Problems of American Blackness 2/2

In the same sense, the political development of the black American southeast, would tend towards a form of socialism; which, weakened by corporate aggressiveness in economy, will be unsustainable like the African empires to which it appeals. These formations will thus be progressively impoverished, due to the typical unproductiveness of the political model; aggravated by the elephantiasis —also typical— of government structures, as guarantors of economic order.

Although for different reasons, this foreseeable development would be that of cases such as Haiti and Cuba; which respond to the structural weakness of sub-Saharan petty imperialism, due to its dependence on a strong personalities. That would be inevitable, due to its origin on the margins of the West culture, rather than in an effective African centrality; as emporiums of political power, in the growing weakness of the Western structure, with its progressive decadence.

This precariousness is what resembles American blackness, to that Germanic expansion in the Roman decadence; but as a process extended in time, which in Europe was only consolidated in the ninth century, with Charlemagne. In the United States, as the modern culmination of medieval chaos, the nature of the conflict is not warlike but economic; making development more imperceptible, in a political expression that transcends the ideological; but for the same reason it has more effective possibilities —than in Haiti and Cuba, for example—, in its religious nature.

What marks the violent evolution of the European Middle Ages would be the claim of universality of Christianity; which, interfering with secular power, exceeds the infrastructural capacity of local cultures. In the United States that is not the problem, but the weakness of this pretension of its political structure, as liberal; which is therefore resolved in the infrastructural function of the local churches, which is parochial and not transnational.

In the same sense, the conflict seems confessional in principle, like that of the early Lutheran Reformation; but it differs in that it is interdenominational —between Baptists and Methodists— and non-jurisdictional, by its political practices. This conflict would develop surreptitiously, due to the political commitment of the so-called African Methodism; as an instrument of ideological liberalism, in a functionally conservative community, such as the black one. This would be solved with the slow migration —hence the surreptitiousness— from the Methodist to the Baptist church; by the latter's appeal to family culture —rather than to the protection of the state— in its functional conservatism; different from the liberal, as practical and not ideological, in the appeal to its existential resources, given its political precariousness.

However, that will only condition the development, which is favorable to the ideological projection of Methodism; because of its conjunction with government protection, reminiscent of the populist absolutism of Louis XIV in France; respect to which it is more efficient, materializing in a state of well-being, paid for with the public debt. Nevertheless, this will make it possible for alternative structures to emerge, in the face of the problem of unproductivity; that will end up undermining the effective scope of that state of well-being, thus surpassed as infrastructure.

To solve this, Americans would have to turn to their own history, but factual and not ancestral; that is, to find their references in their own historical singularity, which transcends African origin. An example would be the ambiguity of the indigenous wars, which in the Seminole case are also known as black; because of that North American ethnogamous peculiarity, by which blacks share with Indians the path of tears.

However, this approach —as existential rather than political— would be pragmatic and not transcendentalist; hermeneutically detaching itself from the liberal tradition, which sponsors it with its own historical reference, as ideology. Hence those contradictions that prevent the consolidation of a local black culture, in transcendentalism; with the conditioning of the past, which they will partially deny, based on their own founding myth.

An example of this denial would be the historic participation of African political structures in the slave trade; as a contradiction that would separates them from the origin they claim, making it inconsistent as a political expression. Another example would be that of the same appeal to the exceptions, and in general to the Mediterranean area; by which they cannot access the resources of the original tribal organization, such as that of geronto democracy and matrilineality.