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by David Comissiong
It is well-nigh impossible to write the history of the USA without finding a place of special prominence for a whole host of black West Indians who, from the days of the Independence struggle down to contemporary times, made critical contributions to the social, cultural and political development of that nation and to the extension of civil and human rights.
I refer to such personalities as Prince Hall, James G. Barbadoes, David Augustus Straker, Cyril Briggs, Hubert Harrison, Marcus Garvey, Joel Rogers, Claude Mc Kay, Richard B. Moore, Amy Jacques Garvey, Rabbi Arnold J Ford, Claudia Jones, George Padmore, CLR James, W A Domingo, Carlos Cooks, Sidney Poitier, Arturo Schomburg and Stokely Carmichael, to say nothing of the multitude of contributors of Caribbean parentage – Malcom X, Grace P. Campbell, Irving Burgie, Shirley Chisholm, Louis Farrakhan, Paule Marshall, and the
list goes on.
But, regrettably, it has to be admitted that in spite of that initial sense of equality, interdependence and mutual respect, the USA and Canada – the two poles of British colonization that evolved into predominantly white nations – have since gone on to claim, and to seek to assert, a sense of superiority
vis-à-vis the predominantly black
Caribbean Community.
In the case of the USA, this can definitely be traced back to a pervasive sense of racial superiority that infected even the most outstanding members of the white majority population of that Country.
A good case in point is the preeminent American states-man – Benjamin Franklin – who, as far back as 1751, objected to the “blackening of America”.
“Why,” he asked, “increase the sons of Africa by planting them in America, where we have so fair an opportunity, by excluding all blacks and tawnys, of increasing the lovely white and red?”
This incipient sense of racial superiority was leveraged in the 19th century and developed into the full-fledged official racist/imperialist doctrine of “Manifest Destiny” – the notion that the new nation was destined by God to expand its dominion beyond the thirteen eastern Atlantic seaboard territories across the entire continent to the Pacific coast, even if it meant the forced removal of Native Americans and Mexicans from their land.
And with this intoxicating imperialistic doctrine to guide it, the Government of the USA engineered the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 thereby doubling the size of the country; took control of Spanish Florida in 1819; facilitated American insurrectionists in their hiving off of Texas from Mexico and adding it to the USA in 1845; engaged in all out war against Mexico in 1848 and, through conquest, added the states of California, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming.
Thus, was American territory and power multiplied and elevated on the basis of the dislocation and brutal mistreatment of Native Americans, Hispanic and other Non-Europeans.
Canadians too, went through their own process of territorial expansion and national consolidation. After engaging in their own ultimately unsuccessful version of the American Revolution in 1837-38, Canadians were able to secure the passage of the British North American Act of 1867, merging Upper and Lower Canada, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia into the Confederation of Canada. And thereafter, the territory of the Confederation was augmented by the addition of Rupert’s Land (Manitoba and the Northwest Territories), British Columbia and Prince Edward Island in 1873, leading ultimately to the Confederation of Canada securing full sovereignty and self-governance with the passage of the 1931 Statute of Westminster.
And, needless to say, just like in the case of the USA, this expansion of Canadian territory and power was accomplished at the expense of the rights and interests of the native peoples of Canada – the rightful, indigenous
owners of the land.
The British West Indies, for its part, also experienced its own version of territorial expansion and national consolidation. Following the final defeat of the French Emperor Napoleon in 1815, Britain gained ownership of the Caribbean territories of Trinidad, Tobago, British Guiana and St. Lucia. Britain also subsequently added the Central American territory or British Honduras (present day Belize).
Furthermore, in 1958, most of the British West Indian colonies were consolidated into a British West Indian Federation, but unfortunately, this political configuration collapsed within the space of four years.
The subsequent history of the British West Indies has been the story of individual colonies securing their formal independence from Britain; combining in the economic integration and functional cooperation structure known as the Caribbean Community (CARICOM); and expanding CARICOM’s territorial outreach beyond the English-speaking Caribbean to French- speaking Haiti and Dutch-speaking Suriname.
But, of course, as already intimated, long before this British West Indies “national” consolidation, the attitude of the Caribbean’s two predominantly white northern English-speaking “brother” nations had long degenerated from one of equality and mutual respect into an attitude of superiority and disdain.
Indeed, from as far back as 1819, the same John Quincy Adams who, as a young man, had expressed such a principled appreciation for the interdependence of the USA and the British West Indies, was referring to the Caribbean territories in the following arrogant and disparaging terms:
“It is impossible that centuries shall elapse without finding them annexed to the US……it is a physical, moral and political absurdity that such fragments of territory, with sovereigns at fifteen hundred (sic) miles beyond the sea, worthless and burdensome to their owners, should exist permanently contiguous to a great, powerful and rapidly growing nation”.
And from there, it was but a short jump to the infamous 1823 Congressional message of US President James Monroe – the so-called “Monroe Doctrine”– that basically asserted that the USA possessed a hemisphere-wide sphere of influence (otherwise known as its “backyard”), and that the Caribbean territories – whether they liked it or not—were objects within that sphere of influence.
At the dawn of the 20th Century, yet another US President – Theodore Roosevelt – added the following “Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine:
“Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western hemisphere the adherence of the US to the Monroe Doctrine may force the US, however reluctantly….. to the exercise of an international police power.”
So, the country that had abolished the barbarous system of slavery some thirty years after the British West Indies, and that had then gone on to impose decades of racial segregation and lynching on its black citizens, was now casting itself as the “civilized”, moral superior of the Caribbean territories and was arrogating to itself the right to use its superior power to discipline these territories.
And now that we have sketched an outline of this long 400 year-old relationship between these three poles of Anglophone presence in the Western Hemisphere – these three historical “brothers” – perhaps there
are some fundamental lessons we can draw from this saga.
Surely, one lesson for us is that we Caribbean people should be committed to a mission to totally decolonise and unify our geographical space of the Caribbean – in a similar, but not identical, fashion to the USA and Canada.
Indeed, we should resolutely refuse to countenance the continued existence of European or US colonies in any part of our Caribbean.
Additionally, we should set out to unify all of the nations and territories that are located in or around our one million square mile Caribbean Sea, thereby establishing our very own extensive, self reliant and powerful Caribbean civilization. And, of course, even if we are not able to attain the US and Canadian examples of political unification, we should definitely set our sights on every other type of unity – economic, cultural, linguistic, and certainly the unity that is built upon functional cooperation.
But it goes without saying that we must unify our geographical space in a manner that is infinitely morally superior to the manner in which the USA and Canada unified their respective geographical spaces. For us, there will be no conquest, no genocides, no violent impositions on defenceless people and theft of their lands.
A second lesson that we can draw from the 400-year history of the three English-speaking “brothers” of the Western Hemisphere, is that we – the nations and people of the Caribbean Community – are in no way inferior or subordinate to the USA or Canada.
We never were, and we must ensure that we will never be. Indeed, if anything, we predominantly black, Afro- Asian people of the Caribbean Community – the proud descendants of enslaved Africans and indentured Asians who unstintingly resisted oppression, preserved their humanity and humanized the locations of barbarism into which they had been deposited – can legitimately lay claim to a morally superior history.
We must therefore always deal with the Governments, officials, leaders and institutions of the USA and Canada as equals. We must also never negligently slip into the habit of thinking that it is our lot to simply follow these two Northern nations or to depend on them.
Rather, we must accept that our history, and the struggles and sacrifices of our ancestors, have bequeathed to us a capacity and a mission to be the pre-eminent international advocates of the principles of justice, equality and fairness, and of the dignity and rights of black and brown people and nations, and indeed, of all oppressed or unfairly disadvantaged minorities.
We began this essay with the opening lines of Langston Hughes’ classic 1926 poem, and so it is only fitting that we permit Mr Hughes to have the final word :-
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow
I’ll be at the table When company comes. Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,” Then
Besides,
They’ll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed –
I, too, am America.
David Comissiong is Barbados’ Ambassador to Caricom.
