Seventy years ago, Mrs. Geneva Johnson, a black Montgomery resident,  was arrested on a Montgomery, Alabama public transit bus for allegedly having the incorrect bus fare and daring to display improper social decorum by “talking back” to a malicious white bus driver who had berated her. It was not uncommon for bus drivers to abuse and rob black riders at the pay meter. Historian Danielle McGuire notes: “Drivers shortchanged African Americans, then kicked them off the bus if they asked for correct change.”

In the coming years, Montgomery would see the arrest of many more black women — Viola White, Claudette Colvin, Katie Wingfield — and even children who dared to challenge entrenched white power by violating the city’s segregation laws on the public bus lines through their refusal to vacate seating reserved for white passengers. Throughout the nation Blacks (and increasingly their white solidarity partners) were beginning to evince heightened levels of intolerance to, and direct action against, Jim Crow segregation. Their objective was less about the individual indignities of anti-black racism they encountered on Montgomery’s buses, as it was about the imperative to confront systemic white supremacy itself.

In 1952 Montgomery police shot and killed a black man over a fare dispute literally as he exited the bus. In yet another particularly horrid 1953 example, Epsie Worthy refused a white bus driver’s coercive attempt to rob her of an additional transfer fee. “Rather than pay again,” says Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, one of the boycott lead organizers and head of the Montgomery Women’s Political Council (WPC). “[Worthy] decided that she did not have far to go and would walk the rest of the way.” Angered by Worthy’s principled resistance the bus driver leapt from his seat and violently beset upon her. Although she mounted a valiant defense, fearlessly returning counter strikes to the white driver’s rain of fists, she would ultimately suffer a loss this day, which meant jail and a fifty-two dollar fine. After the arrest of eighteen-year-old Mary Louise Smith on October 21, 1955 black Montgomery drew a proverbial line in the sand.

Out of Montgomery’s total black population (which numbered nearly fifty thousand), more than half of all the black women laboring outside of their homes found paid work as domestics in white homes — far beyond the economic safe haven of labor protection laws or a union. Unable to afford private vehicles due in large part to their shamefully low wages, black domestics relied heavily upon the city’s public transportation system. Herein, as a directly affected group, black domestic workers became the all-important foot soldiers of the Montgomery bus boycott. The thoroughly networked social and cultural lives of domestic workers proved to be an invaluable resource for the success of the boycott. As seasoned guerrillas, black women clandestinely transported food, items, and, most critical to the boycott, key information gradually gleaned from white conversations eavesdropped upon.

1950’s Montgomery was home to a significant community of black women, many of whom held professional-class careers as principals, professors, nurses, and social workers. Brown University historian, Dr. Françoise Hamlin, in her multiple award-winning book, Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta after World War II, remarked on the powerful regional influence of the Montgomery bus boycott: “… black Clarksdale continued efforts in 1956 to apply pressure on the foundations of segregation. The news of the Montgomery bus boycott had spread fast in Mississippi. If change could happen in Alabama, why not Mississippi?”

Charged with getting the boycott off the ground, middle-class women of the WPC were essential to the initial organizational effort of the boycott. However, labor scholar Premilla Nadasen points out that during the 381-day-long boycott the remarkable networking acumen of domestic workers was indispensable:

They filled the pews at mass meetings and served as the foot soldiers that made the boycott a success, and they also exhibited leadership by raising money and mobilizing others in the community to support the campaign.

Black women, like Parks, who labored outside of the home — particularly domestic workers — suffered the compounded indignities of white supremacy on their return trips home. Throughout the day black women often found themselves verbally accosted by white female employers and sexually assaulted by white male employers. Thus, on the bus ride home black women had little tolerance for the inhumane social violence that was part and parcel of a racially segregated seating system. Racist and misogynist epithets like “‘black nigger,’ ‘black bitches,’ ‘heifers,’ ‘whores,’” were humiliating daily occurrences as Robinson remembers.

Rosa Parks was arrested for engaging in a nonviolent direct action against state sponsored white supremacy. Parks clearly was not the first black woman to resist segregated seating, nor was Montgomery’s the first public transit protest by African Americans. The Montgomery bus boycott comes out of a decades-long tradition of black protest against racial injustices in public transit. However, in Park’s case, middle-class black women who formed the core of the Montgomery Women’s Political Council, and had threatened to boycott the buses prior, used Park’s arrest to launch one of the most effective, efficient, and brilliantly orchestrated boycott actions in U.S. protest history. Nevertheless, without the crucial rank and file support of domestic workers Nadasen reminds us that “the bus boycott, quite simply, would never have succeeded.”

The vessel was bound for what is to today the southeast African nation of Mozambique. Upon arrival Little John’s menial duties as a seaman expanded to that of a jailer of captive Africans. Indeed, all crew on board slave ships where jailers of a sort. How trying it must have been for Little John to maintain vigilant surveillance over a desperate human cargo after the long weeks at sea.

I wonder what Little John thought as he gazed into the lamenting eyes of captive Africans, as their shackled feet pressed their way onto the blood-stained sailing vessel of death. One can only imagine Little John fears as he beheld those humans — some of whom were his same age. “Will they kill me? Will I return home to my mother and father and brothers and sisters?” he must have speculated to himself.”

And even still I wonder what Africans thought when they witnessed Little John, a mere child given charge to be the eyes and ears securing their captivity. As the beautiful African souls plotted their revolt, surely they imagined that Little John would have to be the first to die. He was the smallest, and thus, most vulnerable. “Yeah, we will change his fate and thereby change our ownt!” they thought to themselves.

Alas, it was not to be so. For Little John completed his first voyage as a seaman aboard this Rhode Island slave ship. The following year (1806) Little John returned to the seas where he celebrated his 12th birthday on board another “slaver.” And no doubt the Africans who boarded this floating prison would attempt to make sure Little John never sailed again.

My semi-fictional narrative based on true events from the book The Notorious Triangle: Rhode Island and the African Slave Trade, 1700-1807, by Jay Coughtry

Toward the end of his life Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. grew increasingly disenchanted with the project of racial integration as a means of securing social, political, and economic justice for African Americans. Echoing the sentiments of Ella Baker and Malcolm X, both of whom radically called into question prevailing ideas about what America was and could be, King became deeply concerned that Black Americans were “integrating into a burning house.”

The Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. national holiday, like all holidays, is not merely concerned with uncritical commemoration but collective memory itself. How we, as a highly diverse nation, recount our past(s) informs the ways in which we understand our contemporary moment. Undoubtedly, it is dumbfounding to consider the great divide between what King, and the movement which propelled him, actually called for and the way he and that movement are portrayed today.

What had been a radical movement for systemic change has now been depoliticized and thereby reduced to casual volunteerism. Schools and civic service organizations, like Americorps and City Year, encourage (and in some cases require) students and employees to volunteer their time during the holiday as not a “day off” but a “day on.” Few would argue against the notion that cleaning rubbish from the neglected streets of economically exploited communities of color is a good thing. Certainly facilitating art projects at a local community center with children of color is affirming enough. But these kind of photo-op-styled civic engagements, however gratifying, in no way capture the intent or aspirations of African Americans who lived and died fighting to create a nation free of institutionalized white supremacy.

If we are to celebrate the real King, we must evade the temptation to uncritically consume popular narratives delivered to an American audience each year on this holiday. These popular portrayals actually invite us to mis-remember King. The process of deep misremembering is captured in the words of the late prominent Haitian scholar, Michel-Rolph Trouillot:

[Most Americans] learn their first history lessons through media that have not been subjected to the standards set by peer reviews, university presses, or doctoral committees. Long before average citizens read the historians who set the standards of the day for colleagues and students, they access history through celebrations, site and museum visits, movies, national holidays, and primary school books.

How then, shall we properly think about this national holiday? What does it mean that a nation which continues to violently repress social and political movements of the kind King ordered holds his birthday as a national holiday?

Here I will list a few “dos and don’ts” suggestions for personal use and to share with youth:

DON’Ts

• DO NOT think of or teach youth that the Civil Rights Movement is a relic of antiquity. Dr. King, who would have been 85 years old this month, could very likely have still been alive and active in the struggle had he not been assassinated. Many of us have grand and great-grandparents who are older than Dr. King and very much still alive.

• DO NOT go out expressly to pick up trash or otherwise clean yours, or someone else’s neighborhood. I can assure you that no matter how much rubbish you purge from streets, parks, and playgrounds it won’t prevent law enforcement from racially profiling People of Color.

• DO NOT tell youth that because of Dr. King’s nonviolent rhetoric and actions racism is over and we now live in a post-racial society, citing the election of Barack Obama as evidence. Imbalances across a number of key socioeconomic registers, whether affordable access to healthy food choices or the infant mortality rate, continue to reveal chronic racial disparities within American society.

DOs

• DO listen to and think deeply about King’s full I Have a Dream speech. The heavily sound-bitten (which I call redacted) version disseminated by corporate media every January is designed to make the public feel content about American progress. Struggles to end anti-black social, economic, and political oppression are, though often in flux, ongoing.

• DO creatively find ways to challenge entrenched power, especially if you live with white skin privilege. This will be difficult because white people have a vested interest in not challenging a structure from which they benefit by no fault of their own.

• DO join the fight! Unite with a local, national, or global organization doing work to end various forms of institutionalized oppression. Or at least financially support one.

For more on the authentic Dr. King and his sustained struggle against racial oppression, economic exploitation, and political domination read the last book he wrote before his assassination, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?

However, I intend to combat this with historical commentary, that occasions a more relevant way in which to engage Africana history, philosophy, and political thought both on the Continent and throughout the Diaspora.

With the release of Django Unchained we see one of the few moments in U.S. cinematographic history where southern plantation slavery is thrust upon the big screen as a context for the material and social violence that is so traditionally American. If the American south is the conventional home of all-things white supremacy, then certainly the American north — particularly Rhode Island — must have been its principal financier.

W. E. B. Du Bois, the venerable American historian, sociologist, Pan-Africanist, and first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard, chronicled Rhode Island’s centralized position as a primary trader in African people in his doctoral dissertation The Suppression of the African Slave Trade.

Rhode Island became the greatest slave-trader in America. Although she did not import many slaves for her own use, she became the clearing-house for the trade of other colonies.

Du Bois would go on to quote Rev. Samuel Hopkins, a theologian who preached at the First Congregational Church in Newport, Rhode Island for over three decades:

The inhabitants of Rhode Island, especially those of Newport, have had by far the greater share in this traffic, of all these United States. This trade in human species has been the first wheel of commerce in Newport, on which every other movement in business has chiefly depended. That town has been built up, and flourished in times past, at the expense of the blood, the liberty, and happiness of the poor Africans; and the inhabitants have lived on this, and by it have gotten most of the their wealth and riches. (1787)

Years later scholar Jay Coughtry, in his ground-breaking work on the Rhode Island slave trade, The Notorious Triangle: Rhode Island and the African Slave Trade, 1700-1807, informs us that…

Throughout the eighteenth century, Rhode Island merchants controlled between 60 and 90 percent of the American trade in African slaves. … in no other colony or state did the slave trade play as significant a role in the total economy.

Sanford mayor, Jeff Triplett, against the urgings of his own police and local prosecutors, decided to release the 911 phone call tapes. Until now it was not known that the Sanford police dept. had advised the mayor in this regard.

Additionally, recently release video of George Zimmerman in temporary custody at the Sanford police headquarters 35 mins. after the shooting appears to challenge the veracity of his, and his family’s, claim that he was brutally assaulted by Trayvon Martin. On the video Zimmerman appeared to have no contusions or lacerations on the back of his head or to his nose, nor was there any observable blood stains on his clothing. Zimmerman has claimed that his nose was broken during a scuffle with Martin, and medical experts assert that a broken nose in this instance would have produce significant bleeding. Law enforcement expert, Lou Palumbo, after viewing the video noted that Zimmeran appeared “fully ambulatory.”

New witnesses continue to emerge with detailed accounts that also dispute Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense. One witness who wished to remain unidentified placed Zimmerman as situated on top of Trayvon.

…The larger man got off, then there was a boy that was now dead on the ground … He [Zimmerman] didn’t appear hurt…

Richard Kurtz, the funeral director who prepared the body of Trayvon, stated that he saw no irregularities to Trayvon’s body that would be consistent with the account of a physical struggle the likes of which Zimmerman testified to. Zimmerman’s “story just does not make sense,” said Kurtz.

Arguably the most crucial component to the entire case is a Sanford law which, according to Ken Padowitz, a former homicide prosecutor, states that because Zimmerman was handcuffed and taken to the police station by default means that he actually was officially under arrest, but was apparently never booked.

Somebody at that police department made a decision to not go through normal procedure.

Under Florida’s codes of criminal procedure unless George Zimmerman is charged within a 175 days of this apparent arrest he can never be charged for the murder of Trayvon Martin.

The clock of justice is ticking… literally.

Below is a list of local actions taking place in support of justice for Trayvon and his family:

• April 3rd — This Tuesday Rhode Island College’s Unity Center is holding a campus and community forum from 4-6pm. All are welcome.
• April 8th — This coming Sunday at 6pm the Providence Africana Reading Collective (PARC) will reconvene to focused on isolating our actionable interest in the TRAYVON MARTIN case. PARC meets a Tea in Sahara which is located on 69 Governor St. All community members are encouraged to come.

• April 11th —  Roots Café is hosting a community forum and action planning session on justice for Trayvon Martin and his family. Key community leaders will be in attendance. Additionally, Roots Café is hoping to have a representative from the RI State Attorney’s office to provide a brief contextual description of Florida’s controversial “Stand Your Ground” law. Roots Café invites you to join your voice and action oriented ideas with other community members in a push for justice.

We will discuss/plan how we might involve ourselves in action which will help pressure the powers-that-be to expedite a just resolution to this matter.

I’ve spoken with the Florida State NAACP President, Adora Obi Nweze, and the national communications director, Derrick Turner. They’ve detailed specific actions the NAACP is either organizing or coordinating with other Civil Rights and Black organizations on, both in Florida and nationally. I will report back this info to the community here in Providence this Sunday evening at the Providence Africana Reading Collective’s gathering.

I am also in conversation with other activist and community leaders here in Providence about the prospect of holding a Million Hoodie Protest March here in the city in solidarity and justice for Trayvon Martin and his family. This idea will be explored further at the PARC community forum.

Please come and bring your thoughts and voice!

Where: Tea in Sahara, 69 Governor St.

When:  This Sunday (March 25)

Time: 6pm

Other: To augment the gathering we will read Thomas C. Holt’s essay: “Racial Identity and the Project of Modernity.” Those interested in reading the text may email me at marco.mcwilliams@gmail.com

While shopping at Whole Foods last week (yeah, I do that often #smirking) I came across a new Whole Foods brand coffee. It was arranged in a pyramid styled display, and the store rep., having just completed the task of assembling it, stood nearby staring on with a look so proud it bordered on the supercilious.

I stepped closer to observe that the coffee was being shipped in from all around the world: Latin America, East Africa, India blends. Of course this is nothing new, we always bring in goods from places we’ve either colonized or helped facilitated the colonization of (think Vietnam). But what struck me most was what I read on the side of the container: “A hand up to over a million people. 30¢ from every can goes to alleviating poverty worldwide where Whole Foods Market sources products.”

Hmmm… “A hand up,” “alleviating poverty worldwide.” Really?

There are two immediate ways in which I might problematize the crisis in Western altruistic thought — and the capitalist work of Whole Foods in this endeavor:

First, it positions us, as Westerners who live in and with a “First World” perception, to imagine that essential poverty can be alleviated by 30¢. And what a bargain that is! In fact, it’s a 2 for 1 special, because not only can one purchase a can of fresh, organic, fairly traded coffee, but one can also purchase one’s redemption from having to think or be concerned about the constructed impoverished conditions of the people who laboriously tend this coffee on land they don’t own, or even control. One need not expend cognitive energy contemplating the worker’s labor conditions, which are likely politically influenced by social and economic mandates from one’s own First World government; just 30¢ and it all goes away.

Pardon me a moment while I run to my bookshelf, grab my bible and reread the parable of the Good Samaritan:
[Luke 10: 30-37]

²⁹But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?
³⁰And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.
³¹And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.
³²And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side.
³³But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him,
³⁴And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.
³⁵And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee.
³⁶Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?
³⁷And he said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise. [KJV]

The marketing formation of this coffee creates a way for western consumers to escape critiques of capitalism. Rather than fundamentally question this economic monolith, we choose, instead, to tolerate it; and Whole Foods makes it a benign affair. In many ways that which we call “neocolonialism” is merely the refitting of the old colonialism to a contemporary world and political cultural order. The labor of those othered is still exploited, but said exploitation is somehow in the very same moment alleviated — and that apparently with 30¢.

Real photographs of the women on the side of the can have simply become twenty-first century iconographs of acceptable indigence. Think “Aunt Jamima,” still clothed in her class-status-cueing raiment, still brandishing a smile of contentment, only now she is receiving a so-called fair wage.

Next, when we consider the example of Africa we know that it was a continental European colonial outpost. And we know that the economic corruption and deleterious identity politics were introduced by morally challenged European powers and are sustained by African hegemons. American media and educational structuring silence this past and present in such a way that it is held external to the lived experiences of both Third World laborers and First World consumers. Capitalist frameworks of knowledge exploitation, and our participation in its perpetuation, are obscured by an altruistic desire to purchase our 30¢ redemption from having to care any further about the way in which neocolonialism cashes in on, as Jesus would assert, our neighbor.

Though we think ourselves “Good Samaritans”, in fact we have become political actors, “Levites” and “priests,” at the register in Whole Foods. No coming closer out of compassionate concern, no oil and wine of healing or bandaging of wounds, no picking up from the road side and transporting to the inn, no financing of medical care to nurse back to health; nothing of a sorts. Just 30¢ to alleviate the poverty. Oh, the suffering worker will remain in poverty, no doubt! But it will be somewhat alleviated as the oppressive economic relationship of our’s and our neighbor’s world is authorized by this insidious transaction of misdirection. The irony of the issue at hand is not that we didn’t provide a charitable service, but that we got to walk away imagining that we did. And this is, as Slavoj Zizek would say, “the commodification of suffering,” where the aim is not to end the economic relationship hinged on disparate power, rather it is to maintain it by benevolently prolonging it as though one were giving alms.

“The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.” -Zizek

History is a clock that people use to tell their political and cultural time of day. It is also a compass that people use to find themselves on the map of human geography. History tells a people where they’ve been and what they’ve been; where they are and what they are. History tells a people where they still must go and what they still must be. The relationship of history to the people is the same as the relationship of a mother to her child.
~ Dr. John Henrik Clarke

Conscious memory is the prerequisite for human behavior.
~ Professor Greg Carr

As we sit in the middle of Black History Month I confess that I’ve spent the entirety of it thinking about the possibilities of how we might enter into a more progressive conversation on the topic of Black History. But please realize this month is not merely about the recognition of the achievements of African Americans, or a perfunctory gesture to insert Black faces in as missing chapters of American history. To be clear, most people, African Americans and people of non-color alike, tend to engage the month at equal levels of indifference. That said, for many, Black history in a US context, typically begins with the usual slavery narrative:

1. Once upon a time Black people were slaves…
2. Civil War, blah-blah…
3. Civil Rights, blah-blah…
4. Now we finally have a Black president.
5. The End.

My claim is a small one: the moment you initiate a conversation on Black history with chattel slavery as the port of origin you are always already affirming a short range historical position which ensures that you will (re)fabricate a limiting (and limited) scope from which to view Black (African) history and future. I can best liken it to walking into a football game after halftime and thinking the third quarter kickoff was the beginning of the game.

Professor Greg Carr stresses three critical indexes rendered in the work of Dr. Theophile Obenga which assert that in order to exist with agency in the world a people must be skilled practitioners of their own history, historiography and historicity.

– History: meaning memory; how do you remember your identity as an individual and as a part of a group.

– Historiography: how do you write that memory; how do you construct it and pass it on from generation to generation.

– Historicity: a sense of yourself in time and space; what’s your vision for the future.

If we, as people of African ancestry, only remember ourselves as former slaves and never recall ourselves as the first constructors of highly advanced civilizations with great centers of learning (philosophy, science, mathematics, agriculture and medicine), then we are condemned to remain a people who are only free due to the so-called benevolence of an American president.

Hubert Harrison, a brilliant early twentieth century West Indian writer whose political work influenced figures such as Marcus Garvey and A. Philip Randolph, penned these words in an article from December of 1920…

When white people today talk of civilizing Africa and assert that the Africans are uncivilized [they] awaken in the minds of well-informed Africans a doubt as to whether white people know what is meant by the term. For, no matter how it may be defined, it is clear to the instructed that various “civilizations” not only have existed in Africa, but do exist there today, independently of that particular brand which white people are taking there in exchange for the untold millions of dollars which they are taking from there.

If by civilization we mean a stable society which supports itself and maintains a system of government and laws, industry and commerce, then the Hausas and Mandingoes, the people of the Ashanti and Dahomey, and the Yorubas of the Gold Coast had and have all these, and they are consequently civilized.”

What America means to an individual depends in large part on the historical perspective from which it has been introduced to them. And perhaps by now you’ve heard it mentioned in various mainstream media sources and talked about in numerous context, that is, Arizona’s new education law banning Ethnic Studies which went into effect this January, but will apparently be enforced as of 1 February. In this case, we see the deployment of a political, legal, and economic structure controlled by white political elites. But the fact that it is controlled by this political cohort should be subordinated to the fact that it exist and is maintained by thought norms which are American exceptionalist — that is to say, they are ideas which imagine the nation in a particularly narrow and ahistorical conception. The danger of this perception is not that it is reductionist, for clearly it is, but that it rebuffs attempts at expanding a democratic ethos. No proper understanding of our contemporary moment as a nation can be had unless we are willing to dig through the archives unafraid of what we shall find.

With legitimized trepidation in each painful step, their soiled and bloodied feet, shackled with rusting iron at the ankle, marched from maritime prisons into a new reality — indeed a prison of sorts. This alternate reality entailed not only the enslavement of their bodies, but the degradation of their culture, erasure of their language, and evisceration of their spiritual lives. In the midst of our retentions we find our Black-selves in continual moments of spiritual reclamation. Was not our most precious loss that of our memory, or the knowing of how to remember? African somas, culture, and politics have, from the beginning, been the enclaves of white appropriation for both control and profit.

Management of black existence has always fused in compelling ways with white perceptions of black social and intellectual life. When Jim Crow minstrel performers stepped on stage, faces painted black with burnt cork, they projected an image of believable black life mainly because white-supremacist-created stereotypes, which were by definition of their construction, infused with meanings made palatable and profitable for white audiences.

But what does blackface minstrelsy look like in the twenty-first century? In times past I have argued that it looked like commercial hip hop; I still maintain this. But the current presidential election cycle has witnessed the Republican party render to Herman Cain a national rostrum wherewith to carry out blackface-like buffoonery on a national stage. Yet, concomitant with his shameful exit we also witnessed the xenophobic cultural rejection of the All-American Muslim television series. And it has become apparent that the average white Republican voter is still quite comfortable seeing People of Color subjugated and subservient to political agendas that sustain the interest of a white male ruling class elite (the 1%) — and whenever this can be facilitated by a venal figure with a black face all the better.

Revolutionary Black intellectuals like Steve Biko and Frantz Fanon have long traced the provenance and explained the prevalence of white colonial ideology presented in Black face.

“In order to assimilate and to experience the oppressor’s culture, the native has to leave certain of his intellectual possessions in pawn. These pledges include his adoption of the forms of thought of the colonialist bourgeoisie.” — Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Here Fanon explains that the colonialist deemed it a cultural imperative to denounce the political presence of the native whereby to secure his compliance — or for the purposes of a 2012 election, his/her vote. Because politics do not stand alone, even the native’s image must be sequestered and re-managed, such that it be not merely arrested, but pressed into the service of a ruling class colonial order.

Representation is paramount in the shaping of America’s image in both domestic and international spheres. Given America’s wretched history (and present) with regard to race and class tensions, having an African-American figurehead as the face of the American empire is quite conducive to the international resistance of American hegemony. Indeed, President Obama has been metaphorically described as the opioid of the global masses.

But moments such as this, be they the intentionalities of a corporate plutocracy or mere organic products of the democratic maneuvers of concerned citizens, do have historical precedent.

Mary L. Dudziak, in her essay, Desegregation as a Cold War Imperative, states:

In the years following World War II, racial discrimination in the United States received increasing attention from other countries. Newspapers throughout the world carried stories about discrimination against non-white visiting foreign dignitaries, as well as against American blacks. At a time when the U.S. hoped to reshape the postwar world in its own image, the international attention given to racial segregation was troublesome and embarrassing. The focus of American foreign policy at this point was to promote democracy and to ‘contain’ communism. However, the international focus on U.S. racial problems meant that the image of American democracy was tarnished.

It is a naive to imagine that judicial altruism and situational ethics were the key factors in the 1954 U.S. Supreme court decision in favor of African-American educational progress in the Brown v. Board of Education in favor of school desegregation. With the nation in a postwar global rebuilding moment, the corridors of power would heavily rely upon the moral legitimacy that would result from perceived domestic racial cohesion. Since the U.S. military had used a segregated military machine in the war theater to battle forms of fascism it was imperative that the U.S. recast its own image. With the fabrication of this new image once again the black soma became the terrain upon which eruptions of power politics manifest themselves. School segregation was completely ignored for the entirety of the nation’s history, but suddenly in the postwar year of 1954 we are led to believe that the decisive conversation on black access to the nation’s educational resources was a paramount concern. This, no doubt, served as a hollow beacon of progress to much of the rest of the world that America had somehow bettered itself.

But are we actually in a post-racial historical moment? I strongly argue the negative. This grossly premature assumption of America as a new space, sanitized of institutional racial oppression, is insidiously dangerous. Why? Because it coincides with the delusion that we no longer need to do the work of race-based equity politics. African-Americans now have their very own President, and liberal whites were hugely influential in putting him in office. Is this not the narrative? A quick glance at any local, national, or even global socioeconomic statistical indexes where People of Color exist should be sufficient to disabuse any suspecting citizen of the misconception of racial equity, political or otherwise.

With the issuing of Cain and attempted silencing of All-American Muslim, the colonizers have declared that the scaffolds of power shall remain unchanged, while also maintaining a normative, though imaginary, representative aesthetic of America as essentially white and Christian. The deployment of Cain and bigoted denouncement of All-American Muslim signals yet another eradication of the political interest of those “othered.”

From intentional black invisibility at “Slut Walks” and “Occupy” protest, to black exploitation in the film The Help; from Herman Cain’s minstrel politics, to the ethnocentric disdain for Muslim-Americans, the colonial Right continues to vividly display to the nation and world what their sinister vision of the role those they seek to subjugate should be in this society. As we step forward into the new year we must remain sober and mindful of the necessity to regain the memories of who we were before we became something — or someone’s – else.

The antebellum era south, unfettered by the U.S. Constitution, through its slave system and social codes securely presided over the lives of African people. The notion of a Black political voice existed only in the minds of those enslaved, emancipated, and escaped who determined to imagine political freedom within the nation. Conceding that the scale of plantation slavery in northern locales was moderate by comparison to the south, the white political control was no less thorough. Indeed, prominent New England families like the Browns and De Wolf’s, both from Rhode Island, were elite financiers in the transatlantic trade in human beings. Because money and politics always go together in an American political rubric, access to the ballot stands as both a gateway and barrier. During the lead up to the Civil War political elites in states like Rhode Island and New York effectively negated any designs black males had on the franchise:

In 1822 Rhode Island denied that black men were eligible to vote in its elections . . . In New York an 1821 state constitutional convention raised the property qualification for black voters while eliminating it for white voters. This denied the right to vote to nearly all of the ten thousand black men who had previously voted in the state.[1]

An 1838 political convention in Pennsylvania sketched out modifications to the state’s constitution which secured the enfranchisement of “all white males and disfranchised all black males.”[2] Discontent with this repressive maneuver, black Pennsylvanians for the next two decades sought to have it overturned as they “petitioned Congress to help them gain equal access to the polls. But their efforts failed.”[3]

After the Civil War three Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution were ratified. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth emerge out of a particular moment in which ruling class elites are forced to host a conversation on the sociopolitical status of those once kept as line items on asset statements. New civic, social and political definitions would be required to Constitutionally (re)classify the formerly enslaved.

If Blacks were no longer property then were they somehow humans? If they were humans living among whites within the nascent State then were they citizens also? If they were citizens without the Constitutionally protected right of suffrage then what does citizenship mean? These were among the most important questions the U.S. government had to take up.

The thought that Blacks would be franchised and economically empowered congruent with white, propertied, and literate males was anathema to the Eurocentric ruling class establishment. What followed was a myriad of social, political, and outright violent measures designed to not only prevent Black males from voting but render them less inclined to even try. By now we all know the historical constellation erected to frustrate Black’s attempts at voting: literacy tests, the grandfather clause, poll taxes, voter intimidation and coercion, property qualifications, etc.

Today, blatant attempts to violate the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments where People of Color are concerned would almost certainly be universally decried. With the election of Barack Obama this current episode of African American voter disfranchisement was obliged to revise its pro-American political diction. It needed to appear as though it was protecting the sanctity of the constitutional right of the very people it would ultimately assail. Enter the Republicans.

In 2010 Congress saw a majority of Republicans take state house seats nation wide. That single election cycle increased by twelve the number of states with Republican majorities in their legislatures. One of their first collective political initiatives ensured that the exercise of the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments would be measurably more difficult where voters of Color were concerned. With but a single exception Republicans introduced rigid voter ID bills which carried with them the effect of disfranchising significant numbers of Black and Latino voters and thereby negating important gains achieved after over a century of political struggle.

A recently release report by the Brennan Center for Justice titled Voting Law Changes in 2012 states that “Legislatures introduced and passed a record number of bills restricting  the access to voting this year.” Republican advocates of the new laws have routinely argued that the passage of the legislation would significantly eliminate voter fraud. Aside from the fact that voter fraud nation wide has been at inconsequentially low levels, Democratic objections, according to the Brennan report, emphasize that,

. . . the new laws will make it much more difficult for eligible citizens to vote and to ensure that their votes are counted. In particular, they have pointed out that many of these laws will disproportionately impact low-income and minority citizens, renters, and students — eligible voters who already face the biggest hurdles to voting.

The report goes on to mention that nationally, eleven percent of all registered voters possess no photo ID. But even more significant percentages of minority voters, young and senior citizens alike, lack either state or college issued photo IDs. In some instances state legislatures have moved to actually eliminate legal provisions that once allowed student photo IDs as a legitimate form of identification. And it is precisely this minority population that Republican lawmakers have targeted in order to reduce voter turnout because they vote heavily the Democratic ticket.

If Democratic Representative John Lewis has said that “this year’s Republican-backed wave of voting restrictions has demonstrated that the fundamental right to vote is still subject to partisan manipulation.”[4] Marcia Fudge, a Congresswoman from Ohio voices it more directly: “these efforts have and all-too familiar stench of the Jim Crow era.”[5]

For example, in Colorado the new Republican Secretary of State, Scott Gessler, ordered that “inactive” (though registered) voters in predominantly Democratic districts not be mailed ballots even though they normally receive them — potentially disenfranchising nearly 73,000 registered voters in just two Colorado counties alone. Denver and Pueblo County Clerks Debra Johnson and Gilbert Ortiz have vowed to mail the ballots anyway, in defiance of Gessler. “The City and County of Denver has consistently provided all eligible voters with ease of access to the voting franchise and we plan to continue to do so . . .” said Johnson, preferring to battle Gessler in court, if necessary.

Republican controlled legislatures in no less than seven states have also moved to place strict, if not effectively inhibiting, regulations on organizations which coordinate voter registration drives. The Brennan report mentions that in one Florida county the League of Women Voters along with other voter registration organizations accounted for 62.7% of new voter registrants. Increases in African American voter participation have historically been the direct result of community-based voter registration drives. “African-American and Hispanic citizens in Florida are more than twice as likely to register to vote through such drives as white voters” cites the report.

Moreover, both Florida and Ohio have critically curbed early voting on Sundays (Ohio has eliminated it outright). Clearly, this political scheme is directed at African American citizens who, in disproportion to their white counterparts, tend to head to the ballot box on Sundays after church and when they are less likely to be at work or in school.

These are but a few examples of what amounts to African American voter suppression in an Obamasonian “colorblind” era. Like the malevolent poll taxes and literacy test of old, these forms of political management by the Republican establishment function as proxies for Jim Crow style racial management. Our political enemy has spoken. How will we respond?

Endnotes:
[1]Hine, Darlene Clark, William C. Hine, and Stanley Harrold. African Americans: a concise history. Alexandria, VA: Prentice Hall, 2004.
[2-3] Ibid.
[4-5] Brennan Voting Law Changes Report