by SUJATHA GIDLA Gidla & ALAN HORN
Few today can doubt the centrality of the division in American society that goes by the name of race. The police violence to which black people in the us are routinely subjected has become more widely visible, thanks to cellphone videos and social media. The names of those killed by the police in the past few years, across the country—Eric Garner in New York, Breonna Taylor in Kentucky, Jacob Blake in Wisconsin, Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Rekia Boyd in Chicago, George Floyd in Minneapolis, to name but a few—are borne on the placards of protests often galvanized by working-class communities.
Yet despite the inescapable significance of the colour line in the us, its basis is curiously elusive. Race, needless to say, is not a biological classification. Even when considered as a socio-cultural category, it cannot account for the persistent forms of oppression and exclusion faced by African-Americans, in contrast to other groups—as illustrated by the famous anecdote, told by Malcolm X among others, of a dark-skinned friend who put on a turban and was duly seated and served in a segregated restaurant in Atlanta. Colour alone was not the issue. Whether or not the story is true, the mere possibility that such a stunt might work points to an aspect of African-American identity that lies beyond the physical markers of ‘race’ or ethnic ancestry alone.
Nor is anti-black racism in the us a form of xenophobia, as might be said of prejudice against immigrants in Europe. The American form is mitigated, not deepened, by signs of foreign extraction. Malcolm X, for one, made that principle the foundation of his political philosophy. From his original commitment to the faux-exoticism of the Nation of Islam sect to the pan-Africanism of his final years, he sought to raise black Americans generally to the status of visiting Africans. As part of that project, he called—like a number of black leaders before and since—for the recognition of his people as an oppressed nationality. Yet black people in America do not constitute a nation. They have no territory or economic life of their own; black culture is archetypically American. While some have been attracted to nationalist movements, the vast majority of blacks have aspired not to secede but to integrate.
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