by JARED BALL
This past week the left-of-center host of GritTv, Laura Flanders, had a powerful segment focused on James Baldwin. It began with a clip of Baldwin explaining so poetically how race functions in this country. He spoke about what it means to grow up in a country “pledging allegiance to a flag… that doesn’t pledge allegiance to you” and how being Black imposes, by the age of 30, a condition whereby you lose any ability to trust your “countrymen.” But for her own reasons and his homosexuality, however, Flanders wanted to take Baldwin out of a context of Black History Month saying that he spoke to so many more. And I am sure he did. But she did that after one of her Black guests, professor Hortense Spillers, applying her own context, noted how Baldwin represented much of what goes today unspoken by too many within African America. She said, “there is so much we don’t talk about.” So I too will quite subjectively use Baldwin and this month’s nominal focus and raise one bit of the unspoken, at least for a moment.
Admittedly, my own favorite of the unspoken is the concept of African America as an internal colony, a nation within a nation or even more specifically a nation within a state apparatus which envelops and crushes other nations. Intellectually it can be challenging and it is certainly a most un-welcomed theoretical approach in the acceptable circles. But it is also one that has sustained radical movements within Black America for centuries. Martin Delaney said it in 1852, that we are a “nation within a nation,” colonized as any other. DuBois described us as “semi-colonial,” or “domestically colonized,” as did Claudia Jones. Of course Malcolm X did as well, he was assassinated largely because of that analysis forty-six years ago this week. James Boggs did, as did members of SNCC. And in his recently released collection of essays you can read how Jack O’Dell deployed the theory and see why he was forced out of his own organization and deemed a threat to this country’s national security. Of course, the Black Panther Party arrived at this analysis as did the Black Liberation Army. And today even a host of activists and academics hold to this theory. In fact, it is central to the work of the Uhuru Movement and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement.
Black Agenda Report for more