Challenging the concept of 'Foundational Black Americans' – Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder

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Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder
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The latest iteration of Black othering is found in the concept of “Foundational Black Americans.” A website dedicated to this idea explains: “It is important to clarify that Foundational Black Americans (FBA) is not a group or an organization, and there is no designated leader of FBA.
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“FBA is a lineage-based designation that specifically refers to the over 43 million Black Americans who are direct descendants of the Freedmen — the formerly enslaved Black people who were emancipated in the United States. This lineage represents a unique and unbroken connection to the foundational builders of this nation.”
Those who subscribe to this concept believe it is important to distinguish so-called Foundational Black Americans from those born in Africa and other people of African descent whose ancestors were never enslaved in the U.S. This perspective resembles the MAGA program not only in its othering of immigrants, but also in the convenient disregard of facts, and reliance on comforting self-delusion, all of which is ultimately self-defeating.
So-called Foundational Black Americans may tell themselves they are noble protectors of ancestral legacy, but they are in fact little different from European groups in this country that conceptualized white privilege and tried to reserve it for exclusive groups. In the case of Foundational Black Americans and the so-called “American Descendants of Slaves” who preceded them, there is a belief — sometimes stated, sometimes not — that there is only a small slice of the American pie that is potentially available to Black people, and it is terribly unfair that those who are relatively recent arrivals in this country will share in that slice to the exclusion of people whose families have been here since the slavery era.
Many Foundational Black Americans also believe that reparations paid by the U.S. government should not be paid to those whose ancestors were not held in bondage in the U.S. After all, it is the Foundational Black Americans who are the “foundational builders of this nation.”
But therein is a flagrant untruth. Implicit in the statement is the suggestion that meaningful contributions to the struggle for liberation and justice have been made solely by those whose ancestors were enslaved in the U.S. What then are we to say about Marcus Garvey, Harry Belafonte, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), C.L.R. James, Louis Farrakhan, Ivan Van Sertima, Cicely Tyson, Shirley Chisholm, and many more?
Also, the idea that slavery in the U.S. was a discrete enterprise limited to this country’s boundaries ignores historical facts documented so well in Eric Williams’ book “Capitalism & Slavery” about the global operations of the slave trade, and that the culprits responsible for those held in bondage in the Caribbean and Latin America are also culpable for the plight of those enslaved in the U.S., and vice-versa.
In other words, when it comes to slavery, the circumstances of all Africans are indivisible. This includes Africans who were never taken from Africa, because they were left to cope with the devastation that was the consequence of the slave trade’s massive depopulation of a continent and the destabilization of African societies.
Hoping only for a slice of the American pie not only limits the vision of what is possible for the African world, but it also takes the ideas of liberation and self-determination off the table. Why settle for a slice of the American pie when it is possible to enlist all people of African ancestry in a global fight to purge Africa of all foreign exploiters and then unite the entire continent under a single flag.
That flag could fly over a unified socialist economy and through its sheer size and might guarantee the protection and prosperity of not only Black communities throughout the world, but also solidarity and material support for oppressed people everywhere who are fighting to escape the clutches of imperialism.
This is a portion of LA Progressive’s “The Folly So-Called Foundational Black Americans. To read more, visit laprogressive.com. Mark P. Fancher is an attorney and writer. He can be contacted at mfancher@comcast.net.
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