Black Lives Matter. Do the Statues Matter? (I)

by Laura Lai/Essay

The struggle of the Afro-American people is a long struggle for inclusion in the American nation-building process. The Afro-Americans are black people brought from different African countries to serve as slaves starting with the 17^th century until slavery was abolished in the 19^th century – following a several years-long Civil War between the Northern American states that were slavery abolitionists and the Southern American states.

            At the very beginning neither the Blacks nor the indigenous Indian Americans were considered persons [Last year when I was a Drama Writing student, I wrote a fictive dialogue for my class inspired from a real story of an Indian American, ‘The Standing Bear – The Person’ that I posted on this blog and that you can read here.]. When slavery was abolished, their struggle entered new phases: the fight for the right to vote and the fight against segregation. After long but victorious fights, America elected also an Afro-American President. The fact that an Afro-American man, but no woman – be her white, was elected as U.S. President is the climax of a long and victorious fight to be recognized as a person, as a free citizen and with the right to vote. Under Trump Administration, statistics show that the Afro-American employment rate is historically high. The recent tragic death of the Afro-American George Floyd killed by white policemen shows first and foremost that mentalities are the hardest to change. The tragic death of George Floyd initiated a world movement that gathers all races from around the globe: ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement.

It is within this world movement that protesters asked for the bringing down of statues of imperialists and colonialists. Black lives definitely matter, but this essay wants also to have a look at the controversy around the removal of controversial statues around the world.

‘Afro-Americans suffer perhaps the greatest injustices of all ethno cultural groups, both in terms of their historical mistreatment and their current plight’, wrote Prof. Will Kymlicka in his book ‘Can Liberal Pluralism Be Exported?’ (Oxford University Press, 2001:47). When I was a MA Political Science student and researching on the topic of nationalism, I had the great chance of a summer school scholarship in Budapest and the great honor to meet the Canadian Prof. Will Kymlicka (from Queen’s University) and be his student for couple of weeks. And ever since I subscribe to the observations made by others (some of them teachers themselves) who told me before that great professors are ‘simple’ and ‘approachable’. And so it is! – as they do not have any reasons to use arrogance to talk down and to behave unapproachable, in order to cover knowledge gaps.

            In his attempt to answer whether or not the Western liberal pluralism can be exported to Eastern Europe, Prof. Kymlicka had first identified several ethno cultural groups: national minorities, immigrants, ethno religious groups, metics (illegal immigrants) and the Afro-American people. And from these five culturally different groups, the Afro-Americans constitute the category who ‘suffers the greatest injustices’ of all. Afro-Americans have no longer any other country but the United States and they do not speak any of the African languages, but English – and the language is the most important tool of integration into the majority nation-building. However, they were ‘prevented rather than encouraged from integrating into the institutions of the majority culture’ (Kymlicka, 2001:46). And federalism – that was the topic of my PhD research that I did not have the financial means to finish, or maybe it was neither the place or the time according to the Devine Grace – is usually seen as a ‘panacea’ of multicultural accommodation complexities. The European federalists definitely see it that way and they consider the American federalism as ‘a united in diversity’ inspiration for the creation of the United States of Europe. Prof. Kymlicka himself points on the advantages of the federal system given its self-governing defining element, but the denial of including the Afro-American in the nation-building shows that American federalism is a territorial federalism – meant to organize a large and diverse territory, rather than to accommodate a racial diverse population. Kymlicka reminds that American states had first to outnumber all minorities. Basically, in the American nation-building process, the Afro-Americans were denied participation in the nation-building.

‘The costs of allowing such a subculture to arise are enormous, both for the Blacks themselves, who are condemned to lives of poverty, marginalization and violence, and for the society at large, in terms of waste of human potential, and the escalation of racial conflict’ (Kymlicka, 2001:47).

(to be continued below)