Reimagined Communities

African American Nationalism
Throughout the chapter about African American Politics, the African American “nation” is constantly looking for a separate identity from white America. Through the struggle with religion and foreign relations, the blacks constantly look for a separate stance then that of the American nation. Through relations with the Middle East the blacks find a way to make their own nation through an imagined community of opposition to white supremacy.
Muhammad Ali said, “I’m not an American; I’m a black man”. The black population is so fed up with their treatment in the United States that they do not want anything to do with whites. They want their separate nation. They even request for four southern states to make their own nation. However, they do not need this geographical mark to form their own imagined community. This community is built as the opposite of the white community. The black leaders do everything possible to take the opposite stance from whites.
The black imagined community is constantly trying to build up their reputation. They try to live through others in comparing themselves to the Jews, “God’s people”, in the Exodus. The formation of Israel is considered a success for black people because they see themselves as the same. A success and yet they immediately turn on Israel for the Nation of Islam.
After the comparison with Jews, the black population turns to the Nation of Islam. As Ameer Baraka said, “Islam offered what the Black man needs… a reconstruction… a total way of life that he can involve himself with that is post-American, in a sense”. Post American is exactly what the black people were looking for. They saw Islam as the answer to anti-America. It is even stated that for some, “the appeal of Islam lay precisely in its challenge to Christianity’s Eurocentric heritage and links with imperialism.
Through Islam, blacks created their dominance over whites. White supremacy was completely flipped around in the black imagination. The central myth in the Nation of Islam was the invention of white people by Yacub. They tied themselves in with the Arab peoples who were the first inhabitants of the earth. They backed Egypt, a nation that showed the power of a black leader, in a battle against the “white people’s” Israel.
Black performances also showed this hatred of whites. The Black Mass told how white people came to live in a black world. Whiteness is displayed as evil. They create an animal like creature that is the white man who is barbaric and disgusting. They attempt to show the white man in the same way they have been represented in minstrel shows throughout American history.
Throughout this chapter we see that it is not necessary for a nation to have a specific geographical area. The black imagined community was far spread and well led. It shows that they are completely fed up with the abuse and torture coming from whites and are forced to start their own nation. The only problem with this nation is that after years of persecution it is built on hostility towards the white man. That seems to be this imagined community’s only fundamental principal: A place where black is best. Did they really create their own nation, or a “symbolic countercitizenship”, a counterhegemony.

The idea of moral geographies certainly takes a more interesting turn in response to the Black Power movement during the 1960s in the United States. African Americans openly communicated their feelings of alliance with oppressed men and women of color all over the world, extending geographical borders to encompass newfound loyalties amongst billions of people living under the rule of white men. Borstelmann argues the parallels and discrepancies between the Cold War and the struggle for civil rights in America, which surface most clearly with the shift among young black radicals from a religious and peaceful movement towards a more militant drive. That is, African Americans at home recognized and acted upon the striking similarities between their condition and that of Africans abroad during this global battle for white power.
However, this alliance seems counterproductive in the grand scheme of the Cold War, for many black power proponents continued to dig deeper and struck upon the free market as the ultimate culprit. According to Borstelmann, “…black power advocates began broadening their discussion of racism and its causes to include capitalism as the fundamental problem in America,” (205). These young African Americans had a powerful message to proclaim, especially when they rallied together against the racist war in Vietnam. But their attack on capitalism, while entirely legitimate, worked to possibly downplay their larger point that economic injustice translates into racial injustice on the home front.
Yet even their claim that African Americans did not see national borders but aligned themselves with dark-skinned members of the Third World seems to imply that the Third World consented and consequently also looked to these Americans for comradeship. As Borstelmann writes, “no longer Americans who believed in their government, they considered themselves domestic allies of Third World revolutionary forces…” (205). This statement brings into question if people of the global South fighting colonial rule acknowledged this connection to men and women of the oppressed men and women of the First World.
Using the colonial analogy, African American radicals seemingly assumed that their struggle for liberation must be the same abroad. In this assumption, black power advocates fall victim to the American tendency to assume that our freedoms and our desires must be the same for people all around the world. President Johnson particularly expressed this feeling. “Like many of his generation,” writes Borstelmann, “he assumed unquestioningly that American values were universal. He expected other peoples to admire the achievements of the United States and to aspire to similar affluence,” (173). This belief in the universality of American ideals – even radical African American ideals of the black power movement – is what first instigated the Cold War from the start.
Although the black power advocates appeared to think that they needed to acquire the same language of the perpetrators in order to overcome their oppression. According to Malcolm X, “the best way to stop the Ku Klux Klan is to talk to the Ku Klux Klan in the only language it understands…” (186). While the message was clear, black power could never accomplish anything longstanding by counteracting the same methodology and techniques of the oppressor. Perhaps with the coupling of anti-capitalist thought and civil rights, the African Americans backtracked in their progress to attain, once and for all, the American freedoms that others gloated were meant for all individuals.