My first commentary on a text, ended up being longer than I envisioned.
Says Comrade Sheik:
“We cannot speak about national antagonisms between whites and Negroes in the U.S. in the ordinary sense of that term, because the American Negroes are not a nation. Apart from the complete absence among them of a national language, a national culture; in their racial conflicts with the white Americans, the fundamental economic content and sense of all national antagonisms is absent; the presence of two economic systems standing at different stages in social economic development.” [Emphasis mine. — H. H.]Leaving aside for the moment the question of national language and culture, we shall deal first with the most fundamental argument of Comrade Sheik, which is contained in the last sentence.
I thought about this a bit before. We arrive at an issue with the English language, or rather vernacular. English speakers often use the words “nation” and “people” interchangeably, or think that a nation is always made up of one people. In other languages, there is a big difference between nation and people. For example, it is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, not the “National Republic of Korea”. A nation can be made up many peoples, in fact the US is a nation made up of many peoples. “National identity” is something that is usually enforced top-down by nation-states, especially liberal ones after fall of empires in WWI when you had the situation that now you had new, national geographic entities populated by various people (due to people transfers and moving within large empires) so that it was necessary to develop a “national identity”.
Nations/nation-states are defined through their chosen symbols like flag and anthem. A people can also choose a flag and anthem and other symbols, of course, but if we look at countries in Europe for example, their symbols were chosen by rulers, governmental committees, presidents and so on. A succinct way to say it is that a nation (national identity, national feeling) is something that is imposed on a people.
The author recognises this, too:
It is also necessary to state that Sheik’s inference that the Negroes have no special culture is absolutely unfounded. We have already indicated that the Negroes have a culture which reflects their whole historical development as a people in the U.S…
Of course, American Blacks (I say Blacks cause 1) “Negro” is outdated, even though the article uses it, 2) African-American is a weird term because there’s a lot of black people in America who do not feel “African”) have a culture, they have a language (English) and they are a people, but their nationality is American, cause that’s the only force at the moment that can try to impose a national identity to them. People can and do reject national identities (like myself, for example – I don’t feel like the nationality of my passport, I feel part of a people that includes more than “”““my””“” nation).
And here’s a section where this language “issue” is apparent:
These two lines become more and more clear in proportion to the development of the class struggle within the oppressed nation with the result that at the present time the epoch of imperialism — the national bourgeoisie in all the important colonial countries has already deserted the national liberation movement.
The words “nation” and “national liberation” could be replaced by “a people” and “people’s liberation”. I guess that today that distinction is made, we have “people’s republics” and “peoples’ liberation” movement. In English “people” is plural of “person” which has a different meaning and connotation than “a people”. In non-English languages there exists not only “nationality” but also “people-ality” (belonging to a people), so when I talk in my mother tongue, it is quite easy to convey and comprehend differences in belonging to a nation and belonging to a people. I find that this isn’t so easy in English, because as I said, English speakers tend to use those words interchangeably. And language does influence how we think and conceptualise.
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I like that the article also calls out liberals and their “race theories”.
Does this not in reality constitute a complete capitulation before bourgeois race theories and a practical agreement with the Liberals.
I can’t count the number of times liberals (and other socialists) have rolled their eyes at me because I said that race doesn’t exist in any biological/genetic sense, that it is a bourgeois invention.
Thus, the Negro liberation movement is deprived of all revolutionary content and becomes a struggle for social equality not in the revolutionary sense which in the South can only mean independence and the right of self-determination, but social equality in the liberalreformist conception of that term, i.e. a “struggle” against “race prejudices” and “artificial racial divisions.” It is clear that only the liberals and reformists counterpose the demand for independence to the demand of social-equality.
The article is full of fire sentences/paragraphs like that.
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Thinking more about it, why I see a difference in nation and people is because “”““my””“” country failed to instill a sense of national identity in me. Due to the influence of my parents and the environment I was raised in. I am not the only one. The article was written in 1930, not even a generation away from pre-WWI times, so perhaps the people-nation dichotomy wasn’t as pronounced back then. Today, I feel more and more people choose to identify with a people (for better or worse) rather than a nation. “Choose” and “feel” are key words, because I strongly believe that belonging to a people is something one feels rather than having a document that proves your nationality, like a passport.
Many countries allow dual or triple or quadruple nationalities, so then the question of nation-people for that person becomes even more pronounced. It goes back to choice: a nationality is something imposed on you by virtue of your geographical location (for example, if someone who isn’t American has a child in the US, that baby is then “American” because they happen to be in the US at the time of birth through no choice of their own); belonging to a people (peopleality) is something you feel/choose to feel, oftentimes because of parental cultural influence, but it can also be because you moved to a place as a child and adopted another people’s language and culture.
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Two books come to mind: The Invention of the White Race is an obvious one, because “whiteness” is a bourgeois/imperialist invention and any kind of “genetic evidence” for it is bullshit. The other is Americanah, about the personal experiences of a girl born in Africa, who then moves to the US at a very young age and grows up there, so when she travels back to her home country in Africa, people there consider her to be American rather than African.
Bonus book: The Kite Runner also touches a little on these themes of being transplanted from one country to a completely different one and having to “find oneself” or one’s identity.
I am attracted to these books because I too struggle with belonging and identity, feeling part of a nation or part of a people, and have spent a lot of time thinking about it. Especially cause I live as an immigrant in a “third” country, a country where I was neither born nor grew up in. So if it was confusing before, boy is it more difficult now. I find myself “longing” or “missing” my original country, even though I know that most people there would not consider me as much a part of my “birth nation” as they are. This is why I feel part of a people that transcends the nationality in my passport.
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Good choice of an article. When I read the two choices I was actually more inclined towards the other one at first (I didn’t vote), but I’m glad others did. I’m guessing I’m not the only one struggling with issues of identity, belonging to a nation vs. belonging to a people.
Both “Blacks” and “African American” have problems for identifying the new world peoples of African descent and are Liberal distortions. “Blacks” because people-ness is not denoted simply by color (mulatto question), and has been weaponized on behalf of Colonizers (see: DR vs Haiti). “African American” because the latter half simply denotes citizenship and which only became standard after the civil rights era (which prior excluded us from full citizenship, and it still does today…). Contestations for the first half come from two directions: assimilating into “Americanism” and self-distancing from the colonial struggle in Africa, and recognizing that the new world is our home. Neither term is sufficient and both have Liberal/Imperialist distortions. When I speak historically I use the term US Negroes, or Mainland Negroes. Many Black radicals adopted the term New Afrikan (which I also use) to denote our roots in Africa, but our belonging to the so-called new world. Distancing ourselves either from Africa or our new home brings Imperialist distortions to our self-identity, and are a product of Assimilationism that Haywood was predicting.
For a comparison. The Dominican Republic should not be seen as a nation-people, even though they largely speak another language than Haitians under the Haitian state. The Dominican Republic is a European occupation of Haiti, and all of the island’s Indigenous inhabitants (whether native or African) belong to the Haitian nation of peoples. The DR survives as an empire backed apartheid state, that necessarily privileges lighter skinned Haitians and discriminates darker skinned Haitians to maintain a buffer for the European settlers and monopolies. In the Haitian state, race ideology is abolished and white and mixed/other background individuals are all considered Blacks, and the Whites are the Imperialist classes that seek to dominate Haiti.
Just thought of something, a good (recogniseable) example. Jewish people have often been denied nationality in the countries they occupied, so they developed a sense of belonging to a people that transcends nationality (and borders). And what better example of an imposition of an identity onto a people than the State of Israel calling itself the “Jewish state” and offering every Jewish person on the planet nationality. Many Jewish people reject this, they still consider themselves part of the Jewish people but not part of the nation of Israel.
