“American women bear a heavy responsibility to the millions of our anti-fascist sisters in the world camp of peace, precisely because the threat to world peace stems from the imperialists of our land.”
—Claudia Jones1
“. . . the people of the Congo refuse to mine the uranium for the atom bombs made in Jim Crow factories in the United States.”
—Paul Robeson2
“Black Lives Matter” has become a familiar slogan in American political discourse. The Black Lives Matter movement was born in Ferguson in 2014 when protests erupted in the city after police officer Darren Wilson was not indicted for the murder of 18-year old Michael Brown. Slogans such as “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” and “Black Lives Matter” encapsulated the outrage of Black communities sick and tired of decades, if not centuries, of life-threatening police harassment, terror, and abuse. When police units armed with military grade weaponry occupied the streets of Ferguson, some concluded that American police shared many similarities to military occupation forces deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Yet as activists Tamara Nopper and Mariame Kaba observed, “For blacks, the ‘war on terror’ hasn’t come home. It’s always been here.”3 The Black Lives Matter movement provided an opportunity to connect police violence against Black Americans in cities across the country to struggles against U.S. imperialism and militarism around the world.
The connection between Black America and Palestine, for example, flowed organically from the American nation-state’s long support for Israel’s existence as a settler colonial state in the Middle East. In 2016, the Obama Administration agreed to lend Israel $38 billion in military aid over the next decade.4 This was the largest deal ever reached between the two nations despite the fact that much of the world considers Israel in gross violation of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination. The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) calls Israel’s decades-long colonial policy of displacement, military occupation, and terror a violation of international law that meets and the UN’s definition of genocide.5 CCR cites the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians killed and displaced by Israeli military forces following the UN mandate of 1948 and the subsequent invasions of Gaza in the 21st century as examples of Israel’s crimes against humanity.
Similar to Israeli forces, American police departments act as an occupation army in Black communities. Police murder Black Americans at a near daily rate while subjecting many more to constant terror and violence.6 The connection between Israel and American police is multifaceted. According to one report, the Obama Administration increased Pentagon transfers of battlefield weapons to police by 2400 percent by 2014.7 Not only are police departments armed with the same military grade weaponry provided to Israeli soldiers, but many American police departments send their officers to Israel for training in methods of brutality rebranded as “counter-terror” measures.8
These connections were not lost on Black Lives Matter activists in the movement’s initial stages. Black activists in Ferguson immediately began making links between the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the occupation of Black Americans by police. Palestinians communicated with Black activists in Ferguson staring down militarized police in the aftermath of the non-indictment of Darren Wilson through Twitter. They advised Ferguson activists on the proper method of throwing back tear gas canisters so commonly used by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Later, the Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of Black Lives Matter organizations, made solidarity with Palestine and the divestment of resources from the American military a key demand in their platform.9 In addition, several delegates from the Movement for Black Lives coalition traveled to the West Bank in 2016 to participate in protests against the Israeli occupation.10 These examples of solidarity across borders left little doubt about whether the Black Lives Matter Movement also believed that U.S. imperialism mattered, too. The Black Lives Matter movement appeared well on its way toward developing an internationalist movement capable of transforming American society.
Such optimism was challenged after National Football League (NFL) player Colin Kaepernick decided to sit during the pre-game “Star Spangled Banner” in August of 2016. Kaepernick’s protest of the anthem has precipitated a years-long worth of political debate that the Black Lives Matter movement has largely been absent from. Kaepernick linked his protests to police brutality and the oppresses of Black America. He stated that he would not “stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppressed Black people and people of color.” NFL owners, and indeed much of the American ruling elite, saw Kaepernick’s actions as something much larger than a mere protest against police brutality. Kaepernick has been forced into exile from the NFL. By linking the national anthem to Black oppression, his actions questioned the very legitimacy of American exceptionalism as it related to the never ending wars conducted by U.S. imperialism in all corners of the globe.
The veneration of the National Anthem is a racist cultural tradition that is intimately connected to the intense militarization of U.S. imperialism that has occurred in recent years. Kaepernick’s protest struck a nerve in vested military and corporate interests that heavily invest in sporting leagues to spread propaganda for the American military.11 The NFL in particular has partaken in a form of “paid patriotism” with the Department of Defense. It wasn’t until 2009 that NFL players were mandated by the league to stand as a team for the National Anthem. The change came after the Pentagon agreed to transfer over $11 million from the Department of Defense to the National Guard and the NFL to stage on-field displays of “patriotism” as a means to fuel military recruitment.12 Kaepernick was banned from the NFL in a coordinated effort by owners to ensure that no aspect of the NFL’s profitability—especially the millions of federal dollars accumulated from the glorification of the military as an extension of American superiority—would be disrupted.
The NFL’s institution of “paid patriotism” reveals the broad relationship between the military and U.S. imperialism. U.S. imperialism is a global system that depends on the military to keep the profits of monopoly corporations “safe” from the people who the military so ruthlessly occupies and terrorizes. With a budget of $700 billion dollars, the U.S. military is larger than the military budget of the next ten countries combined. Over 800 American military bases are scattered across the world.13 This figure does not include American Special Operations forces, which are deployed to 149 countries around the world fully equipped with high tech weaponry and trained in torture techniques.14
Since 1945, the American war machine has been estimated to have killed between 20–30 million people in nations such as Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Guatemala, and Libya. Such an enormous number does not count the thousands that have been killed by drone strikes since 2001. Also not counted are the casualties of the ongoing American proxy wars in nations such as Syria. Perhaps even more relevant to our discussion, the U.S. currently has a military presence in 50 of the 54 nations in Africa.15 The expansion of the American military apparatus has not only provided reinforcement for the ideology of American exceptionalism through the threat of arms but has also created the necessary economic, political, and cultural conditions for American dominance abroad. ”U.S. has Special Operations forces in 70 percent of the world’s nations and has active duty troops in over 150 nations in the world. Due to the endless character of U.S. wars in the 21st century, it has become increasingly difficult to measure the enormous scope of the U.S. military’s global reach.”
The further militarization of U.S. imperialism has in effect intensified the militarization of American exceptionalism. American exceptionalism is dependent on American military projection and power. Both President Donald Trump and former President Barack Obama have repeatedly linked the strength of the American military with the so-called American values of “democracy” and “freedom.” While the United States has historically claimed civilizational superiority through the military conquest and dehumanization of African and Indigenous people, the contemporary militarization of American society has built on this framework to justify a more expansive form of global empire. David Theo Goldberg argues that race is an essential component in the militarization of society:
Militarizing societies accordingly are those in which anyone (characterized as not belonging and threatening, as beastly, along with those considered their associates, their bidders) is available for being killed or letting die. They may just be forgotten while rotting away in Guantánamo or Supermax solitary confinement. It is a society in which anyone deemed trustworthy on behalf of the state or its nominal interests can be licensed to kill. There is a litany, for instance, of unindicted police officers killing unarmed black people in the United States. It is a society as well in which the ordained increasingly can authorize unmanned killing via distance destroying technologies such as drones. They are licensed by the order of sovereignty to identify who can be killed or let die and who not, who is beast and who is human.16
Race forms the skeleton that directs the American military to perform the role of armed protector of so-called “white” and exceptional values such as “prosperity,” “national security,” and “democracy.”17 Nations and peoples who stand in the way of American interests are deemed savages. Those who carry out the atrocities of American warfare are deemed human. Instead of focusing on how American military corporations such as Boeing make enormous profits from government contracts to develop drones, or the connection between corporate access to mineral resources and the war in Afghanistan, the American public is led to believe that the U.S. war machine is coming to the aid of nations around the world. The reality is that it is keeping much of the planet in a state of perpetual violence, poverty, and terror.
The racist foundations of U.S. militarism explain why this condition can exist alongside the worship of American troops and police officers. American troops, despite high rates of poverty, suicide, and addiction after service, are glorified as heroes in nearly every speech given by acting presidents. The treatment for police officers injured or killed on the job (a rare occasion) is similar. Humanizing the soldiers of war comes at the expense of their victims. The more that police and military officers are positioned as guardians of American exceptionalism, the more difficult it is to criticize them for their atrocities. Kaepernick can thus be scorned and banned from the NFL for speaking out against the hundreds of police murders of Black Americans that occur each year, while police and military units deployed to oppressed communities commit unspeakable numbers of atrocities with impunity.
These conditions have placed an immense amount of pressure on Black Lives Matter–affiliated organizations and movements to remain silent about the full spectrum dominance of the American military. Protests against the symbol of the American military—the American flag—carry material consequences, as Kaepernick’s case suggests. Anti-war activity does not bring lavish careers, nonprofit opportunities, or personal gains of any type. While police brutality in the U.S. is reflective of the total war imposed by U.S. imperialism, the ruling class has attempted to make it a single-issue reform project. Corporations such as Google have donated millions to particular Black Lives Matter organizations to make information about “racial bias ”more “available.”18 Meanwhile, no such funding exists to imprison cops that have killed Black Americans or make information about American wars abroad more available to the public.
The responsibility thus falls on courageous individuals such as Colin Kaepernick or movements such as Black Lives Matter to connect the struggle against white supremacy and police brutality with wars waged abroad by the American nation-state. The term “war” does not merely reflect a relationship between nations. It reflects a relationship to oppression more broadly and points to a vital bond that the majority of humanity shares with each other. Christina Sharpe notes how officers of the New York Police Department (NYPD) often described “furtive movements” as the reason for stopping and frisking over 700,000 Black and Latino youth in 2011.19 The description painted racialized youth as sexualized beasts, which is not unlike how the Obama Administration painted the Libyan people prior to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bombing of the African country that same year. Libya’s leader Muammar Gaddafi was deemed a “murderer of his own people” by American leadership and the army stood accused of using Viagra to rape women and children. None of these claims were verified yet the American-led NATO invasion of Libya still bombed the most prosperous country on the African continent over 60,000 times over a six-month period. The NATO war on Libya left upward of 50,000 dead, which is a conservative estimate given that NATO has been accused of covering up the full extent of the damage.
U.S. imperialism possesses such a large body count, both within its own colonial borders and beyond them, that the system must exert exhaustive effort to cover up the damage. American exceptionalism places a veneer of innocence over American economic and political domination. The racist policing of Black Americans is forgiven because police officers supposedly “serve and protect” American interests on the home front.20 Over 26,000 American bombs can be dropped on the world in a year (2016) yet the American military is forgiven for allegedly protecting American interests abroad. American political officials—and the corporate media outlets that serve them—describe these interests as universal moral principles when in reality they reflect the political and economic objectives of the ruling elite.
The bullet and the bomb—the American military occupation and the police occupation—are the bonds that link the condition of Black Americans to oppressed nations around the world. Barbara Ransby says of Eslanda Robeson that “in speech after speech, and article after article, she insisted that the relationships among capitalism, sexism, colonialism, racism, and empire were symbiotic.”21 Thus, as Claudia Jones also showed, the point isn’t just that Black Americans should care about oppression at home and oppression abroad, as if to suggest that the two are separate, isolated actions perpetrated by the U.S. Rather, Black internationalists were able to connect oppression abroad with oppression at home. As Claudia Jones’s biographer puts it, “unity becomes a radical strategy against both masculinity, racism, and imperialism. This is what the government recognized as dangerous—the linking of these disparate struggles into a unified movement for social justice.”22
U.S. imperialism has grown larger and deadlier because American corporations must protect private property to fully maximize profit. U.S. imperialism must therefore render Black Americans sexual beasts, Libyans sexual mercenaries, and Koreans in the North brainwashed slaves to explain why American police and military forces should exercise political power over their wealth and labor. American exceptionalism makes the U.S. military takeover of nearly every African nation under the banner of AFRICOM a matter of spreading “democracy” even as the continent loses tens of billions of dollars worth of expatriated profits per year to American and Western corporations. Black Americans, on the other hand, have seen their wealth fall dramatically in conjunction with the intense policing, surveillance, and mass incarceration that characterizes Black daily life.23
Black internationalist critiques “of American foreign policy revealed not only the contradiction of preaching ‘freedom’ abroad while maintaining Jim Crow violence at home,” writes Robeson biographer Tony Perruci, “but also the attempt by ‘American Big Business,’ as the Chicago Defender protested, ‘to carry abroad the system that prevails in South Carolina.’” “In other words,” Perucci continues, “by subsidizing transnational capitalism, the American government was supporting the exportation of its own brutal labor practices in countries throughout Africa.”24 Thus, as Robeson and countless other Black internationalists exemplified, the conditions produced by American exceptionalism have the potential to strengthen supposedly separate movements against police brutality and war into a broad effort to imagine alternatives to the entire system of U.S. imperialism.
A collective consciousness connecting the Black condition at home and American warfare abroad is exactly what the ruling class hopes to render invisible. The response to Kaepernick’s protest of the national anthem is case in point. When the protest began to inspire actions from NFL and other sports players across the country, the ruling class seized the moment to narrow their focus. This became much easier to accomplish after President Donald Trump suggested that an NFL player was a “son of a bitch” for protesting the anthem and should be fired accordingly. Suddenly, all one could hear was how protests against the anthem were a matter of American “national unity.” Rapper Eminem produced a freestyle denouncing Trump’s comment while at the same time proclaiming that “we love our military, and we love our country.” Eminem received a popular response from the corporate media, the Democratic Party, and a significant portion of the American public, including Black Americans. The power of American exceptionalism, then, is in its ability to mold opposition to the overt racism of Donald Trump or the murders of Black Americans by the police into politically acceptable responses that reinforce the legitimacy of the American nation-state. In this case, Eminem’s celebration of the U.S. military responsible for the oppressive conditions around the world is able to masquerade as a stand against anti-Black racism despite the intimate connection between the two.
Black internationalism has been the historic antidote to the political confusion caused by American exceptionalism and its power brokers. Internationalism, and Black internationalism in particular, is an ideology that presumes that the freedom of Black Americans is completely intertwined with the freedom of oppressed nations around the world.25 The Black Lives Matter movement and actions like Kaepernick’s have been unable to revive the spirit of Black internationalism that peaked in the mid to late 20th century. The dominant tendency has been for Black Lives Matter organizations to appeal to the American criminal “justice” system for redress or to form nonprofits to serve the Black community. While good work has come from these efforts, American exceptionalism remains a powerful ideological barrier in the development of an internationalist consciousness consistent with the historic legacy of the Black Radical Tradition in America. Historian Robyn Spencer highlights one of these intellectual heroes of the movement, Connie Matthews, who served as the International Coordinator of the Black Panther Party:
In an interview with Angela Davis, Matthews outlined the Panther internationalist agenda. The party, she declared, sought to educate black people “to the importance of internationalism. To get them to understand that we are in the belly of the whale here and that imperialism, manifested in the U.S., is a monster with tentacles and the other oppressed peoples of the world are trying to cut off the tentacles but that we here have to get the monster from inside.”26
Thus, rather than repeating the mistakes of some Black movement leaders who understood the importance of critiquing American foreign policy yet “felt compelled to prove their American loyalties above all else,” Black Lives Matter can find inspiration from internationalists like Connie Matthews.27
The seeds of internationalism were first planted in the American mainland by African slaves who allied themselves with rival colonial powers to win freedom.28 Internationalism took on even more concrete meaning, however, when anti-colonial and socialist revolutions began sweeping the world following the Russian Revolution of 1917. Ella Baker, Paul Robeson, and his wife Eslanda Robeson are but a few stalwarts of the Black radical tradition who proudly espoused internationalism as an indispensable aspect of the Black Freedom movement. Ella Baker is often remembered for her leadership role in the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as an alternative vehicle to pressure Civil Rights reforms. However, Baker was also a staunch internationalist who campaigned against Italy’s 1934–35 invasion of Ethiopia and spoke out against Eurocentric depictions of Africa that drove support for the war. As her biographer Barbara Ransby reminds us, Baker’s activities “were framed by a much larger internationalist perspective and included a particular concern with the issues of African colonialism and independence.” Later in her life, Baker would extend her internationalist support to Puerto Rican independence and join Peace organizations such as the Third World Women’s Alliance.29
Paul Robeson was an actor and singer who, along with Eslanda, presented the We Charge Genocide petition to the United Nations (UN) in 1951. The document, which was also signed by W.E.B. Du Bois, Claudia Jones, and numerous other Black freedom activists, sought redress for Black Americans from the UN on the basis that their treatment in America met the internationally recognized definition for genocide. Robeson supplemented calls for international redress of Black oppression in America with staunch opposition to American wars abroad, particularly America’s so-called “Cold War” against the Soviet Union. His actions compelled the U.S. to revoke his passport and “blacklist” him for sympathizing with communism. As Tony Perucci explains, Robeson was punished for his
promotion of African American rights, but also his linking of the cold war crisis with capitalist investments in colonialism . . . For Robeson, the possibility of African Americans going to war against the Soviet Union was “unthinkable” because the adverse material effects of war on blacks throughout the black diaspora rendered the very notion of fighting in such a war in direct conflict with the movement toward substantive redress and the realization of freedom. Blacks’ participation in such a war amounted to fighting for their own disenfranchisement and to their own disadvantage.30
Paul’s wife Eslanda was another leader of the Black Freedom movement who opposed U.S. warfare for similar reasons. Eslanda often connected her opposition to the Korean war and the American arms race with the Soviet Union to efforts to improve Black life in America. Ransby argues that Eslanda, or “Essie,” was an “advocate for internationalizing the Black Freedom struggle in the United States and for drawing parallels with socialist, communist, and anti-colonial movements abroad.” Essie “would expand greatly on this idea in her later writings,” Ransby continues, “where she would emphasize the importance of being part of a global political family and developing a global Black identity.”31
Black internationalism was not merely an idea, but a movement informed by and organized around the everyday struggles of Black Americans. Activists such as Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois visited the Soviet Union and China to learn from anti-colonial revolutions abroad and to build support for the Black Freedom movement. As Lisa Lowe notes, “Du Bois situated the African American freedom struggle within a world historical struggle of laborers of color and implied that the struggle of Black labor did not depend on recognition by white Americans or the U.S. state, but on recognition by other laborers of color in the colonized world.”32 Such support helped place pressure on the U.S. imperialist establishment, which saw Jim Crow racism as a potential public relations hurdle in the establishment of economic and political hegemony abroad. “The push to frame America’s civil rights and economic justice movements . . . to the larger anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements abroad,” writes Barbara Ransby, “might actually have strengthened and accelerated, rather than derailed, the push for racial equality had the Black leadership at the time adopted that stance.” Indeed, by the end of the Second World War, U.S. imperialism was worried about how Jim Crow white supremacy would impact its newfound hegemony abroad. The worry was so intense that the United States not only revoked the passports of Robeson, Du Bois, and other Black Freedom activists but also sent jazz musicians to Africa and Asia to offset bad international press about American racism.33
Black internationalism would continue to develop into the era of Black Power and Black liberation. Malcolm X reignited the claims of the We Charge Genocide petition of a decade prior to petition African countries to prosecute the U.S. government at the UN for genocidal crimes against Black Americans.34 The Black Panther Party, which formed in part because of Malcolm X’s legacy, possessed chapters in dozens of countries around the world including in the DPRK and Algeria. The organization offered Black Panther members to fight U.S. imperialism’s war in Vietnam on the side of the Vietnamese. Huey P. Newton, founder of the Party, was invited to visit China in September of 1971, months prior to President Nixon’s supposedly historic visit in 1972.35 The Black Panther Party arguably led the most significant peace movement that has ever existed in America. This movement placed significant pressure on the U.S. to withdraw from its invasion of Vietnam.
U.S. imperialism should matter to Black Lives Matter, then, because Black internationalism has always mattered to the development of a path toward Black freedom. Recognizing, like W.E.B. Du Bois, “that the pursuit of political enfranchisement for a single group within an imperial United States could contribute to the subordination of others, both inside and outside of the American capitalist empire,” Black internationalism envisions a world where white supremacy and empire are replaced by a new, global system of relationships based in solidarity and mutual cooperation.36 Black internationalism imagines a world where Colin Kaepernick is not blacklisted from the NFL for standing up against the wanton murder of Black Americans by the police. It imagines a world where the U.S. military is no longer able to invade, sanction, and bomb nations into submission. Racial oppression in America has reached a climatic intensity, as has U.S. imperialism’s ceaseless profit-driven wars on the planet. Conditions exist, as they did in the 20th century, for Black internationalism to make a revival. This makes the remembrance of Black internationalism a critical tool toward deconstructing American exceptionalism and its cacophonous cries for more war at Black America’s expense.
There are contemporary efforts that are attempting to revive Black internationalism. In 2016, after numerous testimonies were given by individuals and organizations impacted by the practice, a UN working group concluded that police killings of Black Americans were reminiscent of lynching.37 China has produced an annual report on the United States’ human rights record since at least 2014, highlighting racism and police brutality as hallmarks of American society.38 And in the U.S., the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) is leading the way in the development of a new anti-war movement. According to their website, BAP “seeks to recapture and redevelop the historic anti-war, anti-imperialist, and pro-peace positions of the radical black movement.”39 These particular developments indicate that Black internationalism has not been forgotten, just arrested by the influence of American exceptionalism. This is an important lesson that was articulated by Martin Luther King Jr. in his final years. “Like the anti-colonial activists of the 1940’s,” writes Penny M. Von Eschen, King “connected the possibility of change—a genuine transformation of American society and global power relations—to an ongoing struggle of memory against forgetting. The moral imagination to create a genuinely democratic world depended on remembering and bearing witness to the enslavement of Africans, the exploitation of colonial peoples, and the development of racial capitalism.”40
American exceptionalism and its attendant ideology of American innocence have helped the U.S. cover up its atrocities abroad and disconnect them from its racialized atrocities at home. The American military is widely seen as protecting our nation from savage peoples and their inferior ways of life. Police brutality sparked the Black Lives Matter movement because it reminded us that American exceptionalism has never applied to Black people. To the oppressed, the United States has never been a force for good. The Black Lives Matter phenomenon, however, has not yet led to the emergence of a serious anti-imperialist movement. Black Lives Matter organizations cannot be blamed for the overall lack of such a movement. But American exceptionalism can be blamed, as the narrative is intertwined with the justifications the American ruling class uses to promote its military ventures abroad. With U.S. imperialism risking the possibility of nuclear war with nations such as Russia, China, Iran, and the DPRK, and with the Black condition in America in decline, we cannot miss another opportunity like what Colin Kaepernick’s anthem protest afforded. That is, to ensure that peace becomes integrated in the movement to imagine a future that is free from U.S. imperialism and white supremacy. This will require that anti-racist and social justice movements publicly break from U.S. imperialism’s fantasies about the U.S. military’s role in the world without hesitation or exception.