labor by the Slavo-supremacist state that conveniently saw their lives as more expendable than the true Rus. The Uyghurs and Tibetans that face the unending wrath of the Chinese state for never wholly assimilating into the country’s Han self-representation. All the while the communist government constantly slips out Freudian slips: on which land is “us”, and which land is “ours”.
These people are on paper equal citizens of the Russian and Chinese states, but their lives are lesser in worth than the “true” Russian and Chinese. Han birthrates falling is a national security threat, Uyghur birthrates falling is a convenience. A Buryat that survived Ukraine is a celebrated Russian war hero, a Buryat that died in Ukraine has simply died so the Slavs won’t have to. And just like that, Black excellence gets to be American excellence, but Black failure remains Black failure.
But Black people are different, because “decolonization” is not an option. The Chinese can let go of Tibet and Uyghuristan tomorrow and the problem more or less would solve itself. Russia would face more difficulties for while the Far Eastern and North Caucasian indigene could be let go, Slavic settlements have utterly besieged and surrounded the Idel-Uralians and the Finno-Ugrics. What can America let go? The Black South? (That would be based, actually)
Despite the attempts to erase the entirety of Native American people from the continent to make space for the settler state, eventually the white establishment of the United States would capitulate to letting Native Americans exist (in an annoyed sigh and a muttering under its breath that sounds like “Do we reaaaaally have to?”), with the pockets of reservations being at least in theory a recognition that in before European colonization, there indeed was a previous civilization that lived in these lands.
The same cannot be said for Black people. Black Americans were settled upon these lands alongside the White Americans. Their sub-nationality wasn’t created from a people and land occupied by an imperial power the same way it is for other minorities. Their sub-nationality isn’t even like that of Jewish and Romani people who’ve formed their sub-nationalities out of a long history of migration and settlement. They were forced to exist here and here in particular. And those who forced them to exist here soon came of the opinion that they shouldn’t exist here after all. And to escape those who now sought their disappearance, the Black Americans took to pursuing life and existence within the urban areas of America, eternally disparate, but common in shared pain. The United States has spent the earlier three-quarters of its existence doing its damndest to prevent Black people from integrating into its society, and now spends this last one quarter being mad at Black people for daring to have an identity outside of white assimilation. The gall.
And that in truth, is why the Black American nation is so difficult to rationalize for the ordinary person who perceives the world only on the terms of territorialized nation-states and the empires who occupy them. Because it is a nation whose foundations and territories are not based on rural heartlands as countries do, but within vast urban spaces. “The streets” are its rural countryside. “The culture” is its national community. Black America is probably the most famous case of the Austromarxist policy notion of National Personal Autonomy actually having a valid point.
And ultimately, in the end, the responsibility of making Black Americans trust the institutions of the United States falls not on Black people, but on the white-majority establishment. The century-long swelling of trauma and distrust that has become utterly woven into Black society has to be mended by the abuser, not the abused. If the abused ever had the capacity to fix it all by themselves, trust me when I say they would have done it a long time ago. The piss-poor attempts of White America in trying to obfuscate the problem of Black people existing on its soil inadvertently created the very community it struggles so much to integrate today. Two nations. Two Americas. Will there ever be true integration and true assimilation between these two nations, as peoples of separate nationalities but in equal standing within the same country?
For the Black American nation, there can be no true egalitarian future within the status quo. For majority Americans either have to accept the fact that it is not just the all-rounded vague descriptor of a “multicultural society”, but a deeply multinational society as well. It must consent to profoundly readjusting its institutions accordingly to this multinational nature. Or else, Black America simply has no choice but to fight for sovereignty from white dominance through Austromarxist suzerainty or full-on independence. Black people have asked themselves for the last 200 years whether gaining independence or gaining acceptance was easier and have yet to reach an answer.
What sort of “acceptance” are we talking about here, though? In this case, it would be the acceptance that the United States is and always have been an entity of sub-nationalities in the same vein of Belgium and Singapore and reconfigure itself accordingly. It is not some unprecedented utopia, for Belgium and Singapore are both functioning and prosperous countries that face the same issue of multiple overlapping ethnic/national identities that the United States does and have actually taken measures to handle it.
Belgium is a tri-national liberal democracy that along with demarcated territorial legislatures that represent the three regions of Flanders, Walloon and Brussels, has also established an auxiliary legislative infrastructure that ignores rigid territorialism to represent the selective sub-nationalities of the Batavophone, Francophone and Germanophone. While Belgium at least has regionalized approximations of its sub-nationalities that can tie them to specific lands, Singapore does not have that, thus making the Singaporean experience a bit closer to the American one.
Singapore’s tri-ethnic composition of Han Chinese, Indian and Malay peoples is not demarcated by territory at all, yet its government is able to accommodate for all three of Singapore’s sub-nationalities without having to undergo any sort of segregation or Bantustan shenanigans. The funny thing being that the effort to conciliate such differing identities and setting forth multiracialism and multiculturalism as inseparable from the identity of Singapore, was accomplished by Singapore’s conservatives. And ultimately, even if Singapore is anocratic, and even if Belgium is ethno-federalist, what they have is proof that flourishing economies driven by high-trust societies can still be achieved and maintained without having to force minority sub-nationalities into assimilation, but by embracing them. You actually can have your cake and eat it too.
That is the “acceptance” being talked about here. Not some all-fixing magic policy that has never been done before. But solutions that have been tried and tested since the middle of the 20th century. Have Singapore and Belgium achieved the ultimate multinational/multiethnic/multiracial utopia? No. Hell, no. Racism and sectarianism are forces sadly still at play in both their societies and politics to this day. But what they have is an exit out of racial dystopia. Towards if not perfect equality, but a stable consociationalism where all of its sub-nationalities feel politically enfranchised. And granting at least that, would go a long way towards mending the divide between these two nations of these United States.
It’s time to stop thinking of Black Americans as just merely a racial group that has failed to integrate unlike all the other minorities. As news media loves to indulge in how Koreans, Indians and now increasingly Nigerians have succeeded in America while Black Americans can’t. The truth is the cases of American police treating Black people better if they spoke in an African accent instead of in AAVE is no accident. In the Nigerian, the policeman sees an immigrant, and treats them as an immigrant, whether negatively or positively. But in the Black American, he sees a separatist.
“black” is race. “Black” is nationhood.
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Writer’s Note: As
very importantly pointed out regarding the section “The truth is the cases of American police treating Black people better if they spoke in an African accent instead of in AAVE is no accident.”:“Not necessarily true, as the sad cases of Abner Louima (a Haitian) and Amadou Diallo (from Guinea) attest to. Both of these notorious cases involved the NYPD and took place in the 1990s. A more recent case happened in Minneapolis when Mohammed Noor, a Somali-American cop, got convicted for an off-duty shooting: the very first Minnesota officer to be charged for such a crime. Those who convicted him didn’t give a shit that he was from Somalia; all they saw was a “N****” with a foreign accent.”
While it’s deftly pointed out that replacing Ebonics with an African accent when talking to a cop won’t save Black people from mistreatment, I believe the point still stands regarding the resentment held by the average White American towards Black people for daring to have an identity that isn’t just “meek Caucasified African”.
