What separates the Black community from everyone else in America is how we came here. Malcolm used to say, “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us!” Unlike everyone else, our ancestors didn’t come to America by choice; they were violently extracted from Africa so their labor could be exploited in America. We didn’t choose America; America chose us.
Our ancestors were given a new identity by their captors; they became Negroes because they were slaves, they were slaves because they were Negroes. Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir Twelve Years A Slave illustrates the impossibility of anyone black escaping the logic of this paradigm. Black life and liberty have always been at risk to the arbitrariness of white men. The only thing separates Solomon Northup from Michael Brown is time.
Today’s Black community is a function of overt, structural, systemic oppression of a group of human beings around the social construct of race. But as they say in Jurassic Park, “life will find a way,” so like Sisyphus they struggled against the absurdity of their condition and created a new identity and culture out of the chaos of racism and slavery. Central to that identity and culture was the inseparability of the fate of the black individual from the destiny of the black community. We will see the full articulation of this fusion of the new individual identity with the group identity when we get to post-Civil War America.
We were brought here against our will because we were Black. We were enslaved and robbed of our labor because we were Black. We were stripped of our historical identities because we were Black. In fact, we didn’t know we were Black until we got to America.
The second in a series of commentaries on the evolution of the Black community and Black political unity.
Mike Jones is a former senior staffer in St. Louis city and county government and current member of the Missouri State Board of Education and The St. Louis American editorial board. In 2016, he was awarded Best Serious Columnist for all of the state’s large weeklies by the Missouri Press Association.
https://www.stlamerican.com/news/columnists/mike_jones/we-didn-t-choose-america-or-each-other/article_1d212c32-4e08-11e8-9178-7f388584efb5.html