The State in Black Political Thought

• In Event: Du Bois and Democratic Theory: Race, Capitalism, and the State

Abstract

Theorizing Black Statecraft or The State in Black Political Thought


Contemporary critical political theory and black political thought have advanced an implicitly antistatist doctrine among scholars wanting to challenge and decolonize the canon and its concepts. These thinkers attune us to the ways in which American and European antiblack and white supremacist statist discourse often masquerades as universalist discourses, fooling well-meaning black political actors into turning to Western tools (like the state) in their liberation struggles and the foundation of freedom. The disavowal of “statist impulses” across the history of black politics in the United States and the Caribbean has the consequence of favoring a search for radical alternatives, leaving turns to the state undertheorized. A binary in this literature situates black freedom in an opposing and almost contradictory relationship to the state, discounting black political agency and efforts to achieve freedom that turn to the state and statecraft. It advances a disavowal of black agency in addition to its disavowal of the state. Consequently, the best chance for enacting black emancipation, liberation, and the foundation of freedom must exist outside the state, among our efforts to escape its boundaries. Inquiries that urge us to flee or runaway to find freedom end right at the moment that interests me the most. And what will they build there? The question, then, becomes might there be something different in state projects that sustain racial hierarchies and those aimed at destroying them? These are questions that attend to the problem-space of black politics in the 19th and 20th centuries and continue in urgency for us today.
I argue that a reinterpretation of black state-making and the state is necessary to disclose the complicated nature of black politics in a world organized by racism. Early forms of black constitutionalism in Saint Domingue provided an early framework for later black experiments in state-making across the Caribbean and newly independent African nations. Saint Domingue and the Haitian revolution serves as the founding moment of black statecraft, as the first and only successful slave revolution in world history to give rise to the first independent black nation-state.
As Getachew (2019) has shown in the worldmaking projects of 20th century anticolonial nationalists, the European imperial order complicates the quest of freedom through self-determination and sovereignty because a condition of domination persists. Elsewhere, I extend Getachew’s work by reflecting on 18th and 19th century projects of black statecraft. I turn to the longstanding problem of decolonization and the state, centralizing how this issue influences/affects the post-colonial state among black thinkers and political actors in the 18th and 19th centuries centering on Haitian constitutionalism and Abolitionist refounding in the United States. Decolonization raises important questions about whether it is possible or credible to use the “master’s tools” to destroy “the master’s house” (Lorde 1984). Due to this intractable entanglement, it is impossible within modernity to challenge modernity, to create and foster oppositional discourses or tools (Scott 2004). In this way, questions arise with further implications of whether it is possible to have oppositional, hybrid, or creolized discourses aimed at the destruction of oppressive forces like colonialism, imperial conquest, and fascism.
In this piece, I trace the contours of the state in the work of W.E.B Du Bois, Cedric Robinson, and C.L.R. James to identify theorizations of the state. A longstanding tradition of theorizing the state can be found within the work of Hegel, Marx, and Lenin, yet a comprehensive study of this work and black political thought on the political theory of the state is largely absent. A further investigation that brings together these critical theories and the area of study known as democratic theory is also wanting. In this study, I offer a conceptual framework for understanding the state across the tradition of black political thought including the black radical tradition. Through an investigation of how these theorists of black statecraft engage with and theorize the state, we are better able to reflect on the areas of political contestation reshaping the way certain concepts like the state and freedom, to name a few key concepts explored in this study, are understood, and mediated. These black political thinkers provide great reflections for what we are fighting for, to give content to the kind of political-social community we seek to build upon principles of freedom, equality, and justice. This piece begins the conversation.

Author

• Samantha Davis, Oberlin College