With the disastrous U.S. elections complete and the North American political Left gasping for air, many are now drowning in a sea of pessimism. How are we ever to affect substantive and positive social change on this continent? Some suggest that the failure of the Democratic campaign was based on an inability to provide a real alternative to the faith-based imperial fundamentalism and racist fear-mongering espoused by the Bush regime; others have thrown up their arms in despair over what they deem to be a hopelessly lost American body politic.

In the weeks leading to the election, Seven Oaks was able to speak to Dr. Nikhil Singh from the University of Washington, whose recently published book, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Harvard: 2004), really gets to the heart of why the spectrum of American political discourse (including much Left-wing thought) has been unable to transcend the fundamentally racist underpinnings of the country’s history and in effect counter the rightward march of American public culture. Alternatively, Singh looks to what he calls the long civil rights struggle of American Blacks during the 20th Century as the starting point for tracing a legacy of radicalism that can also provide the way forward for progressives as they try to come to terms with new forms of fascistic social control now very much at play in the global political landscape.

Also check out the recent Seven Oaks review of Singh’s new book.

After Singh’s recent speaking engagement in Vancouver, he and Seven Oaks’ Ian Rocksborough-Smith – a Simon Fraser University graduate student of African-American history – engaged in an e-mail conversation about the significance of Singh’s book, as well as the general tone of American politics :

Ian Rocksborough-Smith: Your recent book provides a much-needed critique of racial liberalism and puts to rest the painfully resilient assumption that American democracy is perpetually capable of transcending its imperialist history.

Singh: I think it’s a good question, because when I try to talk about these things I try to think in a sort of spirit of optimism about how we can transform the United States into a more equitable society and into a society in which some of the things I care about become more evident. But I’m struck by your question and its implicit interpretation of my book. The assumption that American democracy is capable of transcending imperialist history, which recurs again and again, is wrong. What we seem to be living through instead is the resurgence and a renewal of some of the worst, that is, most imperial, aspects of American history. So I think we need to think through what kind of alternatives we can develop, what political traditions and histories, and contemporary tendencies we can use to counter our pessimism of the intellect, which is understandable, with what Gramsci called an optimism of the will. Because in some ways, America is not unique, in so far as imperialism is an outgrowth of the worldwide expansion of capitalism. Capitalism can’t really solve the problems of war and uneven development, or the emergence of intractable contradictions within its development. So that’s at the biggest level of analysis, sometimes not the most helpful level of analysis. But I think that it’s nonetheless true.

You know, since WWII, the United States strategy has been essentially to maintain the system of world capitalism that had been shaped by imperialism and to establish and maintain its own preeminence within that system. And really that’s been a 50 or 60-year project, and an on-going one, as we can see from the policies of the current administration. One of the interesting things to think about is those years immediately following the end of WWII, and whether a different kind of trajectory may have been envisioned or enacted. What happens at the end of WWII is very dark: the war ends with the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, which is a signal for a new war, a 30-years war in the Asian rimlands. You’ve also got the emergence of anti-communism as a kind of rubric for American global strategy, which works because it has so many different elements to it. It helps to suppress and marginalize the Left within the U.S., as well as within Europe. It helps to create a discourse and rationale for interventions abroad that can somehow appear as if they are in the same historical trajectory as WWII, particularly, anti-fascism. What ends up happening instead is a reintegration of elements of the fascism that was defeated into an American strategy for the rest of the world. Thus, you have a kind of divided policy: a Marshall plan for Europe and the promotion of what is in some ways a more progressive welfare-state policy than you have in the United States, and a policy of pretty naked domination for the rest of the world, either by proxy war, counter-insurgency, covert action or full blown military intervention.

And obviously under that rubric we have the establishment of dictatorial client states, death squads, as well as untold atrocities, much of which we know about but still don’t have a proper accounting of in American public culture. Up to 200,000 killed in Guatemala, three to four million killed in Vietnam and Korea, a million killed in Indonesia, decades of support for apartheid South Africa, coups in Chile and Iran, and so on. And all of these are things that happen under the hand of the U.S., though they are not necessarily directly executed by the U.S. And you know, the people in the country who talk about these things, document them, and talk on about them endlessly, like Noam Chomsky, probably our greatest chronicler, our greatest national pessimist, and a tremendous political resource (although someone I have my own differences with) – don’t really get much of a hearing. You know anywhere else around the world, he would be absolutely indispensable, but he’s not seen this way in the United States.

Today, even conservatives like Niall Ferguson - who largely ignores the bad news of British imperialism – recognize that the United States “is an Empire in denial.” I think that’s true, and I think that we’re sort of stuck with this. The sources of denial are several fold: it is rooted in a national origin story of anti-colonial revolution where the U.S. is cast as the first anti-colonial nation, a nation born to be against empire, and that’s a deeply rooted story. It is also based upon the idea that the U.S. has never (with the exception of the brutal war and forty-year occupation of the Philippines) pursued overseas empire. These truisms combine with on-going non-recognition, or better, the open secret, of America’s internal colonialism. In many ways, it is true that the United States hasn’t maintained the kind of overseas empires that the British, Dutch, and the French constructed. But the United States fashioned itself (and here I am using the very words of statesmen like Washington, Adams and Jefferson) as a “domestic territorial empire” from its inception. We must not lose site of how this other national origin story shaped an imperial national subjectivity among the majority population in the U.S. long after the facts of internal colonization have been naturalized and forgotten.

IRS: Your book is largely a comprehensive history of how 20th Century Black struggles fundamentally and consistently challenge the contours of American nationhood and its white supremacist underpinnings. How do the legacies of these struggles provide the way forward for progressive social movements today?

Singh: One of the reasons I was so drawn to the African American political and intellectual tradition was it was one place where this kind of national denial of race and empire was not going on. Because there was a first hand experience of these kinds of policies and practices going all the way back and obviously these things are still going on for African American people and people of color. And not just people of color, but all people who are discarded, I mean there is no other industrialized country that has so many discarded people as the United States does. So I was really drawn to African American social and political thought because it felt to me that if there was the possibility of transcending imperialist history in the United States it would come from those communities and traditions that have been most mobilized against it, and have even won some of the arguments against it, and that at least began a process of re-educating Americans about their history and about what it might take to transform it. I think that our most successful tradition of struggle was the long black struggle for freedom which we still define too narrowly as a struggle for “civil rights”. And that freedom struggle has obviously fallen on some very hard times, but I don’t think it’s over by any means. And as many people like SCLC’s Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jack O’Dell have said, it was never just a struggle for the rights and well-being of black people, it was always a broader struggle for a different kind of country and a different kind of world.

I still have questions in my mind… I mean some of the splits in the movement in the 60s are precisely related to this question of the difficulty of transcending imperialist history, because there was clearly a wing of the movement that said we need to trade-off the possibility of getting certain benefits within America by deferring to American strategic priorities in the world arena. And I think that this was a devil’s bargain. It ended up being the kind of position someone like Bayard Rustin took in the late ‘60s, though evidently not the position of King, who came out against the Vietnam War in 1967.

We don’t really know what would have happened had King lived, and I don’t think that it’s far-fetched at all to think that King’s assassination was quite systematically planned, though we have never been able to prove it, definitively. It’s clear to me at least, that King’s coming out against the Vietnam war was not just a radical move, but an incredibly powerful one as well, that proposed the possibility of tying together struggles which were at worst fragmented and separated, and at best, insufficiently coordinated. I think it is also important to recognize as I argue in the book that for a brief moment at the end of his life, King suggested a bridge between the past and futures of black radicalism. It is telling that in one of his last public addresses he identified himself with W.E.B. Du Bois as an activist for peace increasingly estranged from the land of his birth. Just as it is notable that even as he rejected militant sloganeering and violent rhetoric, he recognized the links between racism, urban poverty and militarism highlighted by black power radicals. Indeed one of the grave difficulties of black social movement politics is how to avoid reinventing the wheel. How do we sustain and reproduce the political intelligence and strategic experience of our forebears, particularly in the face of the kind of repression that so often takes them from us before their time?

IRS: I recall seeing Martin Luther King, Jr. pictured on anti-war posters in the states in the months leading up to the big February 2003 mobilizations where his quote about the U.S. being the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world” is used instead of the frequent “I have a dream” quote most commonly associated with his public remembrance. What do you think about the process of remembering King in terms of popular education?

Singh: I’m pleased to hear about this, though it surprises me a little bit as well. I mean so much of the recent history of the American progressivism and if you will the American Left has been a striving for the left-wing of the possible, which since Vietnam has meant appearing patriotic at all costs. But, in striving for the Left wing of the possible, I think we just continue to allow the discourse to move to the Right. Because the Right is actually utopian today, the Right is radical, and the Right has a stranglehold on nationalist discourse in the U.S. And I think that links back to my earlier point about fascism, this is not a conservative Right at work today, it’s a radical Right.

There’s a definition of fascism I like very much: fascism is revolutionary discourse put in reverse. You know, we’ve been living through what they call a “Republican revolution” in the United States. And they’ll push it as far as they can go, they really will. One of the things that we can take some solace in is that there is also democratic tradition in the United States and people in this country still have an expectation of a kind of functioning democracy. There is also a libertarian stream running through the United States, so people don’t really like things like the Patriot Act. And there are also expressions of cosmopolitanism and internationalism that reflect curiosity and concern about how the U.S. relates to, and is perceived in the wider world. But in so far as American society remains dominated by a (contradictory) imperatives of socially fragmenting, capitalist-consumerism and civic-familial moralism, coupled with the immense suceptibility of American people to racist, fear-mongering, conspiratorial appeals, you know, we’re in danger. We’re in danger of things slipping even further, particularly if there’s another terrorist attack, who knows. But the ability of the Right to exploit these things and the rising prominence of a kind of Presidential cult that mobilizes white, Christian identity politics, is something I think we have got to start taking head on in our political organizing and strategy.

We can’t continue just going for the Left wing of the possible where we don’t talk about race, sex and gender inequalities; we don’t talk about empire and the immiseration of half the globe; we don’t talk about the military industrial complex and environmental destruction. What makes us think that if we don’t talk about the things that are now kind of off limits in American politics that we’ll be able to win an argument about jobs or health care, or win politically through an appeal to some kind of bland mainstream economic interests that will supposedly win back some of the lost territory?

IRS: How do you think that the Right has become so organized in its panoptical control of almost everything, such that you have this co-opting of so-called ‘color-blind’ discourse which obscures the ongoing and increasing forms of racialized inequality? I mean you have prominent fascists like Patrick Buchanan now criticizing the Republican Party for not succeeding in creating a “color blind” society.

Singh: They’ve learned to use that discourse very effectively. It’s just like everything else, and it’s just like I was saying about empire, this is a society of people who always think they’re right and good. So there’s this denial of empire and now we live in a post-civil rights era, in which many people think that centuries of racial inequality were resolved in a few short years of legislative reform. In fact what we see when we look at the history, is that you have the beginning of a reconstruction of domination (as Adolph Reed once called it) as early as 1968-9. In other words, there was actually a very short period in which real progress on racial matters occurred. We still live with the legacy of what was accomplished to be sure, especially at the local level, and especially in some of our cities that are really progressive, much more progressive than the rest of the country. The whole Reagan era strategy of course was an anti-urban federalism, aimed at making cities less powerful, and making cities more vulnerable to social decay and this has continued. The current Bush administration hasn’t even released the money for 9/11 promised to New York City; this is a continuation of the same kind of policy. At the same time, we’ve also got struggles at the local level that have been lost. Indeed, cities like New York are increasingly designing themselves as gated communities for the financial industry, pushing out the poor, and creating a climate defined by the policing of public space. Really that is the sort of discourse of the everyday in America right now. Indeed, Bush hopes to win the election by appealing to this ‘honest’ security platform, which really means that America needs to be secure for conducting business and for commuting back to our safe houses. The idea that security becomes the defining term and that it is defined in such narrow terms, not really genuine economic or political security or human security, but the physical safety and civil privatism of those who do business, is a really, really troubling development.

To get back to your question of how color-blind discourse works, I think many people see through it. Most people of color see through it. I think that it has the potential to co-opt some. We’ve certainly seen the rise of a kind of Black neo-conservative pundit in recent years: people like Ward Connelly in California, and Shelby Steele, who is not quite as bad, but gets a lot of press. But they don’t reflect the norms and understandings that tend to still run through Black communities – still the most politically intelligent communities in the United States. For these are people who see discrimination when they go to try to buy a car, or get housing loan; they see how their public schools are disintegrating; experience police harassment first hand. There’s a recognition and an understanding that this country is so far away from achieving any kind of color-blindness or racial justice, and the reality is it can’t. It can’t unless there’s a massive reordering of governmental priorities. And this is again what King recognized, what the whole movement recognized. Even at its most conservative, the Left wing of the possible of the civil rights movement envisioned the United States on the model of a full employment welfare state, a kind of European-style social democracy.

IRS: Something that seemed possible under Roosevelt?

Singh: Yes, and of course, Roosevelt had to back off from these visions pretty quickly. It’s something I’m dancing around I guess, it’s hard to figure out how to regain the initiative in the conversation around racial justice because of how pervasive and powerful this “color blind” discourse has become.

IRS: And ultimately I guess the question is where the new anti-racism is going to come from?

Singh: Right. I think that is the question.

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