This is part two of a three part series. Read the introduction to the series and the first post here. All articles linked to in this series are free to read through 2020. To access, click on the green PDF button above the article. Publisher platform may require registration (free).
The Black Lives Matter movement has seen renewed global visibility in response to a boiling point of racial injustice in the United States: the increased visibility of police violence against Black people, the disproportionate effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on communities of color, and the recent blatant paramilitary attacks against U.S. citizens from their own executive branch — a violence that immigrants of color in the U.S. have also undergone for decades. Concurrently, this transnational “awakening” to demand racial justice has demonstrated a worrying trajectory towards corporatization: the viral spread of radical ideals on social media have given way to superficial “digital activism” where hefty marketing campaigns instrumentalize the cause without commitment to structural change, and celebrities and politicians virtue-signal without tangible action. The time for a multiethnic and multinational coalition against white supremacy is long overdue, and the articles included in “Imagining A Global Resistance” have sought to envisage the contours of such a coalition at different historical moments.[1] Proving W. E. B. Du Bois’s assertion that the color line circles the globe, the authors here illustrate that the color line not only divides the global population in terms of race, but further creates a system of material inequity that reproduces their oppression.[2] Together, the articles included in this bundle expose not only the shared experience of capitalist exploitation through temporal and spatial divides, but also the power of a common resistance.
In pursuit of a global coalition against racial injustice, we must be prepared to sacrifice the illusion of progress in favor of structural change. Robert L. Allen’s article “Re-assessing the Internal (Neo) Colonialism Theory” (2005) reconceptualizes Black peoples in the U.S. as neocolonial subjects via the illusory inducements of Black capitalism and Black politics.[3] This system instrumentalizes a portion of the Black upper middle class as a buffer against insurgency and as an appeasing spectacle of Black progress. In this way, Allen identifies false consciousness as an ideology that dovetails with author Nawal El Saadawi’s observations in the second article in this bundle. Buttressing the myth of American individualism, Black capitalism allows for selective assimilation into capitalist structures of profit and exploitation; meanwhile, it obscures the enforced poverty of Black communities as a whole. This internal neocolonial system, bolstered by Black capitalism, works in tandem with the illusion of Black politics, in which representational gains are prized while Black communities remain politically and economically circumscribed by existing racist political structures. While the theory of internal colonialism Allen outlines is specific to the experiences of Black Americans, it finds commonality with the decolonial approaches of authors such as Walter Mignolo and Anibal Quijano and their articulations of “coloniality of power” to envision “the prospect of developing a global paradigm of the colonial relationship that will also provide a deeper theoretical understanding of the powerful resistance that continues to emerge in subaltern communities and nations around the world.” Yet, Allen points to a major problem in this multinational coalition building, one which remains an equally insidious threat in 2020 as in this article’s publication year, 2005: disenfranchisement strategies render these alliances weak, unorganized, and easily undermined.
El Saadawi’s “War Against Women and Women Against War: Waging War on the Mind” (2004) offers striking examples of the power of corporate interest in disenfranchising oppressed communities, specifically Arab women in Egypt and abroad. She indicts the collaboration between Islamic fundamentalism and American Neo-imperial capitalism, a collaboration that she boldly claims renders Arab women “bodies without a mind.”[4] El Saadawi condemns global capitalism and its support of misogynistic social, political, and religious formations. She charges “native intermediaries”—members of an oppressed group who, pursuing the promise of assimilation into power, continue to perpetuate the structures that oppress and disenfranchise them and their communities—with possession of a “false consciousness.” This critique of false consciousness extends across many of the pieces offered here, from the neocolonial structures of Black capitalism in the U.S. that Allen discusses to the tokenization of Black police officers described by Edward Palmer in the third bundle of this collection. Her focus on the specific status and experiences of Arab women serve as an important reminder of the intersectional nature of systemic oppression and compel us to consider the disproportionate effects of global capitalism on women around the world. El Saadawi is keenly aware of these effects and the dangers of unchecked power, as she was imprisoned under former President of Egypt Anwar Sadat for two months in 1981 in response to her feminist publications. Sadat positioned her as an enemy of the state for precisely the global feminist consciousness she offers in this noteable piece.
In the final article of this bundle, we turn to epidemics of police violence in the United States as another iteration of the coalition between white supremacy, capitalism, and state power. Carl Dix begins “Police Violence: Rising Epidemic/Raising Resistance” (1997) by invoking October 1996: a moment he characterizes as a “unified national movement of resistance” against the epidemic of police brutality. His descriptions of this “new” and “diverse” resistance feel equally applicable to the present conjuncture: from Ferguson in 2014, to Minneapolis this year, to the numerous global protests against police violence, many of which have not entered into the American consciousness with the same intensity. Police are good at their job—they relentlessly protect the property and profits of the state and the rich elite at the expense of a racialized labor source kept in desperate conditions. Within the United States, the policing of Black Americans maintains the internally colonized proletariat of racial capitalism. The imperial U.S. further consolidates its capital power by reproducing this colonized proletariat within the Global South through the related technologies of militarism and the unchecked economic expansion of U.S. multinational corporations. Racial capitalism may take us to the boiling point but, through the redirection of corporate and governmental organizations, we are prevented from spilling over into complete revolution. While Dix’s hope in witnessing the multiethnic coalition of 1996 has not yet come to fruition, it articulates the potential for global resistance that is both anti-racist and anti-capitalist. Justice begins by cultivating a consciousness of the global majority tied to the liberation of working people everywhere.
Allen, El Saadawi, and Dix call for resistance that traverses boundaries—whether national, racial, ethnic, or gendered—to build collectivity beyond the instruments of colonialism and capitalism. With coalition comes the power to reimagine our relations in favor of justice, community, and care.
Jamiee Cook, Maria Sintura, and Maile Young
Graduate students, University of California, Santa Barbara, Hemispheric South/s Research Initiative
[1] In his monograph Black Marxism, Cedric Robinson redefines racialism as a material force which would “inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism.” He coins the term “racial capitalism” to refer to “the subsequent structure as a historical agency” of this reconceptualization of Marxist relations (2). Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism, University of North Carolina Press, 1983.
[2] Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 1902, 2.
[3] Internal neocolonialism resignifies the formulation of African America as a “nation within a nation” subjected to a form of “domestic colonial rule” (4). This idea has been articulated by theorists and activists at different points in history: from Martin Delany as early as 1852, to W.E.B DuBois in 1945, and Kenneth Clarke and Malcolm X in the 1960’s. Robert Allen, “Re-assessing the Internal (Neo) Colonialism Theory,” The Black Scholar, 2005.
[4]Nawal El Saadawi, “War Against Women and Women Against War: Waging War on the Mind,” The Black Scholar, 2008.
