Chapter 2: The Search for Truth - Conclusion Not Object but Subject: Black and Indigenous Peoples Indigeneity for far too many only comes through the racialized lens of Imperialism. Questions abound regarding the actuality of such realities. Is there a place called Africa and people called Africans? Who are these peoples and what is their place in the Americas? How can they exist? Even granting such an existence, we are left with the racialized frame of asking, as Du Bois did, "What is it like to be a problem?" Can we identify humanity, as Franz Fanon and Kwame Nkrumah in the ideas of W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey. Throughout the diaspora in places like the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East, Africa does not constitute a meaningful political or cultural unity. They are regions and continents but not cohesive entities. How can there be an African, a Latin American, an Asian, and a Middle Easterner, much less diasporas? These questions go to the
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In Search of the Truth One ever feels his twoness, —an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The History of the American Negro is the history of this strive-this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. ( Du Bois 1903/2009: 6-7 ) Our journey into the truth starts with the musings of W.E.B. Dubois as he struggled to explain the contradictory place Blacks found themselves. Being at once at odds with themselves a creature of two worlds. To be African and American, to be both object and subject. To exist in a space of “double-consciousness” of being and not being, of reacting and acting, of being th