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Colonialism and Constitutional Memory
Aziz Rana
Cornell Law School, ar643@cornell.edu
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Aziz Rana, "Colonialism and Constitutional
Memory," 5 UC Irvine Law Review (2015)
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Colonialism and Constitutional Memory
Aziz Rana*
The United States shares a number of basic traits with
various British settler societies in the nonwhite world. These include
longstanding histories in which colonists and their descendants divided legal,
political, and economic rights between insiders and subordinated outsiders, be
they expropriated indigenous groups or racial minorities. But Americans rarely
think of themselves as part of an imperial family of settler polities and
instead generally conceive of the country as quintessentially anti-imperial and
inclusive. What explains this fact and what are its political consequences?
This Article offers an initial response, arguing that a
significant reason is the symbolic power of the American Federal Constitution
in sustaining a particular narrative of the country as free and equal from the
founding. Although this creedal narrative has played a powerful and productive
role in creating a more inclusive national community, it has also,
paradoxically, made it more difficult for Americans to appreciate the country’s
colonial underpinnings, and thus to address specific structural grievances. In
developing these claims, this Article first explores how universalistic
accounts of national identity and constitutional meaning began to take
political hold with the country’s emergence onto the global stage following the
Spanish-American War. It then analyzes the unacknowledged contemporary costs of
creedal narratives by recovering a tradition of radical black critique, which
viewed the dominant national identity as truncating dilemmas of race in part by
de-emphasizing the need for material restitution and symbolic rupture.
* Associate Professor of Law, Cornell University Law School,
106 Myron Taylor Hall, Ithaca, NY 14850. E-mail: ar643@cornell.edu. Phone:
607-255-5423. For discussion and extremely helpful comments, I would like to
thank Christopher Tomlins and all the participants in the “Law As . . . ” III
symposium at the University of California, Irvine School of Law. I also
received essential feedback from Bill Alford, Aslı Bâli, Daragh Grant, Jeffrey
Green, Murad Idris, Jeremy Kessler, Darryl Li, Odette Lienau, Dylan Lino, and
Intisar Rabb, as well as the participants in the International and Comparative
Law Workshop at Harvard Law School. Finally, I would like to thank Sam Cretcher
and the rest of the UC Irvine Law Review editorial team for their invaluable
work on this Article.
263
Introduction: The Decline of Settler Self-Conception 264
I. How a
Settler Society Reconceived Its Own Past 270
II. Black Power
and Recalling the Colonial Legacy 277
Conclusion: A Postcolonial Identity Without Decolonization 286
INTRODUCTION: THE DECLINE OF SETTLER SELF-CONCEPTION
In March 1942, General Douglas MacArthur arrived in
Australia, having fled the Japanese assault on the Philippines, which for more
than four decades had been the central American colonial possession in the
Pacific. Speaking to a parliamentary dinner in Canberra, MacArthur underscored
the deep personal importance to him of the warm Australian reception,
especially given recent events. He declared,
Although this is my first trip to Australia, I already feel
at home. There is a link that binds our countries together which does not
depend on written protocol, upon treaties of alliance or upon diplomatic
doctrine. It goes deeper than that. It is that indescribable consanguinity of
race which causes us to have the same aspirations, the same hopes and desires,
the same ideals and the same dreams of future industry.1
In focusing on the “indescribable consanguinity of race,”
MacArthur was highlighting a shared cultural project that marked the two
communities. Above all, both were experiments in Anglo-Protestant settlement,
in which English colonists successfully wrested political supremacy from
nonwhite indigenous groups. And in the context of a global war that pitted
European descendants against a rising Asian power, Australia embodied an
outpost of white rule and white values in an otherwise treacherous region.
In many ways, MacArthur’s implicit invocation of a common
settler experience linking the United States to Australia, and presumably to
other polities like New Zealand and South Africa, was part of a longstanding
refrain in American public life. For the better part of a century, politicians
and authors had described the common racial identities and political
predicaments facing these white colonies in the nonwhite world—perhaps no one
more intently than President Theodore Roosevelt. Indeed, in 1907, following
Japan’s stunning victory over Russia, and thus at an earlier moment of Asian
ascendancy, Roosevelt—in a move MacArthur would have appreciated—sent the
American fleet to Australia as a show of solidarity.2 He told a correspondent
for the New York Times that the
1. Douglas
MacArthur, We Shall Win, or We Shall Die, in WELL MAY WE SAY . . .: THE
SPEECHES THAT MADE AUSTRALIA 107, 107–08 (Sally Warhaft ed., 2004); see also
Nikhil Pal Singh, The Problem of Color and Democracy, in THE SHORT AMERICAN
CENTURY: A POSTMORTEM 59, 64 (Andrew J. Bacevich ed., 2012) (quoting General
MacArthur).
2. See MARILYN
LAKE & HENRY REYNOLDS, DRAWING THE GLOBAL COLOUR LINE: WHITE MEN’S COUNTRIES
AND THE INTERNATIONAL CHALLENGE OF RACIAL EQUALITY 199
fleet’s presence there was necessary to emphasize to the
world “that those colonies are white man’s country.”3
For Roosevelt, Australia, like the United States, embodied
the hegemony of “English-speaking peoples over the world’s waste spaces,”4 in
the process spreading civilization across the globe. This fact “ha[d] been not
only the most striking feature in the world’s history, but also the event of
all others most far- reaching in its effects and importance.”5 But in the view
of Roosevelt, such hegemony was increasingly imperiled. If anything, the great
twentieth century challenge was the preservation of white settler dominance—and
with it European civilization itself—under conditions of indigenous uprising
and growing nonwhite political assertiveness.
Predicting the demise of white power in South Africa,
Roosevelt worried that the civilizing mission would inevitably fail there
because, unlike the United States, where Anglo settlers had been able to
“exterminate[ ]”6 the Indians, white South Africans were “confronted by a very
large native population with which they cannot mingle, and which neither dies
out nor recedes before their advance.”7 These hard truths only elevated the
importance of white success in Australia and New Zealand, colonial experiments
that bore the most “resemblance”8 to the United States. He hailed Australian
historian and journalist Charles Pearson’s 1893 book National Life and
Character: A Forecast in which the author too foresaw a twentieth century of
receding European power and thus presented Australia as “guarding the last part
of the world, in which the higher races can live and increase freely, for
higher civilisation.”9 According to Roosevelt, the text was nothing less than
“one of the most notable books of the end of the century.”10
Such concerns about the future viability of settler
colonization and white imperial authority, widespread in the early
twentieth-century United States, speak to a profoundly different way of imagining
the national project than what citizens today would find recognizable. Many
white Americans at the time took for granted—and indeed positively identified
with—the fact that the country was an important piece in a global European
project of imperial conquest. Akin to white societies in South Africa and
Australia, they understood their own community as a project of settlement
structured fundamentally around a basic legal, political, and economic divide
between insiders and subordinated outsiders, be they
(2008) (quoting Roosevelt as explaining his decision to send
the fleet based upon a belief that “America should be ready to stand back of
Australia in any serious emergency”).
3. Id. at 197.
4. See THEODORE
ROOSEVELT, THE WINNING OF THE WEST 21 (Hastings House 1963) (1889).
5. Id.
6. Id. at 28.
7. Id. at 29.
8. Id.
9. CHARLES
PEARSON, NATIONAL LIFE AND CHARACTER: A FORECAST 17 (2d ed. 1913).
10. Theodore
Roosevelt, National Life and Character, 2 SEWANEE REV. 353, 353 (1894).
expropriated Native Americans, formerly enslaved blacks, or
even Asian migrants, the last group confined to the category of “aliens
ineligible to citizenship.”11 In taking for granted that the United States was
what I have elsewhere called a “settler empire,” most Americans had long
presumed that collective institutions were meant to do two things
simultaneously. First, they were supposed to provide racially defined insiders
with the emancipatory conditions of self-government and economic independence.
And second, to support this overarching project, these institutions were
designed to extract much-needed land and labor from native and nonsettler
groups, in the latter case particularly African slaves and their descendants.12
Above all, if the term “settler empire” would not have been familiar to early
twentieth-century Americans, the basic ethical vision and political objectives
certainly would have.
Today, by contrast, to describe in mainstream public
discussion the United States as part of an imperial family of settler societies
would be deeply jarring. Americans are certainly painfully aware of a past
marked by both native dispossession and African slavery. But these features of
the collective experience are integrated into a very particular narrative about
national identity, one in which the country is understood to be the
quintessential civic polity. In the words of Michael Ignatieff, the American
community, rather than being grounded in prepolitical ethnic, religious, or
racial ties, has long been constituted by “equal, rights-bearing citizens,
united in patriotic attachment to a shared set of political practices and
values.”13 This fact places the American project in an exceptional position,
standing outside the contested histories of Europe—particularly its bitter
conflicts over class and empire—and enjoying a distinctive character vis-à-vis
other nation-states.
No doubt most commentators, Ignatieff included, readily
admit that the United States has never fully lived up to these civic values.
Yet as Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal declared in the 1940s, while the
country may have only partially achieved its ideals, “[t]he main trend” in
American history has been “the gradual realization of the American Creed.”14
Thus, such a view accepts the practical reality of injustice, particularly the
sinfulness of slavery, but understands the United States to be at root a
liberal society engaged in a process of self- fulfillment. Ignatieff, like
Myrdal before him, sees the country’s civic promise as the essential truth of
the American experience, a truth steadily redeemed over
11. For more on
the treatment of Asians as culturally unfit for settler membership, see HIROSHI
MOTOMURA, AMERICANS IN WAITING: THE LOST STORY OF IMMIGRATION AND CITIZENSHIP
IN THE UNITED STATES 70–75 (2006).
12. See AZIZ
RANA, TWO FACES OF AMERICAN FREEDOM (2010). In particular, see id. at 12– 14,
for a fuller account of American settler empire—including its ideologies and
constitutional practices.
13. MICHAEL
IGNATIEFF, BLOOD AND BELONGING: JOURNEYS INTO THE NEW NATIONALISM 3–4 (1993).
14. GUNNAR
MYRDAL, AN AMERICAN DILEMMA: THE NEGRO PROBLEM AND MODERN DEMOCRACY 1021
(1962).
time, while representing the ascriptive and exclusive
elements as aberrational.15 Most telling about this dominant narrative is that
it neglects to depict the civic drive—aimed at vesting sovereignty in all
people “regardless of race, colour, creed, gender, language or ethnicity”16—as
only a relatively recent development. Instead, this account reads such
aspirations back into the very founding of the United States, albeit while
accepting the extent to which equality may have been deferred in historical
fact.
A large part of why exceptionalist narratives of American
civic identity have had such a powerful grip on the national imagination is
because of the presumed symbolic meaning of the Federal Constitution. According
to today’s scholars and commentators, the Constitution gives concrete substance
to the country’s civic ideals, generating a political order grounded in
democratic consent, pluralism, and equal rights for all. In Cass Sunstein’s
words, “exceptionalism is real” and “[i]t began in 1787, with the
Constitution’s effort to establish a large, self-governing republic, in which
diverse views serve as both a safeguard and a creative force.”17 Quoting
Alexander Hamilton’s language in Federalist No. 1, Sunstein declares that while
European history, marked by social conflict and monarchical despotism, has been
the product of “accident and force,” the defining feature of the American
experiment—expressed most profoundly by that initial act of constitutional
construction—is instead the effort to base politics on “reflection and
choice.”18 For Jack Balkin, the 1787 Constitution provided the “legal and
political” mechanisms through which the Declaration of Independence’s promise
of equal liberty could “be redeemed in history.”19 The Constitution’s writing
and ratification are therefore the constituent acts of American exceptionalism
and civic founding, embodying above all the collective break from an imperial
and absolutist Europe.
Ultimately, what is especially remarkable about the
contemporary framing of the United States as a civic polity is how it erases,
almost entirely, the colonial structure of the American past. According to the
civic imagination, to the extent that the United States bears any meaningful
relationship to European histories of empire, it is not as a sustained
experiment in settler colonization. Rather, the country from its birth has been
anti-imperial, conceived as an assault on an entire “system of social
hierarchy.”20 Indeed, for Seymour Martin Lipset, the very essence of American
exceptionalism is its status as the first postcolonial society as opposed to a
continuation of European colonialism: “The United States is
15. See
IGNATIEFF, supra note 13, at 6–7.
16. See id. at 3.
17. Cass
Sunstein, The Real Meaning of American Exceptionalism, BLOOMBERG VIEW (Sept.
23, 2013, 9:00 AM EDT), http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-23/the-real-meaning-of-
american-exceptionalism.html.
18. Id.
19. JACK M.
BALKIN, CONSTITUTIONAL REDEMPTION: POLITICAL FAITH IN AN UNJUST WORLD 19
(2011).
20. Id. at 21.
exceptional in . . . being ‘the first new nation,’ the first
colony, other than Iceland, to become independent.”21 If anything, under this
civic framing, the American experience—whatever the problems of inequality—has
more in common with the independence projects of indigenous societies than it
does with English settler experiments in South Africa, Australia, or New
Zealand.
How does a community reconstruct the meaning of its own
past—to such an extent that defining historical attributes no longer resonate at
all with collective self-perceptions—and what are the long-term consequences of
such a reconstruction? Over the following pages, I offer a sketch of the
process by which white Americans came to think of themselves in civic rather
than settler terms, and then turn to a consideration of what this shift has
meant for issues of racial equality and native self-determination. I begin in
Part I by contending that the initial move toward a sustained civic identity
occurred not at the founding, Reconstruction, or even the more recent civil
rights period. Rather, civic identity as a growing public sentiment developed
out of a sense of ideological uncertainty that enveloped the United States in
the early twentieth century. In particular, the closing of the frontier and the
country’s emergence onto the global stage with the Spanish-American War raised
basic questions about the future of colonial settlement as well as the meaning
of American power in the world. In this context, many white Americans began to
rally around a specific reading of the Constitution as the moment at which
universally accessible Enlightenment principles first took historic root, thus
presenting the country in explicitly exceptionalist terms. This view separated
European imperialism on the one hand from American global influence on the
other, with the latter depicted as benign tutelage fundamentally in keeping
with the basic interests of nonwhite peoples. Such civic arguments, structured
around the symbol of the Constitution, steadily reimagined the country in more
inclusive terms. But they also provided an ideological framework that allowed
classically privileged American insiders to preserve nonetheless the basic
institutional structures of the polity—those of an increasingly completed
settler project—while at the same time asserting greater authority abroad.
Part II then argues that although such civic self-conception
has brought with it profound social improvements that cannot be underestimated,
it has also come at a significant cost. The country’s identitarian shift from
settler to civic nation has meant that Americans have never properly confronted
the county’s colonial infrastructure or the living legacy of its settler
history. As a consequence, today’s vision of the country as intrinsically—if
incompletely—liberal systematically deemphasizes those forms of economic and
political subordination that continue to mark the experience of historically
marginalized communities. In effect, the two narratives of national
identity—settler and civic—should not be thought of as establishing
fundamentally distinct legal and political periods. Rather, the lack of a
21. See SEYMOUR
MARTIN LIPSET, AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM: A DOUBLE-EDGED SWORD 18 (1996).
proper reckoning with the past has meant that prevailing
civic ideologies remain institutionally and conceptually interlinked with
settler ones; thus, the two eras of national identity fold into one another
instead of marking a clear chronological divide or break in political time.
I pursue these thoughts by recovering a black political
tradition especially dominant with the radicalization of the civil rights
movement in the late 1960s. This tradition maintained that the emphasis on the
American Revolution’s anti- imperial dimension undermined the ability of most
twentieth-century Americans to appreciate the extent to which their society was
a continuation of European projects of empire. These black thinkers focused
their critique on the centrality of the Constitution for sustaining narratives
of American exceptionalism and civic identity. They were especially attracted
to such constitutional critique—and to the colonial framing more
generally—because they believed that the politics of civic inclusion truncated
the dilemma of race in the United States, de-emphasizing both the links to
global structures of inequality and the need for more thoroughgoing
socioeconomic changes. Just as important, the language of colonialism allowed
both black radicals and indigenous activists to highlight an unacknowledged
harm to subordinated groups generated by traditional creedal accounts. These
accounts compelled outsiders, as a condition of any reform, to accept and
repeat self- validating majority narratives. They seemed to require that
marginalized communities deny both their own sense of profound alienation as
well as their belief that such alienation spoke to a constitutive and
oppressive truth about the nation’s identity.
By way of a conclusion, I discuss the basic reasons why
black power activists, especially those associated with the Black Panther
Party, argued for a new constitutional convention and a conscious break from
the existing legal order. Such calls were above all part of a sustained effort
to make apparent to Americans a striking fact about the shift in national consciousness
from settler to civic self- conception. According to black radicals, white
Americans had essentially adopted a postcolonial sense of nationhood despite
the fact that the country had never gone through an actual process of
systematic decolonization, one akin to those initiated in newly freed Asian and
African countries. In such former colonies, much of the independence project
concerned the formal and substantive transfer of economic and political power
from imperial elites to historically subordinated populations. But in the
United States, by contrast, at no point did historically oppressed groups
successfully generate a similar and explicit institutional or normative rupture
from the American settler past—including its governing structures and prevailing
national symbols—nor did they succeed in claiming either material reparations
or meaningful indigenous sovereignty. In fact, part of the discursive power of
civic national identity continues to come from its disavowal of any need for
such structural transformation, precisely since it reads a liberal and
egalitarian identity into the country’s very genesis.
I. HOW A
SETTLER SOCIETY RECONCEIVED ITS OWN PAST
In many ways, today’s dominant language of civic identity
consciously repeats a set of arguments developed by Abraham Lincoln during the
Civil War. Lincoln famously referred to the Declaration of Independence as an
“apple of gold” framed in the “picture of silver ” that was the Constitution.22
By this, he meant that the animating purpose of the constitutional project was
to fulfill the egalitarian promise of the Declaration: “The picture was made,
not to conceal, or destroy the apple; but to adorn, and preserve it. The
picture was made for the apple—not the apple for the picture.”23 Crucially, for
my purposes, although Lincoln may have evoked such civic ideals in the context
of debates over slavery and secession, this vision did not reflect how the
overwhelming majority of white Americans understood their collective project
and its relationship to the Constitution, either during the antebellum period
or in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.
In fact, the far more entrenched pre-Civil War view was that
the country was a white republic and the Constitution served as the governing
document for this racially defined community. As Stephen Douglas declared
during his victorious Senate campaign against Lincoln:
I hold that a negro is not and never ought to be a citizen
of the United States. . . . I hold that this government was made on the white
basis, by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity forever,
and should be administered by white men and none others. . . . [T]he signers of
the Declaration [of Independence] had no reference to the negro whatever when
they declared all men to be created equal. They desired to express by that
phrase, white men, men of European birth and European descent, and had no
reference either to the negro, the savage Indians, the Fejee, the Malay, or any
other inferior and degraded race, when they spoke of the equality of men.24
This sentiment even shaped the era’s Republican Party, whose
leadership, as legal historian Mark Graber reminds us, “routinely described
their coalition as a ‘white man’s party’ and proposed ‘to settle the
Territories with free, white men.’”25 Indeed, with strong Republican backing,
nonslave African Americans were not only barred from entrance into frontier
states like Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and Oregon, they also were explicitly
barred from claiming property through western land grants.26
22. Abraham
Lincoln, Fragment on the Constitution and Union ( Jan. 1861), in 4 THE
COLLECTED WORKS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN 168, 169 (Roy P. Basler et al. eds., 1953).
23. Id.
24. See Senator
Stephen Douglas, Speech at the Third Lincoln-Douglas Debate, Jonesboro, Ill.
(Sept. 15, 1858), reprinted in ABRAHAM LINCOLN: SPEECHES AND WRITINGS
1832–1858, at 598 (Don. E. Fehrenbacher ed., 1989).
25. MARK GRABER,
DRED SCOTT AND THE PROBLEM OF CONSTITUTIONAL EVIL 80 (2006).
26. See RANA,
supra note 12, at 118.
Moreover, Douglas’s alternative vision of the Declaration as
racially circumscribed spoke to a profound truth deemphasized by Lincolnian
rhetoric. Alongside the egalitarian dimension, Thomas Jefferson had also
highlighted as grievances against the British Empire the crown’s responsibility
for “excit[ing] domestic insurrections amongst us, and . . . endeavor[ing] to
bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages.”27 In
effect, the Declaration did not evoke a civic promise of equal liberty
unproblematically. Its language taken as a whole instead intertwined arguments
for internal settler freedom with a clear drive to pacify those external
threats posed by both excluded slaves and expropriated Indians.
For all these reasons, radical abolitionists as well as
African Americans—the only real constituencies in the antebellum period that
imagined a multiracial community—often directly attacked the central symbols of
national identity. For instance, before the Civil War, free blacks tended to
celebrate Independence Day on July 5th as a conscious commentary on black
enslavement and exclusion from the body politic.28 For instance, Frederick
Douglass’s famous 1852 address to the Antislavery Society of Rochester, What to
the Slave is the Fourth of July?, was delivered on July 5th since, according to
historian Mason Lowance, Douglass “did not wish to participate in the
celebration of hypocrisy and could not join the festivities recalling the
Declaration of Independence.”29 Even more pointedly, Nat Turner’s slave revolt
had been planned to begin on July 4, 1831.30 As for the Constitution, prominent
radical abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison denounced the text’s
accommodations with slavery as an “agreement with hell.”31 In the era’s most notorious
act of constitutional opposition, Garrison, outraged by a Boston federal
judge’s decision returning a fugitive slave, Anthony Burns, to his Virginia
owner, burnt a copy of the U.S. Constitution before an 1854 Independence Day
audience.32
This vision of the country as first and foremost a white
Republic, and of the Constitution as its ruling text, remained solidly
entrenched for decades after the Civil War.33 If anything, with the collapse of
Reconstruction, the Lincolnian narrative of the relationship between the
Constitution and Declaration of
27. THE
DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE para. 29 (U.S. 1776).
28. See MATTHEW
DENNIS, RED, WHITE, AND BLUE LETTER DAYS: AN AMERICAN
CALENDAR 24 (2002).
29. Mason
Lowance, Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), in AGAINST SLAVERY: AN ABOLITIONIST
READER 38 (Mason Lowance ed., 2000).
30. DENNIS, supra
note 28, at 287 n.18.
31. William Lloyd
Garrison introduced a resolution before the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society
in 1843, stating: “That the compact which exists between the North and the
South is ‘a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell,’—involving both
parties in atrocious criminality; and should be immediately annulled.” BALKIN,
supra note 19, at 253 n.7 (quoting William Lloyd Garrison).
32. Eric Foner,
Blacks and the U.S. Constitution 1789–1989, 183 NEW LEFT REV. 63, 63 (1990).
33. See RANA,
supra note 12, at 182–93; see also DAVID W. BLIGHT, RACE AND REUNION: THE CIVIL
WAR IN AMERICAN MEMORY 338–80 (2001).
Independence retreated to the political margins by the turn
of the twentieth century34—a point highlighted by Teddy Roosevelt’s colonial
rhetoric described in the introduction. In the interceding years, the country
had witnessed the consolidation of white supremacy in the South through brutal
force, facilitated by a mixture of Northern white indifference and complicity.
In many ways future President Woodrow Wilson, the son of a Virginia slave
owner, better captured the prevailing judgments about national identity and
radical Reconstruction than did a Lincolnian view.35 According to Wilson,
Reconstruction promoted a destructive project of racial readjustment, in which
Republicans imposed black voting and legal protections on Southern whites, the region’s
“real citizens.”36 For him and many others, “the sudden and absolute
emancipation”37 of slaves, and especially the efforts to impose equal
citizenship on whites, embodied a “dark chapter of history.”38 To underscore
just how widely such views were held, even socialists like Victor Berger took
for granted the racially circumscribed nature of American membership, declaring
“there can be no doubt that the Negroes and mulattoes constitute a lower
race.”39
The governing account of national identity only began to
change permanently with the completion of the settler project itself. At the
beginning of the twentieth century, the closing of the frontier meant that the
historic role of territorial expansion in sustaining American economic growth
and internal settler prosperity would soon come to an end. In effect, the very
success of American colonization imperiled the future viability of what
amounted to the settler way of life. One solution, increasingly embraced by
political and economic elites, was to engage in practices of economic and
political expansionism abroad as the natural extension of settler territorial
growth. As Frederick Jackson Turner wrote in 1893 of the national experience,
“Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect
upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for
its exercise.”40 For Turner and others like him, just as the project
34. See BLIGHT,
supra note 33, at 381–97.
35. Historian
Michael Dennis describes Wilson as personifying the emerging white middle class
sensibilities in the urban South, especially the commitment to “regional
progress through national reconciliation, industrial growth, agricultural
diversification, and racial control.” Michael Dennis, Looking Backward: Woodrow
Wilson, the New South, and the Question of Race, 3 AM. NINETEENTH CENTURY HIST.
77, 77 (2002).
36. Id. at 82
(quoting Woodrow Wilson, Reconstruction of the Southern States, 87 ATLANTIC
MONTHLY 1, 11 (1901)).
37. Wilson, supra
note 36, at 6.
38. Id. at 11.
Wilson decried Reconstruction practices for producing
a vast “laboring, landless, homeless class,” once slaves,
now free; unpracticed in liberty, unschooled in self-control; never sobered by
the discipline of self-support, never established in any habit of prudence;
excited by a freedom they did not understand, exalted by false hopes;
bewildered and without leaders, and yet insolent and aggressive, sick of work,
covetous of pleasure,—a host of dusky children untimely put out of school.
Id. at 6.
39. MARK
PITTENGER, AMERICAN SOCIALISTS AND EVOLUTIONARY THOUGHT, 1870– 1920, at 181
(1993) (quoting Victor Berger).
40. See FREDERICK
JACKSON TURNER, THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY 37 (1920).
of continental conquest had in the past promoted internal
wealth and external power, greater assertiveness on the global stage could now
serve similar ends.
But whatever its potential benefits, the ideological and
practical problems with a new grab for international power were manifold. To
begin with, the classic method of territorial conquest in the United States had
been white settlement, with new land steadily incorporated into the republic on
grounds of equal statehood. But land in the Americas and especially in Asia
could not be colonized in this way. Indeed, as one commentator noted, formally
annexing distant foreign territory created the likelihood of ruling over
racially distinct nonwhite communities in a context that “forb[ade] the hope
that Americans will migrate to it in sufficient numbers to elevate its social
conditions and ultimately justify its admission as a State.”41 Even more
important, the country had appeared on the global stage at a decidedly late
moment, after the most valuable colonial possessions had already been
claimed.42 This limited the usefulness of direct colonial rule as either a
symbol of national strength or a means for expanding economic and political
power.
Finally, the American foray into overseas empire with the
Spanish-American War emphasized the profound pitfalls of becoming ensnared in
colonial adventures. The takeover of the Philippines generated a massive
indigenous uprising, one that was only suppressed after years of intense
fighting and the brutal application of military force.43 This experience
brought home not only the costs in blood and treasure of maintaining actual
foreign land, but also emerging truths about nonwhite political assertiveness.
It reinforced arguments in the public discourse, such as those associated with
the Australian Charles Pearson, regarding the precariousness of permanent white
control across the colonized world.44 All these issues emphasized that if
American authority were to expand abroad, it would have to do so in a way that
came to grips with new global realities.
Especially following events in the Philippines, a growing
number of political elites responded to these dilemmas by repurposing the
Lincolnian narrative of a universalist national identity, only now to justify a
new vision of American international mission.45 This vision was conceived as inherently
anti-imperial and suspicious of maintaining expensive foreign colonies.46 And
by focusing on the United States’ own break from Britain, the account of
national identity also highlighted the perceived differences between American
and European values. Rather than treating foreign territories as extractive
assets, the United States’ global ambition concerned the spread of mutually
advantageous commercial trade,
41. See Carman F.
Randolph, Constitutional Aspects of Annexation, 12 HARV. L. REV. 291, 304 (1898).
42. See RANA,
supra note 12, at 283.
43. See MICHAEL
H. HUNT & STEVEN I. LEVINE, ARC OF EMPIRE: AMERICA’S WARS IN
ASIA FROM THE PHILIPPINES TO VIETNAM 10–63 (2012).
44. PEARSON,
supra note 9, at 31.
45. RANA, supra
note 12, at 262–90.
46. Id.
democratic self-government, and above all international
peace.47 Interventionists therefore stressed the shared benefits for all
communities, regardless of race or ethnicity, of enhanced American power, and
in the process de-emphasized the need for formal land acquisition let alone
actual white settlement.48 In fact, such elites reframed the project in the
Philippines not as one of a colonial scramble, but rather as that of assisting
an indigenous population on a path to ultimate self- determination.49
In developing this civic account, the Constitution
increasingly played a central role in arguments about the inherently inclusive
nature of American identity and thus American authority abroad. For those like
David Jayne Hill, diplomat, university president, and influential author of
Americanism: What It is (1916), what most distinguished the American character
from Old Europe was the document itself.50 Whereas European communities were
the product of feudalism as well as political and religious absolutism—and thus
disposed to treat foreign populations instrumentally—the Constitution
underscored how the American experiment had been built instead on an effort to
fulfill universal Enlightenment principles. Hill claimed that the Federal
Constitution above all “developed here in America a new estimate of human
values, and this has led to a new understanding of life.”51 Contrasting
European monarchical despotism with American commitments to liberty and
self-government, Hill—in words virtually identical to Cass Sunstein’s
today—declared that the “original and distinctive contribution of the American
mind to political theory” was the focus on eliminating “forever the recurrence
of absolutism in every form, whether official or popular, whether of dominant
individuals or of popular majorities.”52
Moreover, in line with the Lincolnian idea that the
Constitution gave substance to the egalitarian aspirations of the Declaration,
Hill maintained that “Americanism” was not reducible to racial criteria:
It cannot be maintained that Americanism . . . is a matter
of race. Our country from the beginning has been populated by people of widely
different ethnic origins. Some of their qualities are perpetuated with
practically little effacement, others are obscured by the syncretism of races;
but there is no definable ethnic type that is exclusively entitled to be called
American.53
Rather than merely a white settler polity no different than
Australia or South Africa, the Constitution was living proof that Americans had
produced a
47. Id.
48. Id.
49. For a more
complete account of the shifting visions of external power and national
identity in the context of the Spanish-American War and the occupation of the
Philippines, see generally id.
50. See DAVID
JAYNE HILL, AMERICANISM: WHAT IT IS, at vii–x (1916).
51. Id. at viii.
52. Id. at 27.
53. Id. at vii.
phenomenon unique in global history: they had erected out of
divergent racial communities a single, unified, and powerful nation committed
to inclusive civic values. Hill and others at the time began to map out an
early twentieth century variant of what scholar Nikhil Pal Singh has called
“American universalism”54— the idea that what establishes the United States as
exceptional is its status as the first nation truly grounded on equal liberty
for all.
Such claims about the interconnection between American
constitutionalism and American exceptionalism emphasized how an expanded U.S.
role abroad served the basic interests of foreign populations. According to
Hill, European Powers sought to divide the world based on the principle of
“imperialism”55 and thus treated other communities as little more than material
spoils. Given these facts, and the increasing disorder wrought by European
action, both domestic security and international peace required a far greater
national presence. Precisely because the American civic vision, embodied by the
Constitution, was “antithetical to Imperialism, whose watchword is unlimited
power,”56 only the United States could offer the world a counterbalance to
European hegemony. In opposition to empire, the constitutional principle meant
that American authority was centrally about creating the conditions in foreign,
oftentimes nonwhite, societies for peaceful self-government. Distinguishing
U.S. control over the Philippines from European practices in Asia and Africa,
Hill argued that American conduct on the island had been a step in the
advancement of civilization and democratic order. Glossing over the actual
history of extreme American violence, he declared, “[W]e have taken in tutelage
a population in its political childhood and conscientiously striven to lay the
foundations for its future self-government.”57 In other words, although it may
have required American imposition, at stake in the Philippines was not imperial
rule but the entrenchment of civic values and Enlightenment principles in a
culturally undeveloped region.
Even Woodrow Wilson pursued the logical implications of this
inclusive narrative of American power. In his 1916 address to the Railway
Business Association, Wilson made clear that the country’s global ambitions did
not entail new colonial dependencies.58 Also emphasizing the essentially
anti-imperial nature of U.S. global authority, Wilson declared, “There is no
spirit of aggrandizement in America. There is no desire on the part of any
thoughtful and conscientious
54. See NIKHIL
PAL SINGH, BLACK IS A COUNTRY: RACE AND THE UNFINISHED STRUGGLE FOR DEMOCRACY
17–18 (2004) (“‘American universalism,’ historian John Higham summarizes, is
‘our egalitarian ideology . . . molded by the Enlightenment and forged in the
revolution . . . simultaneously a civic credo, a social vision and a definition
of nationhood.’” (ellipses in original)).
55. HILL, supra
note 50, at 134.
56. Id.
57. Id. at 177.
58. See President Woodrow Wilson, Address to the Railway
Business Association, N.Y. ( Jan. 27, 1916), reprinted in THE POLITICAL THOUGHT
OF WOODROW WILSON 268, 268–69 (E. David Cronon ed., 1965).
American man to take one foot of territory from any other
nation in the world.”59 This of course did not mean that military and economic
interventions were not critical to nonwhite tutelage or to the spread of civic
ideals. In the same speech, Wilson, echoing Hill, spoke in laudatory terms of
the Spanish-American War:
The world sneered when we set out upon the liberation of
Cuba, but the world sneers no longer. The world now knows, what it was then
loathe to believe, that a nation can sacrifice its own interests and its own
blood for the sake of the liberty and happiness of another people.60
For Wilson too, the American projection of power, if
necessary through actual military force, was a key tool in promoting a tranquil
and civilized global community.
As underscored by the persistent language of tutelage, the
emerging civic rhetoric of American universalism was above all an adaptation
rather than a rejection of the settler past. It was promoted by privileged
insiders and consciously embraced the history of North American colonization as
proof of the country’s exceptional status. Indeed, in order for Hill and others
to explain why Americans were worthy of global leadership, they focused
especially on the idea that the particularities of colonial settlement generated
a culturally distinct community, one that allowed universal creedal values to
flourish in the first place. According to Hill, the earliest colonists left
monarchical England because of a “protest against mere power,”61 and in fact
the first truly American charter of liberty was not the Constitution but the
November 11, 1620 Mayflower Compact. Long before England’s 1647 “Agreement of
the People” or the later writings of Locke and Rousseau, settler colonists—“a
company of plain men, sailing over wintry seas to an unknown land with the
purpose of escaping the too heavy hand of an absolute government”62—forged “the
beginning of real self-government.”63 Thus, the reason why the framers were
later able to devise the Constitution was because they had been raised in a
political community attuned to practices of self-rule and principles of
liberty. This meant that the Constitution, a century and a half later, was just
the culmination of a specifically American cultural commitment to the
“voluntary renunciation of arbitrary power.”64
Such a settler experience therefore not only explained why
the United States enjoyed a special and redemptive global mission, it also
spoke to why white Americans in particular were equipped at home and abroad to
supervise projects of tutelage and racial uplift. In essence, the emerging
civic self-conception, especially through arguments about exceptionalism and
constitutional founding, combined seemingly conflicting political ideas of
universalism and cultural
59. Id. at 269.
60. Id.
61. HILL, supra
note 50, at 13–15.
62. Id.
63. Id. at 15.
64. Id. at 29.
superiority. Figures like Hill may have believed in the
theoretical fitness of all ethnic and racial groups for full self-government.
But transforming this theoretical fitness into reality entailed a sustained
project of white stewardship in which racial and ethnic communities both within
the United States and in distant lands would be led from their “political
childhood” into a civilized adulthood. In this way, and perhaps counterintuitively,
the increasing prominence of civic notions provided a powerful mechanism for
preserving ethno-cultural accounts of American identity and with them settler
privilege.
What these facts bring home is the extent to which the shift
to civic frameworks emerged out of efforts by political elites to make sense of
how best to promote American power under radically altered circumstances. Thus,
civic accounts, grounded especially in a budding vision of the Constitution as
a symbol of American inclusiveness, were the ideological outgrowth of a
fundamentally settler imagination and predicament—namely, how to conceive of
collective purpose given the completion of North American expansion. Slowly,
and over the course of decades, these accounts eclipsed the preexisting view of
the United States as an exclusively white republic. Domestically, they created
the political space for liberalizing reform efforts such as the push to end
segregation and to provide legal protections to historically excluded groups.
Indeed, creedal arguments about American exceptionalism allowed civil rights
leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., half a century later, to depict black
inclusion as part of the country’s founding aspirations, albeit “essentially a
dream, a dream yet unfulfilled.”65 And today, the dominance of the civic
self-conception is so comprehensive that citizens no longer even perceive its
settler roots and genesis. But as the following section highlights, these
settler roots underscore the persistent continuities between the civic present
and the colonizing past— continuities that only rarely have been confronted
directly in American political life.
I. BLACK POWER
AND RECALLING THE COLONIAL LEGACY
Perhaps the most sustained and broad-based public
examination of the country’s colonial legacy took place during the late 1960s.
Against the backdrop of independence movements in Asia and Africa, African
American activists, especially those who gravitated toward ideas of black
power, increasingly presented their relationship to mainstream society as akin
to that of colonized communities in the so-called Third World.66 In the
process, they directly challenged narratives of American universalism and
exceptionalism and denied the basic legitimacy of the existing constitutional
order, which they viewed as the great
65. See Martin
Luther King, Jr., The American Dream (Feb. 5, 1964), in A TESTAMENT OF
HOPE: THE ESSENTIAL WRITINGS AND SPEECHES OF MARTIN LUTHER
KING, JR. 208, 208 ( James
M. Washington ed., 1990).
66. See infra
text accompanying notes 86–93.
symbol of the prevailing civic identity.67 With the collapse
of both the student and civil rights movements, today these arguments—along
with the settler legacy they recall—have essentially receded from memory. But
they nonetheless provide a critical means for appreciating the significant
costs associated with our contemporary reconstruction of the national
experience as a liberal and redemptive project from the founding.
In many ways, black power activists developed their position
in response to what they viewed as the limitations of the traditional civil
rights framework, a framework that refrained from challenging the civic account
of the American experience and instead sought to unleash its reformist
potential.68 In the 1950s, middle class African Americans, along with liberal
white allies, presented the struggle for black freedom as one of fulfilling the
universal ideals embedded in the Constitution. Analogous to arguments made
earlier in the century by David Jayne Hill, the principal civil rights
discourse maintained that American belonging was not racially defined but built
on shared and inclusive liberal values.69 This articulation of how antiracism
fulfilled notions of American universalism drew especially from Gunnar Myrdal’s
classic study An American Dilemma. For Myrdal, the Constitution embodied what
he called “the American creed”70 and through the text “[t]his nation early laid
down as the moral basis for its existence the principles of equality and
liberty.”71 This meant that at its core the United States—the nation where the
Enlightenment took historical root—was “humanity in miniature.”72
Such arguments presented the United States as an essentially
liberal national experiment, contaminated in the present by un-American and
illiberal practices of racism. This vision of the country—as a fundamentally
universalist polity on a march toward liberal completeness—carried with it key
implications for the civil rights agenda at home and for American power abroad.
At home, fulfilling the creed primarily entailed ending formal discrimination
and providing worthy elements within the black community with an equal
opportunity to enjoy professional and middle-class respectability.73 It
emphasized social mobility for black elites and meritocratic inclusion for some
into arenas of corporate and political power.74 Abroad, the invocation of the
creed, as Nikhil Pal Singh writes, “upheld the prerogatives of the American
national security state.”75 Precisely since
67. See infra
text accompanying notes 86–93.
68. RANA, supra
note 12, at 329–30.
69. Id.
70. See generally
MYRDAL, supra note 14. Myrdal contended that “American civilization early
acquired a flavor of enlightenment which affected the ordinary American’s whole
personality” and generated a creedal commitment to “liberty, equality, justice,
and fair opportunity for everybody.” Id. at lxx, lxxii.
71. Id. at 1021.
72. Id.
73. RANA, supra
note 12, at 329–30.
74. Id.
75. See Nikhil
Pal Singh, The Black Panthers and the “Undeveloped Country” of the Left, in THE
BLACK PANTHER PARTY RECONSIDERED 57, 73 (Charles E. Jones ed., 1998).
U.S. civic commitments expressed the world community’s
ideals, the projection of American power necessarily meant the defense of
inclusive values against illiberal threats. As Myrdal argued, Americans stood
“warmheartedly against oppression in all the world.”76
In effect, the traditional civil rights discourse allowed
activists to combine a reform politics of black integration at home with a Cold
War commitment to supporting U.S. objectives internationally. In this way,
activists were able to construct a deeply appealing account of black equality
for white politicians at the national level, who themselves were increasingly
embarrassed by the eyesore of southern segregation. These politicians and the
constituencies they represented could see racial reform as simply making
archaic regional practices consistent with those prevailing across the
country—in the process, preserving American domestic economic and political
stability while strengthening U.S. moral standing globally, especially in newly
independent nations.
But by the late 1960s, the failure of legal desegregation to
address deep- rooted socioeconomic hierarchies, alongside the war in Vietnam,
left many black activists increasingly discontented with the traditional civil
rights embrace of civic nationalist rhetoric. For those that gravitated to the
idea of black power, the 1950s and early 1960s focus on American universalism
and the American creed concealed more than it illuminated. In particular, it
undermined the ability of most Americans, white and black, to appreciate the
extent to which the country from its birth had been an enterprise in
colonialism—an extension of European empire rather than an egalitarian and
anti-imperial break. As Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton wrote in Black
Power of the traditional civil rights narrative:
[T]here is no “American dilemma” because black people in
this country form a colony, and it is not in the interest of the colonial power
to liberate them. Black people are legal citizens of the United States with,
for the most part, the same legal rights as other citizens. Yet they stand as
colonial subjects in relation to the white society. This institutional racism
has another name: colonialism.77
To Carmichael and Hamilton, race relations in the United
States mirrored settler frameworks common in Asian, African, and Latin American
societies, in which substantial imperial populations were able to expropriate
indigenous land and claim political dominance. Akin to “South Africa and
Rhodesia,” Carmichael and Hamilton argued that the United States too was a
society organized around a basic divide between settlers and nonsettlers, with
the specific African American condition of “black and white inhabit[ing] the
same land [but] blacks subordinated to whites.”78
76. MYRDAL, supra
note 14, at 1021.
77. STOKELY
CARMICHAEL & CHARLES HAMILTON, BLACK POWER: THE POLITICS OF
LIBERATION IN AMERICA 5 (1967).
78. Id. at 6.
For such activists, the American experience was not a story
of steady progress toward an inclusive ideal embedded in the Constitution.
Rather, the historical practice vis-à-vis subordinated groups consisted of
reproducing and adapting classic modes of colonial authority for changing
American circumstances. As with similar experiments in Asia, Africa, and
elsewhere, settler colonialism in the United States had long been organized
around two distinct forms of sovereign power: one of democratic consent and
internal checks, and another of external and coercive discretion.79 In the
United States, such a dual framework served to separate free settler insiders
from a patchwork of marginalized groups, particularly native peoples and slaves
and their descendants, who found themselves subject to a complicated structure
of overlapping hierarchies. According to Huey Newton, cofounder of the Black
Panther Party, this duality meant that the defining feature of collective life
had been “majority freedom and minority oppression”: “[w]hile the majority
group achieved their basic human rights, the minorities achieved alienation
from the lands of their fathers and slavery.”80
For Carmichael, Hamilton, and Newton, under this internal
American colonialism each subject community enjoyed distinct modes of
governance and levels of rights, depending on the “majority group’s” economic
needs and the dictates of settler political order.81 For instance, blacks and
nonwhite Mexicans were formally granted citizenship and, by the late 1960s,
even enjoyed explicit legal protections, but were still overwhelmingly denied
the basic economic and political conditions essential for meaningful
equality.82 For Native Americans, the reservation system mimicked structures of
indirect rule common throughout the colonized world and pointedly denied
indigenous peoples—whom Newton called “the legitimate heirs” of the national
territory—their right to self-determination as independent and sovereign
political communities.83 For such black radicals, all of this meant that the
framing of the country in civic terms, despite its reformist
79. Highlighting
this duality between internal constraint and external force, Carmichael and
Hamilton continued, “But what about . . . the system of ‘checks and balances’?
We are well aware that political power is supposedly divided at the national
level . . . . But somehow, the war in Vietnam has proceeded without Congressional
approval.” Id. at 9.
80. Huey Newton,
To the People’s Revolutionary Constitutional Convention, Address Before the
Plenary Session in Phila., Pa. (Sept. 5, 1970), reprinted in OFF THE PIGS! THE
HISTORY AND LITERATURE OF THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY 377, 378 (G. Louis Heath ed.,
1976).
81. See id. at
377–82; CARMICHAEL & HAMILTON, supra note 77, 2–32.
82. The first
chapter of Black Power, titled White Power: The Colonial Situation, gives an
overview of how Carmichael and Hamilton believe the “colonial status operates
in three areas—political, economic, social.” See CARMICHAEL & HAMILTON,
supra note 77, at 2–32.
83. On the
experience of native peoples in the U.S. as proof of the country’s colonial
structure, Newton states:
We find evidence for majority freedom and minority
oppression in the fact that the expansion of the United States Government and
the acquisition of lands was at the unjust expense of the American Indians, who
are the original possessors of the land and still its legitimate heirs. The
long march of the Cherokees on the “Trail of Tears” and the actual
disappearance of many other Indian nations testify to the unwillingness and
inability of this government and this government’s Constitution to incorporate
racial minorities.
Newton, supra note 80, at 378.
potential, played a deeply problematic role in collective
life. By cloaking basic structural features of the American experience from
public debate, it allowed those features to persist in shaping the
opportunities and experiences of historically subordinated communities.
This presentation of the African American condition, not to
mention the Native American and Mexican experiences, as existing in a colonial
order tapped into a longstanding black tradition of conceiving black identity
in international rather than purely domestic terms. If men like Teddy Roosevelt
and Douglas MacArthur in earlier decades appreciated the extent to which the
United States was part of a global history of white settlement, so too did
black thinkers during the same historical periods. Especially following
Reconstruction, the black journey from bondage to freedom and back again to
bondage highlighted to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African
Americans how, despite the Lincolnian rhetoric of American liberal equality,
white society remained trapped by the same logics as other European experiments
in the nonwhite world. As
W.E.B. Du Bois wrote at the turn of the century, black
inequality was only one piece of the global “problem of the color-line,—the
relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in
America and the islands of the sea.”84 Indeed, Du Bois, like Carmichael and
Hamilton after him, explicitly attempted to resituate the American national
project in imperial terms; he remarked to an audience in Haiti in 1944 that
colonial circumstances were not only those in which one country “belong[ed] to
another country.”85 They also included “groups, like the Negros of the United
States, who do not form a separate nation and yet who resemble in their
economic and political condition a distinctly colonial status.”86
In fact, black power activism in many ways embodied the
return to political vibrancy, after a period in the United States marked by
anticommunist suppression and Cold War orthodoxy, of a powerful black internationalist
politics. According to previous leaders like Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Hubert
Harrison, the reality that the color line was a global issue—bound to European
practices of empire—meant that African Americans had to question not only civic
accounts of identity but their very allegiance to the American nation as the
primary site of political attachment.87 For Harrison, a journalist and social
critic, to the extent that African Americans were part of any community, it was
an international community of “darker races” who shared the same interest in
self-determination and independence.88 Harrison wrote in 1921, “We have
appealed to the common patriotism which should bind us together in a common
loyalty to the practice
84. W.E.B. DU
BOIS, Of the Dawn of Freedom, in THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK: ESSAYS AND
SKETCHES 23, 23 (Henry Steele Commager ed., Fawcett Publ’ns
1961) (1953).
85. W.E.B. DU
BOIS, The Colonial Groups in the Postwar World, in AGAINST RACISM: UNPUBLISHED
ESSAYS, PAPERS, ADDRESSES, 1887–1961, at 229, 229 (Herbert Aptheker ed., 1985).
86. Id.
87. HUBERT
HARRISON, Wanted—A Colored International, in A HUBERT HARRISON READER 223 (
Jeffrey B. Perry ed., 2001); see, e.g., W.E.B. DU BOIS, supra note 85.
88. HARRISON,
supra note 87, at 224.
rather than the preachments of democracy, and in every case
we have been rebuffed and spurned.”89 The only solution was to link the black
struggle in America with that of “peoples of all colors” who across the globe
sought “their own enfranchisement from the chains of slavery, social, political
and economic.”90 A half century later, Carmichael and Hamilton echoed these
views and argued that “Black Power means that black people see themselves as
part of a new force, sometimes called the ‘Third World’; that we see our struggle
as closely related to liberation struggles around the world.”91 For Carmichael
and Hamilton, just as for Harrison before them, African Americans must not seek
solidarity exclusively within the polity, but rather “must hook up with these
struggles. We must, for example, ask ourselves: when black people in Africa
begin to storm Johannesburg, what will be the role of this nation—and of black
people here?”92
By the closing of the 1960s, this longstanding
internationalist orientation led African American radicals to challenge
directly the great symbols of American civic nationhood, in particular by
explicitly tying their analysis of colonialism to the Constitution. In large
part, this was because of a sense that key questions of race had moved away
from those primarily of formal legal equality. As Du Bois himself told a
college audience in North Carolina shortly before leaving for exile in newly
independent Ghana, although the United States was “definitely approaching . . .
a time when the American Negro will become in law equal in citizenship to other
Americans,” this represented only “a beginning of even more difficult problems
of race and culture.”93 For Carmichael, Newton, and others, the central
predicament facing the country was how to uproot a colonial infrastructure that
perpetuated black disenfranchisement, even despite formal equality.94 In
confronting this challenge, they viewed the Constitution—especially its
symbolic links to dominant ideas of American exceptionalism and universalism—as
more a hindrance than an aid.95
To begin with, Lincolnian narratives of how the Constitution
gave concrete substance to egalitarian revolutionary ends reaffirmed widespread
views of the United States as the quintessential anti-imperial
republic—“conceived in liberty and dedicated to life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness,” as Newton remarked.96 Thus, while the historical reality of
American life was one of colonization, the anti-imperial and creedal narrative
of the Constitution meant that white insiders did not see themselves as
colonizers. If anything, to the extent that most white Americans contemplated
the relationship between the United States
89. Id. at 225.
90. Id. at 224.
91. CARMICHAEL
& HAMILTON, supra note 77, at xi.
92. Id.
93. W.E.B. DU
BOIS, Whither Now and Why, in THE EDUCATION OF BLACK PEOPLE: TEN CRITIQUES
1906–1960, at 149 (Herbert Aptheker ed., 1973).
94. See generally
CARMICHAEL & HAMILTON, supra note 77.
95. See infra pp.
282–86.
96. Newton, supra
note 80, at 377.
and European imperial practices, they viewed the country as
a colony that shook off the shackles of empire. Instead of perceiving their
real continuities with other imperial outposts, social insiders actually
depicted the country as the first postcolonial community. In other words, they
reimagined the white majority not as settlers at all, but if anything as
natives themselves—situated in the same relationship to European empire as
other colonized groups. There was obvious truth to the point that the
revolutionary founding had indeed been an anti- imperial break from England.
However, this anti-imperial narrative ignored the equally central fact that
American independence and constitutional founding did not entail the end of
colonization. Rather, it explicitly empowered local settler populations and
thus spurred a new phase of both expansion and political control over outsider
groups. This meant that instead of simply one history of empire, the United
States had been marked by a double history of British and then locally led
expropriation.97
Thus, for black radicals, the fact that civic conceptions,
undergirded by the Constitution, distorted the basic relationship between white
Americans and European empire had two related consequences. First, by reading
out of the collective experience a post-revolutionary colonial past,
constitutional discourses emphasized a politics of integration that downplayed
the systematic forms of economic and political subordination that marked the
pervasive experience of most blacks. For Newton, regardless of whether black
elites now had the legal right to access professional power, discrimination was
nowhere close to disappearing.98 This was because longstanding settler
structures had reduced “the life of a substantial proportion” of the country’s
nonwhite communities, not only blacks but American Indians and Latinos as well,
to “nothing more than a prison of poverty.”99 As even Martin Luther King Jr.
stated, such subordination produced the nonwhite reality of “poverty amid
plenty,” in which the condition for those marginalized was one of “educational
castration and economic exploitation.”100 For King, not unlike for younger
black radicals, overcoming racism required more than elite black advancement;
it entailed “a radical restructuring of the architecture of American
society.”101
Just as problematic, this occlusion of the colonial
dimension also allowed the goal of black freedom in the United States to become
disconnected from global independence struggles—the natural allies of African
Americans. Even worse, the traditional civil rights framework, with it
governing faith in civic nationhood and a redemptive Constitution, pressed
African Americans to identify their own
97. For more on
the complexities of thinking of post-revolutionary America in “postcolonial”
terms, see the discussion of early American constitutional formation in Chapter
2, Citizens and Subjects in Postcolonial America, of RANA, supra note 12, at
99–175.
98. Newton, supra
note 80, at 377.
99. Id..
100. MARTIN LUTHER
KING, JR., WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE: CHAOS OR
COMMUNITY? 112 (1967).
101. Id. at 133.
interests with those of the American state regardless of how
the country operated abroad—a fact highlighted by Myrdal’s defense of American
international power.102 In the context of Vietnam, the traditional leadership
within the black community opposed combining a critique of legal discrimination
at home with any challenge to American Cold War imperatives or interventionist
policies. For instance, Whitney Young, the head of the Urban League, warned
activists at the NAACP’s 1966 convention that the League would denounce those
groups that linked issues of “civil rights with the Vietnam conflict.”103
For Carmichael, this presented the deeply perverse
consequence of black acceptance of a national security agenda that fought
against fellow colonized peoples while reproducing domestic conditions of
racial domination.104 According to black radicals, Vietnam was only one example
of how intertwined accounts of constitutionalism and American universalism
undermined liberation alliances and destructively reframed the real enemies to
black freedom—white elites at home and abroad—as friends of an American civic
project.105 For this reason, the 1966 Black Panther Party Platform and Program
called for the exemption of black men from military service: “We will not fight
and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being
victimized” by racism and colonial authority.106 Nothing spoke more directly to
this point than the United States’ ongoing relationship with South Africa.
Reminding African Americans of the need for black opposition to the national
security state—and indeed the need for an independent black foreign
policy—Carmichael and Hamilton emphasized the United States’ active role in
assisting apartheid: “It seems inevitable that this nation would move to
protect its financial interests in South Africa, which means protecting white
rule in South Africa. Black people in this country then have the responsibility
to oppose, at least to neutralize, that effort by white America.”107
These concerns with the political effects of constitutional
rhetoric, especially in promoting policies that truncated black equality
domestically while justifying interventionism abroad, led the Black Panther
Party to write its own competing constitution. As Huey Newton declared,
Black people and oppressed people in general have lost faith
in the leaders of America, in the government of America, and in the very
structure of American Government (that is, the Constitution, its legal
foundation). This loss of faith is based upon the overwhelming evidence
102. See MYRDAL,
supra note 14, at 1021.
103. MANNING
MARABLE, RACE, REFORM, AND REBELLION: THE SECOND RECONSTRUC-
TION IN BLACK AMERICA, 1945–1982, at 105 (1984) (citation
omitted).
104. See CARMICHAEL
& HAMILTON, supra note 77, at x–xii.
105. Id.
106. See October
1966 Black Panther Party Platform and Program, in OFF THE PIGS! THE HISTORY AND
LITERATURE OF THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY, supra note 80, at 248, 249.
107. CARMICHAEL
& HAMILTON, supra note 77, at xi.
that this government will not live according to that
Constitution because the Constitution is not designed for its people.108
In a mass popular act of constitutional rejectionism—and
indeed one of the most striking such acts in twentieth century America—the
Panthers chose to celebrate the anniversary of the document by descending on
Philadelphia in September 1970 to stage a large-scale “Revolutionary People’s
Constitutional Convention.”109 Depending on estimates, the number of delegates
and participants ranged from 12,000 to 15,000 people, with 5000 to 6000
attending the plenary sessions at Howard University as well as Newton’s opening
speech (quoted above); thousands more stood outside the doors but could not get
seats.110 As one participant recalled later, delegates to the Convention came
“from an array of organizations” besides the Panthers: “the American Indian
Movement, the Brown Berets, the Young Lords, I wor Keun (an Asian-American
group), Students for a Democratic Society . . . , the newly formed Gay Liberation
Front, and many feminist groups.”111 In fact, another participant reported that
various 1960s era activists and celebrities mingled with the crowd and took
part in plenary sessions, from Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, and
William Kunstler to Muhammad Ali himself.112
The most interesting feature of the convention was that,
alongside plenary sessions, participants broke out into workshops that produced
a new alternative text framed around a variety of basic demands.113 These
demands in many ways mirrored the policies increasingly debated as part of
decolonization efforts in Asia and Africa. Abroad, such efforts had revolved
around practices including commissions to uncover the truth about colonial
crimes and related legal prosecutions, monetary and land-based reparations,
massive resource redistribution to those historically subordinated, the
constitutionalization of meaningful indigenous sovereignty, fundamental changes
to internal security and policing (a central coercive tool of colonial regimes),
and even symbolic and institutional changes (from renaming localities and
landmarks to creating new flags and writing new constitutions). In line with
those international debates, the
108. Newton, supra
note 80, at 381.
109. See A
Convention to Write a New U.S. Constitution, in OFF THE PIGS! THE HISTORY AND
LITERATURE OF THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY, supra note 80, at 185; see also George
Katsiaficas, Organization and Movement: The Case of the Black Panther Party and
the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention of 1970, in LIBERATION,
IMAGINATION, AND THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY 141, 146 (Kathleen Cleaver &
George Katsiaficas eds., 2001).
110. See
Katsiaficas, supra note 109, at 146.
111. Id.
112. Trevor Wyatt
Moore, A Rumbling in Babylon: Panthers Host a Parley, CHRISTIAN CENTURY, Oct.
28, 1970, at 1296.
113. Revolutionary
Peoples’ Constitutional Convention, Philadelphia Workshop Reports (Sept. 1970),
in LIBERATION, IMAGINATION, AND THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY, supra note 109, at
289.
Convention workshops proposed everything from broad-ranging
reparations114 to truth commissions and political trials115 to expanded
socioeconomic rights and significant wealth transfers (such as through the
provision of free food, housing, clothing, medical care, and a guaranteed
income)116 to fundamental changes in the control and exercise of military and
police power (the end of the draft, the demobilization of the existing standing
army, and, above all, community-organized police control boards).117
The plan for the participants had been to reconvene in
Washington, D.C. in November to hold a massive ratification of the new
constitution, but internal disagreements within the Panther leadership led to
the collapse of the second convention.118 Still, the Philadelphia Revolutionary
Convention was not without its own political significance. In many ways, the
call for explicit rupture from the existing constitutional order was an attempt
to highlight to both whites and nonwhites a basic fact about the collective
experience. Over the course of the twentieth century, it was certainly true
that oppressed groups had been able to access greater legal protections in the
United States. But these changes had occurred ultimately on ideological terms
shaped by a white majority. Unlike colonized peoples abroad, African Americans
and American Indians in particular had never been able to impose within the
United States an actual conscious moment of colonial accounting, and with it,
national disavowal. There had been no symbolic raising of a new flag or writing
of a new governing text, let alone imposition of the type of sustained policies
that marked decolonization efforts elsewhere. If anything, the civic frame had
been constructed by white elites on terms that allowed for reform precisely so
long as historically excluded communities accepted an unconditional attachment
to the nation, its central symbols at home, and its practices abroad. The
following conclusion explores the present-day implications of this absence of
rupture—especially what it means for Americans to embrace a postcolonial
identity while rejecting any colonial legacy.
CONCLUSION: A POSTCOLONIAL IDENTITY WITHOUT DECOLONIZATION
Today, the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention
has more or less been lost to history. And to the extent that there is any
collective memory of black radical efforts to generate a constitutional rupture
in the country, these efforts are largely incorporated into a very specific
account of black power and of the Panthers in particular. Under this reading,
the rise of the Panthers to prominence in the late 1960s—especially given their
militant posturing and
114. Id. at 290
(“Reparations should be made to oppressed people throughout the world, and we
pledge ourselves to take the wealth of this country and make it available as
reparations.”).
115. Id. at 295
(“These tribunals will be decentralized and arise out of the area where the
incidents or alleged crimes themselves took place.”).
116. Id. at 290–94,
299–300.
117. Id. at 298–99.
118. For more on
the story of the Convention and its aftermath, see Katsiaficas, supra note 109,
at 141–55.
fixation on armed self-defense—embodies the moment when the
civil rights and student movements lost contact with mainstream America and
instead descended into violence and irrelevancy. Moreover, such views place
black radicalism’s anticolonial agenda, and suspicion of the great symbols of
American nationhood, at the center of this shift away from the “good” 1960s of
desegregation campaigns to the “bad” 1960s of urban riots and left
disintegration. As Richard Rorty declared fifteen years ago, rather than
“shar[ing] in a national hope”119 of liberal self-fulfillment, black radicals,
along with the student activists who followed them, courted marginality and veered
between “self-disgust” and “self-mockery.”120 The consequence has been that,
even within what remains of politically relevant leftwing groups, the
prevailing sentiment is that all reform projects must begin by reaffirming
accounts of American civic promise. In a sense, not only has the colonial frame
been dismissed, but—to the extent that there is any public awareness of such a
frame—disassociating oneself from it is seen, even by left- liberals, as a
precondition for being taken seriously in politics.
In these final pages, I wish to underscore the
straightjacket these developments place on popular self-recognition, not to
mention on meaningful reform. The actual history of the sustained shift from
settler to civic imagination over the first half of the twentieth century
highlights the extent to which civic arguments were constructed by settler
elites themselves. Ideas of American exceptionalism and universalism were at
root the product of debates about how an essentially completed settler project
could transform itself into a global power, especially against the backdrop of
a closed frontier at home and both bloody European rivalries and nonwhite
political assertiveness abroad. Politicians and policymakers came to embrace an
anti-slavery Civil War discourse and, in effect, employed this discourse to lay
the ideological foundations for what would become the American Century. In the
process, they reimagined the fundamental meaning of the national past while at
the same time reaffirming its key markers—from Puritan settlement to
revolutionary independence and from constitutional founding to continental
expansion. This vision called on all communities within the country—regardless
of their own histories of expropriation or enslavement— to participate in an
ongoing narrative of American identity, one that read subordination as
aberrational and viewed white settlers not as colonizers but as the rightful
inheritors of the land.
In a sense, the black radical assault on this account was an
effort to confront the profound dissonances such civic arguments imposed on
marginalized communities. For many African Americans, the experience of living
within the United States was that of an internal exile,121 and accepting
redemptive stories of
119. See RICHARD
RORTY, ACHIEVING OUR COUNTRY: LEFTIST THOUGHT IN
TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA 8 (1998).
120. Id. at 6.
121. In fact, Singh
and other scholars highlight how many of the key figures in twentieth- century
black politics, including Du Bois, Robeson, C.L.R. James, Richard Wright, and
Robert
liberal national purpose did not simply mean allowing
dominant presumptions about the country’s basic character to go unchecked. It
also meant being forced for all intents and purposes to celebrate such exile and
to suppress one’s deep estrangement. Indeed, the majority’s self-conception as
the first independent and anti-imperial colony—if anything culturally similar
to newly independent societies in the Global South—brought home this
dissonance. It told native peoples in the United States that, as a requirement
of gaining minimal respect (not even actual sovereignty and political
autonomy), one had first to agree to one’s own expropriation as the natural
order of things. And similarly, it required blacks to deny that their sustained
experience of enslavement and subordination embodied an essential, perhaps
irredeemable, truth about the nation’s character.
The discursive triumph today of civic nationalism—and with
it redemptive stories of American fulfillment—does more than make us all
complicit in the perpetuation of such dissonances. It also forces any reform
project to proceed exclusively within a framework compelling to the majority
self-understanding. As exemplified by the mainstream civil rights movement, historically
excluded groups cannot claim equality—let alone meaningful power—except by
taking the dominant society’s view of itself as the actual political truth. But
what happens to those very real modes of hierarchy that fail to resonate with
national self- perception? Even more specifically, what does it mean when a
community adopts a postcolonial identity but denies the necessity for any
systematic project of decolonization? In a sense, most Americans have accepted
successful transformation—an increasingly liberal completion of the nation’s
ostensible founding ideals—as the reality of the present, while at the same
time rejecting the need for precisely the structural economic and political
changes that might in fact produce equal and effective freedom. As for those
that remain dispossessed, the lesson is simple: limit one’s own aspirations,
objectives, and allies or gain little in return from society at large. The
question for the future is whether Americans, both white and nonwhite, are
capable or willing once again to imagine other alternatives.
Williams (author of Negroes with Guns (1962) and president
of the Monroe, North Carolina NAACP chapter) to name just a few, experienced
real repression and even became actual exiles. See Singh, The Black Panthers,
supra note 75, at 72.
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