African Philosophy, Myth and Reality (original) (raw)

To Be American Is To Be Indebted To Blackness: Understanding Blackness as Constitutive of an

2023

In this paper, I argue that African-American’s fight for national inclusion and belonging, from the American Revolution to the late twentieth century, centres some of the founding contradictions and tensions of America’s democratic project even as it implores Americans to embark on a process of national healing and reconciliation. Starting with a discussion on the founding contradiction of the United States, embodied through the juxtaposition of its declaration of human equality while retaining the practice and institution of chattel slavery, I will show some of the earliest struggles and constraints placed on Black life in America and our ability to access meaningful and gratuitous entry into society. Following the North’s victory of the Civil War, American life saw an opportunity to effectively include now-freed Black Americans into its fold. Despite some of the achievements that highlighted Black American life during the Reconstruction Era, that, too, was mediated by forms of legalised discrimination such as segregated Jim Crow, particularly in the South. Eventually, the dehumanising trauma of slavery mixed with the experiences of Southern Jim Crow, as well as better job opportunities in the North, saw an influx of Black migrants to Northern States in what came to be dubbed the Great Migration. However, it would take over another half century, manifested in the Civil Rights Movement, for widespread, national organising, advocating for the acknowledgement and enforcement of Black folks' citizenship and the rights. This paper takes up these historical moments in African-American life, in an attempt to shed light not only on the obstacles, but also on the nuanced forms of physical and political resistance and ideological advancements that came to define these socio-political moments.