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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