CREDIT: ANDRZEJ KRAUZE <\/p>\n<\/div> In the late 1980s, the Reverend Jesse Jackson was leading the charge in calling for blackness to be ditched and replaced with \u2018African American\u2019. It became a defining transition in black American history. Two arguments were made for this shift. First, the claim that blackness had represented a sense of shame in and a refusal to engage with the African heritage of America\u2019s black population. This might seem strange, given that black power was originally articulated by sections of the black movement who saw themselves as black nationalists and wanted to reconnect themselves with ongoing struggles for liberation on the African continent. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Second, tellingly, was the argument that black held more negative associations in people\u2019s minds \u2013 African American sounded less threatening. While the debate was inconclusive, African American steadily replaced black in textbooks and state ethnic data gathering. African American held the respectability of other hyphenated groups that had included themselves in the American family, such as Italian Americans and Asian Americans. The black was once again an American, the descendant of slaves, and black freedom was once again contained within the nation\u2019s borders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This transition was not only happening in America. Across the global north, black was either given suffixes tying diasporic populations to the metropole or ditched altogether. In Britain, the 1991 census was the first to include an ethnic designation beyond \u2018white\u2019 or \u2018coloured\u2019. Black \u2013 a category which had once encompassed all former subjects of empire \u2013 was co-opted by the state and became: \u2018Black African\u2019, \u2018Black Caribbean\u2019, \u2018Indian\u2019, \u2018Pakistani\u2019, \u2018Bangladeshi\u2019. Those of mixed heritage had to choose. This data failed, and continues to fail, to distinguish \u2018race\u2019 (as a constructed and real social hierarchy) from \u2018ethnicity\u2019 and geographical heritage, but that is not what it was intended to do. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In the administration of empire, ethnicity data gathering did the work of creating ethnicities by making these \u2018communities\u2019 a primary mode through which the citizen and non-citizen alike navigated their relationship with the state \u2013 the groups have not been static, but they remain defined by the state. The classifications were not neutral but formed the datasets for investigations into racial inequality \u2013 determining the language through which communities could seek funding and redress for harms from the state. In Britain, as in America, narrower, discrete categories became naturalised as the contours of race. Anti-racism was largely shorn of its internationalism as political horizons retreated into \u2018community organising\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Throughout this process, the material conditions sustaining any coherent black community with a single collective interest were also eroded. We saw the emergence and consolidation of a black bourgeoisie whose daily lives did not reflect the conditions of domination embedded in earlier accounts of blackness. Instead, the husk of this relation was transformed into a cultural politics in which blackness existed as an abstract community that obfuscates rather than illuminates the conditions it emerged to articulate. Many within this emergent black bourgeoisie have clung to blackness to position themselves as dominated while appropriating the trauma of working-class black communities who live the conditions of domination, exploitation and carcerality that previously tied black struggle to the internationalist politics of the global south, not least Palestine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This contradiction was displaced into anxieties about the exploitation of black people by non-black people of colour. You could now speak of black wealth as collective, shared in some abstract sense by the working-class black people from whose exploitation it was amassed. The task was no longer to dismantle the oppressive structure of race, and the extractive processes that create and sustain it but rather to manage the essentially oppositional interests of different communities of colour. The black militant has been largely replaced in the popular imaginary by the black columnist. In such a world, the question of Palestine has become a black political litmus test.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As Angela Davis continues to argue passionately, solidarity with Palestinians comes from more than a place of sympathy. It involves a recognition of the shared history of struggle and the similarities linking the technologies of domination levelled against us. \u2018Palestine under Israeli occupation is the worst possible example of a carceral society,\u2019 Davis says. This framing sees blackness as political, one relation within a broader matrix of imperialist domination. It sees black struggle as one contour of a politics that also encapsulates Palestinian struggle and every other struggle against imperialism \u2013 \u2018a world struggle\u2019. By contrast, the ethnic black frame rejects the possibility of such a common cause. It posits comparisons with Palestine as essentially antiblack, thus paralysing routes to solidarity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Black politics faces fundamental challenges today; 1970s slogans ring hollow now. The apparatuses of domination to which they refer have evolved in response to our gains. Recounting these bitter transformations of racial politics is not a call for imitating the language and imagery of old; it is instead to render explicit the logics and conditions that shaped the thinking that today presents itself to us as natural. Identities transform, they do not inscribe themselves on blank canvases \u2013 words accumulate layers of meaning in their travels like old library books annotated by generation after generation. I like the metaphor of the palimpsest: blackness in its new form will always bear the weight of the morphology that clouds its history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If the great mystification of racecraft inheres in presenting recent historical constructions as if they were natural and eternal, then the work of demystification means recovering agency: expanding the range of things in our lives we believe we can change. How we identify ourselves, and with whom we find common cause are two of those things \u2013 we just need to find a language to express it. The words of righteous indignation might retain their force over time (racism, after all, is still with us) but what really matters is to ask afresh what winning would look like in changed conditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The question of Palestine has become a black political litmus test, argues Annie Olaloku-Teriba, defining the very nature of black identity and politics <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":38489,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[279,1852,848,244],"tags":[2645],"class_list":["post-28302","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-civil-liberties","category-colonialism-imperialism","category-palestine-middle-east","category-race-racism","tag-annie-olaloku-teriba"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.redpepper.org.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/09\/Krauze-22.jpg\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nBecoming hyphenated<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Becoming bourgeois<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Recovering agency<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
This article first appeared in Issue #229\u00a0No Return to Normal<\/em>. Subscribe<\/a> today to support independent socialist media and get your copy hot off the press!<\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"