African Americans were brought in chains to the Americas where for centuries they were forced to serve as slaves and, in a political sense that has not changed. After the purported emancipation of American slaves they’ve permitted themselves to remain in political slavery, first to the Grand Old Party and now, for almost a century, to the party that sought to keep them enslaved, the Democratic Party. In part that’s because American slaves, unlike the slaves in Haiti, did not free themselves. Haiti can hardly be qualified as a success but it’s version of Simon Bolívar and José Francisco de San Martín y Matorras and yes, George Washington, Toussaint Louverture should be an inspiration to all descendants of Africans stolen from their own lands and forced into slavery. Abraham Lincoln should not.

American slaves were emancipated only through a cynical ploy by Abraham Lincoln, a racist who believed African Americans could never coexist with whites and should all be expelled from the Union he loved. A cynical racist who believed that African Americans should never have political rights in the United States of America. American slaves were emancipated, not to enjoy the fruits of freedom and the ability to attain their highest potential, as individuals and as a race, but rather, to preserve the Union and to lower the cost of labor for Northern factory owners thriving as the industrial revolution permitted the evolution of what became known as the “gilded age” in the United States.

Slaves in the United States were emancipated, not because slavery was considered an intolerable evil, but because victory in the Civil War was essential for Northern industrialists to realize their dream of an American Empire. They were emancipated only to dissuade the United Kingdom and France from supporting the Confederacy’s aspirations for independence. In fact, when they were initially purportedly emancipated during the Civil War, they were emancipated only in the Confederacy over which the Union lacked legal jurisdiction but remained enslaved in the Union itself. That seems ironic based on how history has been taught in the United States for the past century but anyone can read Lincoln’s initial inaugural address where he said (and anyone can verify it on Google): “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”

The fact that Americans of African descent were emancipated by cynical whites by no means implies that there have not been brilliant, ethical and visionary leaders of African descent in the United States, leaders, for example, like Frederick Douglas or Marcus Garvey or Malcolm Little (later known as el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz and finally as Malcolm X) or Martin Luther King, Jr., leaders who believed that Americans of African descent should break the bonds of political slavery that prevented them from attaining the role in American society to which their numbers and their talents should have entitled them.  Indeed, as of 2019, there were a total of 255 different African American led groups in the United States that avocated for African American political independence. But the old overseer system that controlled African Americans during their days as slaves, the system of treacherous African American overseers who betrayed their brothers and sisters, never ended. It just morphed into a system controlled and funded by people of all races that sees African Americans as a commodity to be controlled and used, especially in the political arena where African Americans can be herded into a monolithic voting bloc that serves its masters rather than its members just as slaves enriched plantation owners while they were maintained at barely subsistence levels. A system run by modern overseers like Barack Obama and Kamala Harris and Hakeem Sekou Jeffries and Charles Diggs and Charley Rangel and Kweisi Mfume and Shirley Chisholm and Louis Stokes and William L. Clay. Heroes to African Americans because some among them participated in apparently successful battles for desegregation and civil rights but whose principal loyalties were and are to the white led, power mad, ill-named Democratic Party.

The Democratic Party is a strange amalgam of disenfranchised minorities and fringe groups without common bonds other than their deluded acquiescence in their own continuous betrayal, especially since the ascension of the Clintons to political power in 1992. The party’s principal strategy is the use of polarization to goad their betrayed supporters to maintain them in power so that the party can, in turn, serve its real masters: the billionaire class, Wall Street, trial lawyers, but most of all, the military industrial complex. It seems amazing, especially with reference to African Americans, how successful condescending platitudes, backslapping and utter hypocrisy have been in keeping their voters in line even when, as in case of the Clintons, they are devastatingly betrayed. Witness the Clintons (two for the price of one) deformations of the criminal justice and welfare systems that devastated the African American community. But that’s exactly what overseers are for. What they’ve always been for.

The reality is that Black Power is an inchoate reality, as is the power of each and every component of the incoherent alliance that conforms the modern Democratic Party, but a reality that will only be realized when such groups are emancipated from political slavery and attain their own political power through their own political parties under leaders loyal to their constituencies rather than to the hidden leaders of what has come to be known as the Deep State. Shifting from one component of the political duopoly that has ruled the United States since the Civil War to the other is meaningless. Only a multiparty system embracing real democracy rather than its verisimilitude can bring about a real American Dream, a society where every American citizen can attain his or her own greatest personal potential, for their own benefit, and where overseers are consigned to the Hell they deserve.

Of course, the United States constitutional system at all levels, as implemented by legislation, regulations, rules, ordinances, decree and judicial decisions, poses a huge impediment to political emancipation and democracy. It was designed by slaveholders precisely for such purpose, with the seductive illusions of democracy, liberty and opportunity for all held out like a carrot, but the carrot has always been a mere mirage and only the stick has been real.

It’s not as though African American political parties don’t exist. Cornell West, PhD, a brilliant American philosopher of African descent is running for president during this electoral cycle, although the Democratic Party is doing all it can to keep him off the ballot in November, and the following are an illustrative listing of current African American political parties in the United States: the African People’s Socialist Party, the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, the Black Hammer Party, the Black Panther Party, the Black Riders Liberation Party, the Freedom Now Party, the Harold Washington Party, the New Afrikan Black Panther Party, the New Black Panther Party, the Progressive Democratic Party, the Revolutionary Action Movement, the Revolutionary Black Panther Party, the Umoja Party and the United Citizens Party. However, they are singularly unsuccessful because the overseers appointed by the Democratic Party (and its allies in the corporate media) keep them virtually unknown.

African American voters bear a terrible stigma as a result of the homogeneous manner in which a majority have voted over the decades. They tend to be the balance of power in American politics and have been so since they were formally granted the rights of citizens pursuant to the thirteenth fourteenth and fifteen amendments to the United States Constitution following the Civil War. In reality, although they’ve derived few tangible benefits as a result of their political subservience, they’ve been responsible for the election of the administrations responsible for World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the wars on Serbia and Kosovo, the destruction of Libya (Africa’s most economically successful state), the promotion of civil war in Syria, the Ukrainian conflict, and, for Israeli genocide, ethnic cleansing and Apartheid in Palestine.  Those are intolerable moral burdens for a people to bear. For any people. But especially for a people who have been so utterly abused for over half a millennium.

What Americans of African descent really need if real freedom and real independence and real emancipation and real personal realization are their goals, rather than fourth class illusory citizenship, is their very own “Toussaint Louverture”.

If you’re an American of African descent and don’t know who he is, look him up. 

You may be glad you did.

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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2024; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, the Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.