Domestic colonialism
January 29, 2025 12:24 AM   Subscribe

Between the late 1950s and the middle of the 1960s, more and more Black Americans began envisioning the relationship between decolonization and the Black freedom struggle in a new way. Before then, the relationship was primarily seen as one of inspiration. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke in these terms in a sermon delivered after his return from the independence ceremonies in Ghana in 1957. The anticolonial movement there, in his estimation, served as an example from which Black Americans might draw strategic lessons and philosophical reinforcement in their parallel, but conceptually distinct, struggle for freedom. By the middle of the 1960s, however, an increasing number of Black intellectuals—including, if only on occasion, King himself—began to describe American racism as a kind of colonialism. from The Lexicon of Empire [Boston Review]
posted by chavenet (4 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 
I understand what it means for a colony to achieve independence from its colonizer through national independence. What does it look like for a sub colony within a nation to achieve independence?
posted by AstroCatCommander at 3:05 AM on January 29 [3 favorites]


It's not Independence, per se, it's the cessation of treatment as a subjugated class. Things like equality of opportunity, respect and protection of civil rights, freedom from violent oppression by law enforcement, equal treatment by non-governmental institutions such as banks and real estate firms, access to equal quality of education.... You know, the big, obvious stuff that white led institutions still have massive issues with. Decolonization in this case means being fully welcomed into the policy as equal citizens.

However, there is an argument for a more independence-oriented understanding of this, which is the freedom to develop parallel Black institutions to serve that community, who are understandably traumatized after centuries of dishonest treatment and often violent oppression.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 4:46 AM on January 29 [3 favorites]


I think maybe the first example of the term Internal Colonialism being used was by Stalin in relation to the other soviet republics. Russia didn't have colonies to exploit, so Stalin committed to a policy of Internal Colonialism to bootstrap his empire.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 5:50 AM on January 29 [2 favorites]


I am in the process of reading MLK's writings beginning in the 50's and moving into the 60's and people throwing off colonial yokes is his go to in terms of referencing other people who have faced similar barriers to freedom. India is a major point of interest in that he feels there is true collegiality between the Indian people and the lingering British presence, i.e., that they lived and worked in harmony after India declared its independence. That was his repeated stance for what he hoped to see in the American South and much broader United States. I have a pitiful amount of knowledge about post-Independence British and Indian relations, so I honestly don't know how real the relationship was between formerly oppressed and the oppressors.

But the perspective that African-Americans represented an internal colony of the United States makes a lot of sense. White Americans sought to control their lives, their bodies, and everything else with the same, if not greater, degree than colonial powers might elsewhere around the globe. The difference being, the colony was imported versus established abroad. The colonizer, so to speak, in this instance isn't withdrawing raw goods for its benefit, but the labor to produce the raw goods.

This also reminded me of Steven Hahn's A Nation Under Our Feet, as something of a precursor to the 1960s colonial theory.
posted by Atreides at 7:12 AM on January 29 [1 favorite]


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