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 heart of what it means to exist, to have agency, and to have a reality that is not imposed but composed by the individual or group.  

Our journey starts with a statement by Anna Julia Cooper, 21 years after the end of the Civil War and almost two centuries ago, declaring that Black people's plight, reality, and future depended upon the Black woman's success. For too long, the Church, clergy, politicians, educators, and even the Black man thwarted these efforts by placing constraints upon the Black woman's hopes, dreams, and opportunities. Cooper's "Voice" provides a clarion call not to look back with inflated conceit but to glean wisdom from experiences, capture the spiritual essence of our being, and look to the future with hope and trust. This Voice shrugged condescension and victimhood yet shouted determination and "the radical amelioration," liberation, and regeneration of the Black woman and community. Cooper ends with hope, believing Black women shall arrive at the "promised land." (Cooper 1892)

White America responded to the emergence of this new Black with lynchings and race riots.  Again, targeted were Blacks, particularly males, who dared to assert their freedom.  Ida B. Wells, taking up the challenge, led the anti-lunching campaign in the United States. 

Wells rejected the negative image of the rapist and refused to be complacent.  One of the first to challenge segregated streetcars, she refused to stay in her place.  It was she who argued that the South was dependent upon Afro-American labor.  Lynchings and segregation were means of keeping the Blacks in a servile position.  She acknowledged that Jim Crow legalized racism and legitimated white racial hierarchies.  Wells, anticipating Malcolm X and Carmichael, advised “that a Winchester rifle (sould) have a place of honor in every Black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.”  (Wells 1892/2005)

Following in her footsteps, Du Bois questioned the "problematization of being Black".  A problem complicated by prejudice, lawlessness, and ruthless competition. What is it like to be a Black and an American, two unreconciled selves, two paradoxes, two ends of a spectrum — in one body? Forty years after the promise of emancipation, freedom remained elusive to the freedman. Constantly vilified and condemned, overpoliced and undervalued, within just one generation, Blacks crafted institutions that provided escapes from the prison of poverty, mediocrity, and complacency. Yet, the Soul of Black folks, the spiritual strivings of a people, was made manifest as they went from enslaved to free, from forced laborers to skilled artisans and farmers. They created thousands of businesspeople, clergy, teachers, and doctors. (Du Bois 1903/2009) 

 

Du Bois's assertion that a specific spirituality fundamentally characterizes Blacks and other distinct groups.  Both historical and social factors causally construct this spirituality.  These historical and social factors include laws, religions, habits of thought, and their conscious strivings that produce a cohesive, spiritually distinct subjective identity.  (Du Bois 1897) The community and their humanity guided these stories based on economic, social, political, and educational freedom.  The spiritual strivings, therefore, constituted a "self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect."  Thus emerged the "revelation of his power, of his mission," A truer, better self.  (Du Bois 1903\2009: 8)

It is not coincidental; Kendi (2016) points out that Du Bois chose to call his book The Souls of Black Folk.  The one thing that distinguishes humans from beasts is their souls. Being Black, in America was often objectified and vilified by racist structures.  Such an object only reacts, but Du Bois asserted the active agency of Blacks as he called for "The Talented Tenth" to forge a new path and create a "New Negro”.  The Soul of Black Folks is captured in their gift to America-"the spiritual heritage of the nation" found in the spirituals and folk songs that emerged from slavery. 

Franz Fanon would describe this as a non-being, for the racialized, anti-Black World does not recognize it.  But rather than a non-being, this is a being that reflects the subjective "yes that vibrates to cosmic harmonies (1952 {2008: 2}). This existential reality is the cumulative essence of rejecting colonial objectivity, as Blacks in the Caribbean purposefully created Creole and pidgin.  The racist structure would characterize these dictions as imperfect and conclude that the Caribbean Blacks were inferior.  The creation of these imperfections was indeed a deliberate attempt to assert one's subjective control of their objective realities.  Talking properly alienates and assigns a fundamental pathology to the speaker.  We might today call this code-switching, where in one setting, the Black speaker demonstrates their ability to articulate perfect "English," yet among one's peers to perform "Black Speak." (See for, e.g., Luu 2020)  

The adoption of "Black Speak" parallels the civil rights and post-colonial discourses that challenged the imperial racial state. These voices were more than a reaction but also an act of creative agency as the struggle to define and reimagine the subjective realities of Blacks, Africans, and other indigenous peoples. 

Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey was the first major thinker on a massive scale to advocate for Black dignity, destinies, and pride. In the 1920s, living in Harlem, he unapologetically called for Black nationalism when Jim Crow, white supremacy, and segregation were the law of the land. It was a period when scientists and politicians deemed Blacks in the U.S. and Europe culturally, biologically, and socially inferior. (Abdelfatah 2021) Garvey rejected the notion that "A Black skin" was "a badge of shame, but rather a glorious symbol of national greatness." (Cronon 1955 quoted by Abdelfattah ibid) This journey begins by first acknowledging that "A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots." (Garvey)  Only by reclaiming this past, these roots, could the Africans restore their dignity stolen by slavery and colonization. Garvey launched a United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) between 1916 and 1927. This global movement, encompassing 40 countries and nearly 1200 divisions in Africa, the Caribbean, Australia, and the United States, produced an international organization of Black resistance, self-determination, and affirmation. (Lewis 2009)  The only way for Blacks to defeat universal prejudice and subjugation was to construct their systems of government, scholarship, and communities. Only then could they recover their identities and become free. (Garvey 1923/2009)  

Garvey produced a unique voice that did not embrace oppression but spoke of liberation, did not embrace exploitation but articulated empowerment, and did not reflect objectification but the subjective articulation of Africa and the Africans. With these tools, the destructive forces of racialized ghettos and states were engaged. And thus, Garvey became "the greatest and most successful organizer for the Pan-African cause." He did this by "psychologically rehabilitating. . . the colour 'Black,' instilling an awareness in black people of their African roots and creating a real feeling of international solidarity among Africans and persons of African Stock. (Adewale 2023)

In Europe, an alternative fork emerged in the 1940s, originally known as the negritude movement. This movement challenged the notion that Africa was a figment of European imagination, with no agency or historical Voice before its discovery by Western Imperialism. This movement, centering around French-speaking Black intellectuals, began to show that Africa had a history and that civilization, mathematics, arts, and sciences derive from its people. (Diop 1954: 253) Soon, Black voices in the U.S. began to make similar proclamations.   

These ideas, Du Bois, Fanon, Garvey, and beyond, produced modern civil rights and post-colonial movements.     The most prominent voices of these movements were such activists as King, Stokely Carmichael, and Malcolm X in the U.S.  Often, we ignore the other voices of the Americas, but who can forget Che Guevara or on the Continent, the post-colonial voice of Kwame Nkrumah. 

The beginning of the Modern Civil Rights movement is typically situated with the 1954 Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which ended school segregation.  Thurgood Marshall, chief counsel for the case, cited Murray’s 1951 book, “States’ Laws on Race and Color,” as the “bible” of the civil rights movement.  (Ahmed 2006: 1510-1511) The case featured the work of Pauline “Pauli” Murray, yet her work was not acknowledged until decades later.  Many point also to the 1963 March on Washington as seminal, yet, as pointed out by Pauli Murray, it had one fatal flaw: no women were featured in any of the major speeches or part of the delegation that met with the President.  She wrote:

 

I have been increasingly perturbed over the blatant disparity between the major role which Negro women have played and are playing in the crucial grassroots levels of our struggle and the minor role of leadership they have been assigned in the national policy-making decisions.  It is indefensible to call a national march on Washington and send out a call which contains the name of not a single woman leader. (quoted in Cole and Guy-Sheftall 2002: 89)

One cannot talk about the Modern Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. without talking about Martin Luther King, Jr. King's focus was on changing the structure of racism. Racial equality was not the job of Blacks but of Whites. These changes would not come "merely from court decisions nor from the fountains of political oratory…White America must recognize that justice for Black people cannot be achieved without radical changes in the structure of our society. And so, while much of King's activity was in organizing the Black community, much of it was directed at getting Whites to own the system they had created. As observed by Joe Feagin: "…Whites created slavery, Jim Crow segregation and contemporary racial discrimination" (Feagin quoted by Henton 2022) But while King embraced America and pushed for changes to accommodate and ultimately free the "Negro”. Others pushed for rejecting that America and called for creating a new identifying label -Black.

Although Martin Luther King, Jr. is viewed as the architect of the modern Civil Rights Movement, he was part of a larger coalition of activists. One of the central features of this "Movement" was the realization of what Stokely Carmichael would declare as "Black Power." In this regard, Carmichael remarked: "When you talk about black power, you talk about bringing this country to its knees any time it messes with black men . . . any white man in this country knows about power. He knows what white power is and ought to know what black power is". (Negro Leaders on "Meet the Press") Carmichael rejected American institutions, nonviolence, and the accommodationist perspective of King. He appealed to Blacks to engage in an armed struggle as the only means of Black liberation. 

"Black Power" was used by earlier race leaders such as Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, and Adam Clayton Powel. Their use of the term asserted the agency and reality of being unique in America. Therefore, they rejected assimilation (where Blacks were encouraged to blend into White America) and amalgamation (Blacks somehow coexisted within a White defined reality). For Carmichael and other Black Power advocates, the term was an attempt to control the narrative, instill pride, and redefine Black identity. (Carmichael and Hamilton, 1967/1992)

Over time, and the criticism of major civil rights leaders such as King and Whitney M. Young (National Urban League), advocates began to assert a transformed Black power that emphasized nonviolence, nonrevolutionary participatory democracy, self-empowerment, self-determination, pride, and control over one's destiny and community. (Martin 1991)  

Malcolm X, following in the path of Garvey and representing his mentor Elijah Muhammad, asserted that Africans, Africa, and their history had been distorted by white "historians . . . (who) ignored the African roots of Western civilization." (Malcolm X quoted in Martin 1991)  With the founding of the Organization of Afro-American Unity in 1984, Malcolm X pushed for the elimination of racism and justice. 

As the fight for freedom, justice, and empowerment was being waged in the U.S., it was part of a much larger set of decolonial movements across the African continent. Africans were fighting to redefine their identities, independence, and paths forward. The struggles were interconnected as Africans worked to embrace each other by recognizing their shared histories of racial exploitation, oppression, and subjugation. In the process, the African diaspora shared a bond that transcended geography, language, and politics. 

The Voice of Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah loudly proclaimed the necessity to counteract the colonial legacies of illiteracy, ignorance, and self-hatred embodied in the ethnically based political and communal conflicts that seem to define African states. Nkrumah advocated a cultural revolution that would disrupt the Eurocentric perspectives by articulating an African ontological reconstruction of the political, economic, and cultural agenda. 

At the core of Nkrumah's ontological reconstruction was a rejection of the dehumanized cultural personality of the colonized Africans. Nkrumah (1963) observed that African epistemologies, cultures, cosmologies, aesthetics, and realities were the first targets of colonial Imperialism.   

Che Guevera, in 1961, articulated the global struggle of the Africans.  He asserted that all were in solidarity against racial imperialism.  This struggle was not only in the Americas, “fighting for the independence of the Guianas and British Antilles…” but also in Belize, and “in Africa, in Asia, in any part of the world where the strong oppress the weak…” (Guevara 1961) This global liberation movement recognized that markets and financial institutions collaborated to create racially stratified systems.   Victory would only come with intensive reform programs aimed at counterbalancing and producing a fundamental economic and social revolution.  (Guevara 1964)    The first successful challenge to European colonialism occurred in Ghana under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah.

The voices of the Africans, both in the U.S. and abroad, sound the clarion call and are marked by progress, resilience, and perseverance; it is easy to ignore the trials, tribulations, and suffering endured by many Blacks over the ages. Maya Angelou's “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” reminds us that it is not always a bed of roses.

This is particularly true in this autobiographical work that traces a life often interrupted by tragedy, moving from kin to kin, grandparents to separated parents, and back to grandparents. Being the ugly duckling, battered and abused (sexually, mentally, and spiritually). But after being raped, pregnant, and disgraced, she continued onward. She did not allow these obstacles to drag her into hopelessness and despair. Head held high, she continued to pursue her path, gave birth to a marvelous son, graduated from high school, and the rest is history. So why can the caged bird sing? She dreams of freedom.

 Time and space limitations preclude us from going further; countless other voices have surfaced to lift the African.  But these brief glimpses provide the basis for how African thought and, hence, CRT has evolved.  Based on these observations, we can identify a set of Theorems and postulates. 

C.R.T. -Theorems and postulates

Central to C.R.T. are the voices of marginalized peoples. Many who look at this process concentrate on the objectification, victimization, and marginalization of indigenous, colonized, and enslaved as they were minoritized and marginalized. And while there were obvious reactions by such people to the processes, they were nevertheless active agents. This means that indigenous, colonized, and enslaved peoples were more than blank templates upon which were written the epithets of racism and racialism; they were already contemplative, whole peoples who had already spent hundreds of years writing their own stories. One of the principal lies and myths of liberal and conservative historians is that they began the history of these peoples at the junction where they entered history as victims and rarely as thinking, sentient peoples. This is an important reality in that failure to see this means that we fail to understand how counter-narratives and alternative narratives existed and persisted even as the racial transformations deliberately attempted to wipe their existence from the face of history. Critical race theory advocates the essential use of storytelling (Cooper 1994), counter stories (Delgado Bernal, 1998; Villenas et al., 1999), and counter-narratives (Lather, 1998) as not only a corrective but necessary transformative process in producing equitable and systemic antiracism policies, practices, and policies.   (Miller, Liu, and Ball, 2020)  Each chapter will feature these corrective and transformative narratives. Alternatively, I will explore a set of theorems that will guide the discussion in each chapter, as indicated in parentheses. 

 

C.R.T. theorems

                                       a.    Minoritized, marginalized peoples/groups represented by indigenous, colonized, and minoritized individuals and groups are not mere objects but subjects actively engaged as agents of social change and architects of social justice. What this means is that race is both objective and subjective. The subjective components of racial identities reflect how minoritized and majoritized individuals and groups construct cognitive maps, boundaries, and meanings.  (Brubaker et al 2004)

                                       b.    Racial Triangulation refers to how institutional structures and racial designations intersect to "fix" the location of the lowest racial caste. This caste historically has been occupied by indigenous, colonized, former enslaved, and colonial subjects. From the Beginning of racial caste within the various western racial states and their former colonies, they have utilized three specific structural components to situate and trap indigenous, colonized, minoritized, and marginalized people/groups in the lowest of castes.   These structures -education, economics, and criminal justice- perpetuate race and the racial caste system. This is seen most recently in most blacks trapped in the ghettos of this country, with poor educational funding (we spend about 26k less on black education than white education), a decades-long war on drugs, and the militarization of police, and an economic system that has used such things as redlining, occupational segregation, and differential access to credit markets to keep blacks in their place. These structures make up the racial Triangulation that keeps blacks fixed. I would argue that a similar form of Triangulation, in this case -Racial Triangulation- has been a central component of American racism since its inception. 

 

                                        c.    Race and Other Myths – The history of indigenous, colonized, enslaved, and marginalized peoples has been distorted, denied, or perverted. In their places, taught are the narrative that whites are superior peoples, that Western nations were great, and that the destruction of other peoples, their nations, and theft of their lands either did not occur or was necessary to bring the savages into the modern World. (Khatan 2020,)  This whitewashing of history is reflected in national monuments, history books, street and building names, and in much of our public discourse. In America, the founding of the Colonial National Monument in 1931 is one way in which African Americans and Native Americans were intentionally left out of American history. Co-conspirators included a balance of both conservatives and liberals, such as General John Pershing, France's Marshal Pétain, the Secretary of the Interior, and New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a year before his election to the presidency. (Wills 2019). We all agree that race is a social construction or a myth. What we don't seem to understand is that associated with this myth are components that help shape, preserve, and, at times, justify race. A few of these race components include but are not limited to, white guilt, white privilege, and white fragility. Other aspects of race have to do with assumptions associated with racism. Racism, the ability, and the power to enforce racial codes, sanctions, and rewards operate at the system or institutional level. While individuals might be racially biased, they must be in positions of power or authority and willing to use them to enforce racial codes, sanctions, and rewards. Put simply, racism is a form of discrimination that links bias with institutional power.

                                       d.    Racial Dynamics and Social Movements - Like Newton's Third Law, the 3rd theorem of C.R.T. is that racial and racist dynamics presuppose motion and a continuous set of opposite motions associated with racial social movements. More simply, racial and racist dynamics represent barriers, usually constructed or defined by the various policies, practices, and beliefs, that serve to protect or preserve racial and racist systems. Social movements aiming to disrupt these barriers often produce negligible or incremental changes. Consequently, the changes may appear to be insubstantial, particularly as the racial and racist dynamics re-emerge.  

                                       e.    racial reality is a social construction; racial consequences are the consequences of believing that the results are normal and natural and the victim is the cause, not the structures.  

                                         f.    focus on systemic change rather than individual or even group behavior   

                                       g.    racial codes of conduct and norms are institutionalized and global in their prevalence, operationalization, and interconnectedness.

                                       h.    white racial angst/fears underlie racial constructions; thus, racial structures reflect a zero-sum mentality. Historically, this has limited the efforts to dismantle the racial state effectively.