C – Political Globalization

Afro-Americans under American Imperialism

III – The Formal and Informal American government policy towards Afro-Americans

Before we begin our description of American governance with respect to Afro-Americans, I would like to clarify the distinction I have made between “formal’’ and ‘’informal’’ American government policy.

One could say that a ‘’formal government policy’’ is the one which coincides , transmits and applies to the political ideals that are reflected in European Enlightenment(1715-1789), which were adopted and defended by the Founding Fathers of the United States, those who drafted the American Constitution. Any American government policy and any American political institution not conforming to these political axioms which make up the ideological core of America’s Constitutional Democracy, should be classified as ‘’informal’’ and ‘’illegitimate’’ human constructs, as ‘’political hybrids’’.

In the American Declaration of Independence which was adopted by all American colonies on July 4, 1776, Thomas Jefferson(1743-1826), who drafted in it the political ideals of America’s Founding Fathers, inserted the tenets that, ‘’…We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable Rights; that among these are life , liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men , deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…’’.(p.17, Freedom, a history of U.S., Hakim, Joy, Oxford University Press, 2003)

These political tenets of the Declaration of Independence were the ideological concepts of those European thinkers who had promoted European Enlightenment during the 18th century , like Jean-Jacques Rousseau(1712-1778), Voltaire(1694-1778), Adam Smith(1723-1790) and Immanuel Kant(1724-1804). Their intellectual teachings had produced a cultural upheaval in Western Civilization, leading to the founding of the United States in 1776, the French Revolution(1789-1799), the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789, and the creation of the modern nation-state which was based on a Constitutional Democracy, the first one being the First French Republic(1792-1804).

If we now examine American history, we observe that since the founding of the United States in 1776, as a Constitutional Democracy, there have been critical political indicators and   everyday societal realities of institutional and ideological digressions in relation to the universal humanistic and democratic values of the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the American Constitution, the last ratified by every American state legislature in 1788.

In the Declaration of the Rights of Man, approved by the Revolutionary National Assembly of France on August 26,1789, Article 16 notes that,’’…A society in which the observance of the law is not assured, nor the separation of powers defined , has no constitution at all…’’. (http://avalon.law.yale.edu). Taking into consideration this Article 16, we could easily say that during the history of the United States, there have been a multitude of distortions and digressions of the democratic tenets of the American Constitution and the American Declaration of Independence at all levels of policy-making.Starting from the civil rights of American citizens to American foreign policy which has to have the consent of both Houses of Congress(House of Representatives, Senate) , if war is initiated on another country. One could therefore conclude, that the American government, both at the federal and state level, has functioned many times as if there was no constitution, as if the United States was not a Constitutional Democracy!!!

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 -1968 ) in his autobiography, tries to explain objectively the institutional and political contradictions which exist in America’s political culture , between the democratic political guidelines of a Constitutional Democracy and actual government policy towards its citizens, especially its Afro-American citizens. Martin Luther King emphasizes that ,’’…We cannot have an enlightened democracy, with one great group living in ignorance. We cannot have a healthy nation with one-tenth of the people ill-nourished , sick, harboring germs of disease which recognize no color line –obey no Jim Crow laws. We cannot have a nation orderly and sound with one group so ground down and thwarted that it is almost forced into unsocial attitude and crime…’’.(p.9, The autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr., edited by Clayborne Carson, Warner Books 1998)

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C.- Political Globalization

b) The First Nations of North America and Afro-Americans under American Imperialism

Afro-Americans under American Imperialism

I — Introduction

As I was reading through the various statistics , documents and essays concerning the history of Afro-Americans since their arrival as African slaves in North America beginning in the 17th century , I could not but feel the same human disgust for European colonialist and later on American colonialist policy with respect to what Native Americans had experienced in their own history, as First Nations, within their own native territories of thousands of years.

As a Greek person, I personally feel uneasy and politically alienated for belonging to a European political culture with its ‘’supposedly’’ democratic political ideals and Christian humanistic values, and why not , I feel distraught for being part of ‘’modern human civilization’’, which for the last 6,000 years, has devoted most of its human energy and potential in accumulating and consuming irrationally the earth’s natural resources to the physical and spiritual detriment of his own specie and to the physical destruction and poisoning of his natural environment which keeps his specie alive. The ‘’modern’’ and ‘’evolved’’ human specie has shown itself to be dysfunctional and in disharmony with respect to all other living organisms; reinforcing a self-destructive and nihilistic human evolution which will naturally end with his own ‘’extinction’’ , as it had occurred in the past with the dinosaurs.

The history of the Afro-Americans during the last 400 years, is essentially the story of Black Slavery originating in the continent of Africa beginning in the 16th century, and which represented a major historical factor in Western Imperialism and Globalization, economic, political and cultural. Black Slavery controlled by Western European Powers, represented a critical economic component to Western Globalization, and especially American Globalization within the Western Hemisphere. Therefore, if we are to better understand American Globalization and the socio-political and economic status of   Afro-Americans today, we should begin our analysis with the socio-economic institution of Black Slavery as it evolved in North America from the 17th century.

In the first section of our article on Afro-Americans, we will first examine the various aspects of Black Slavery as it was introduced and applied in North America since the 17th century, throughout the American colonies and later on in the United States of America when it was founded as an independent nation-state in 1776. We will then examine official American government policy with respect to the civil status of Afro-Americans till the present day. Finally, in this section of our article, we shall look into at the involvement, the contribution and the civil status of African-Americans as fighting or military combatants within the defence apparatus of the American colonies and consequently , within the American Armed Forces. The civil status of Afro-Americans as regular soldiers or combatants, is a very accurate historical indicator to their socio-political status and their civil rights within this North American geopolitical entity and its political culture during the last 400 years.

We shall now note down definitions of political terms and concepts which I believe are relevant with respect to our article on the historical experience of Afro-Americans during the last 350 years.

They are the following:

Apartheid – a policy or system of segregation or discrimination on grounds of race (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com)

Colonialist – a person who supports the practice of gaining political control over other countries and occupying them with settlers (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com)

Authoritarian – favouring or enforcing strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com)

Oligarchy – a small group of people having control of a country or organization (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com)

Ethnocentric – evaluating other cultures according to perceptions originating in the standards and customs of one’s own culture (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com)

White supremacist – one who believes that white people are racially superior to others and should therefore dominate society (www.thefreedictionary.com)

Racism – prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com)

Lynching – putting a person to death by mob action without due process of law (www.thefreedictionary.com)

Assimilation –assimilation, in anthropology or sociology is the process whereby individuals or groups of differing ethnic heritage are absorbed into the dominant culture of a society (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com)

Segregation – the enforced separation of different racial groups in a country , community or establishment (www.collinsdictionary.com)

Social Integration – the combination of previously segregated social facilities into a non-segregated system (www.collinsdictionary.com)

Political Culture – Political Culture is defined by the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences as ‘the set of attitudes , beliefs and sentiments that give order and meaning to a political process and which provide the underlying assumption and rules that govern behavior in the political system (https://en.wikipedia.org)

We shall now register personal observations by three Afro-American political leaders who greatly influenced the socio-political evolution of Afro-Americans during the 20th century. These political protagonists provided Afro-American society with the ideological and social guidelines to define its historical identity within American society, as well as the political tools to promote their own civil rights and socio-economic interests within the United States of America.

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C- Political Globalization-b) The   First    Nations of   North  America  and  Afro-Americans,  under  American  Imperialism!!!

1)The   First  Nations of  North  America- the  Indian tribes

We  shall now examine in a general context, how the indigenous  Indians  and the  African  American slaves, who much later became ‘’ second class’’  American citizens, were treated by  American authorities, whether they represented the  Federal  Government or  State  Governments. We shall demonstrate that through official American policy, these two racial groups were treated  as  ‘’savages’’ and  as ‘’subhuman’’ social entities, since they were not  white, of  European ancestry  and  Christian. For  almost all  American settlers , ‘’divine destiny’’ dictated that these ‘’peoples’’  were assigned to service in a  servile  and subservient way , the long term  expectations  of the  American governments to create a  ‘’benevolent  empire’’, popularized by  Benjamin Franklin(1706-1790)  and  Thomas  Paine(1737-1809), major architects of  America’s political  culture , or an ‘’empire of liberty’’ as  President Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809) espoused as political axiom. Therefore we see, that  the  United  States was founded on a  political environment  of  ‘’virtual reality’’, both politically and ideologically!!!(www.americanforeignrelations.com)

By  observing the  socio-economic circumstances  under which these two distinct but major social communities of the  United  States evolved  during the last 250 years approximately, we will be able to once again substantiate our position in classifying this Nation as authoritarian, racist and imperialistic, demonstrating very few ideological commonalities with the political concepts of liberalism and republicanism, as well as with the socio-cultural  tenets of  Jesus Christ as described in the Christian Gospel!!!

We shall begin by analysing the historical evolution of the native American Indians, before and after American  Independence.

Before we go into detail concerning the plight of the Indian Nations of North America under the ‘’colonialist governance’’ of the white European settlers, before and after  American Independence in 1776, I would like to present a statement from the introduction of a study, undertaken by the University of Vienna in 2006, addressing the ‘’genocide’’ of the Cherokee Indian Nation(whose territory covered most of the south-eastern United States) under official government policy at all levels(federal, state, local), utilizing  American military forces and the American Judicial System to weaken, to dismantle and to eventually displace its peoples from their ancestral land.

The   introduction of the article, entitled ‘’The  Trail of  Tears across the Mississippi Valley’’, emphasizes the fact that, ‘’…There were ten million Native Americans on the American continent when the first non-Indians  arrived. Over the next 300 years, 90% of all  Native American original population was either wiped out by disease, famine, or warfare, imported by the whites…’’.(http://www.univie.ac.at/Anglistik/)

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