Problems of American Blackness 1/2

The problem of blackness in the United States is identity —or lack thereof—, supplemented with its references to Africa; which provides the bases but not the structure of that identity, and much less can it resolve its determinations. It is not that this projection takes place in a vacuum, since it has a basis in the very culture of the American Southeast; whose segregationism is not only political but also due to the swampy geography of the eastern islands; resulting in a kind of New Africa, due to the isolation of the plantations, which made syncretism difficult. However, this will still be insufficient, since it still depends on the negativity of segregation, whatever its cause; not allowing the practical consistency —as positivity— of some economy, even primary, as in the Seminole case.

This is why its expression, as a culture, consists of a political projection instead of an existential one, as an ideology; with the positivist and romantic rational nature of the idealist tradition, which it shares with the liberalism that sponsors it. The problem with this is the artificiality of that liberalism, which actually acts a functional conservatism; since it consists of a vigilance over the individual, to whom it subordinates the community, in that historical transcendentalism.

In the opposite direction, cultures tend towards the same transcendentalism, but they are adequate by their tribal infrastructure; which limits that political determinism with its own cultural consistency, in the power of the family as a private space. Elements such as matrilineality, in the very infrastructural function of the clan, are limits to this transcendentalism; that ignores them in the political conventions proper to the West, such as the community or the common good.

These are values attributed to African primitivism, but never superimposed to its basic tribal infrastructure; but they do constitute in the West its very structure, with its natural reduction of culture to that political determinism. That, for example, was the case with Christianity, when it over imposed itself to tribalism, with the crown of Carlo Magno; as the moment the West culture lost its existential object, in crisis since the imperial efforts of Julio Cesar. It's for a reason that these values reach their conceptual excellence in the West, with figures such as Kant and Descartes; but in a development that starts from the very basis of that transcendentalism, from Platonic to Neoplatonic uranism; which then organized in Christianity, prepares the war debacle with which the West arrives at Modernity to end.

In African tribal primitivism, on the other hand, culture cannot lose its existential function, not even in this determinism; which, lacking sufficient infrastructure, collapses the phenomenon in its very formation, before its apotheosis. This is the case of all the empires in the sub-Saharan area, with the exceptions of Sudan, Ethiopia and Mali, for example; which are explained in their contamination by the influence of Mediterranean culture, including the religious element (Mali). In Congo, on the other hand, like Oyó in Nigeria and Dahomey, this structure cannot survive its own contradictions; because its inability to go beyond tribal organization —as domestic—, resolved in matrilineality.

The references of North American blackness to a primitive African communism would try to make up for this lack; already in that historical and transcendentalist projection of political determinism, but in a conceptual ambiguity. In this sense, they come to legitimize themselves in the exceptionality of the great imperialism, not in the tribal regularity; to which they nevertheless appeal in their ideological function, despite its direct contradiction of exceptional imperialism.

The contradiction is logical, due to the special nature of this political projection, as an ideology rather than culture; by not being on behalf of the popular class, but of an intellectual elite, formed in that patronage by political liberalism. The best example of this case would perhaps be that of W.E.B. Du Bois, probably the most outstanding personality in that segment; but because of its contradiction with black leadership in its popular origin, with figures such as Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglas.

To be continued