Past Imperfect: Leaving America The prospect of a second term for George W. Bush has more than a few black people reaching for their passports.
By William Jelani Cobb
Dateline: America, twenty-four hours later.
The people have spoken. In tongues. In the dawning aftermath of Election 2004, the voice of the American public is scarcely more intelligible than the speeches of the man whom they have selected as leader of the purportedly free world. The convenient wisdom has it that the public has been hoodwinked. Bamboozled. Run amok and led astray. Taken in by the electoral spin games of the high-gloss grifters from the West Wing who head-faked middle-America into thinking about gay marriage and stem cells, not Osama Bin Laden and unemployment.
The index of Bush non-achievements is staggering: a needless war fought for false reasons, a massive deficit and a non-funded education initiative, tax-cuts for billionaires and gasoline that costs $2 per gallon. In the face of that kind of blatantly faulty leadership, it’s not hard to imagine that Karl Rove is the Republican Machiavelli who tricked half the country into taking their eye off the ball. For the conspiracy-minded, rumors of an electronic scam involving rigged Diebold voting machines started grape-vining even before Ohio turned red-state. Ghosts of elections past.
And life right about now would be easier if it was that simple.
Grapple with this alternate scenario for a sec: what if the catastrophic events of November 2, 2004 were actually the purest expression of American democracy? What if 58 million votes for George W. Bush were not a product of superior spin or an electoral rope-a-dope, but the legitimate will of The People? What if Bush and Cheney were guilty of merely seeing where the crowd was headed and then running out in front of it? We don’t want to think about that possibility because it would mean that we live on the fringes of a society with 58 million people who care nothing of phantom WMDs, but only SUVs, that we the people care more about stopping gay marriage than stopping unjust wars. That for many, our brand of Christianity does not preclude obliterating poor people across the globe. These are dark thoughts for those of us stranded in the vast red stretches and clinging to an increasingly fragile sense of citizenship.
That might be the reason why the common denominator in the multiple conversations I’ve had about this election is the desire to leave this country. A friend of mine, during the early haze of electoral returns, lamented that her ancestors had not been among those fugitive slaves who passed the Mason-Dixon Line and kept going right on up to Canada. Black people, since the earliest moments of our history on these shores have attempted to leave America. As early as 1815, Paul Cuffee chartered his own ships and enlisted black people to return to Africa with him, believing that this country would never rid itself of pathological racism.
Given the fact that Congress, with the 14th Amendment, conferred citizenship on ex-slaves without ever asking if they wished to be citizens of the country that had enslaved them, the idea of a mass exodus became a recurring theme of early black politics. In the wake of the Civil War, Martin R. Delaney and Frederick Douglass fiercely debated whether blacks would be better off emigrating to Africa upon emancipation. Bishops Alexander Crummell and Henry McNeal Turner studied the question in the 19th century and Marcus Garvey built a massive following with promises of a return to Africa in the 1920s.
In later years, Richard Wright, Josephine Baker, Nina Simone and James Baldwin exited America for France, citing suffocating American racism as the impetus. Robert F. Williams, the NAACP leader who advocated armed self-defense in the 1950s was forced to flee to Cuba in the 1960s as was Assata Shakur in the 1970s. W.E.B. Du Bois who devoted seven decades of his life to bare-knuckle brawling with American racism left for Ghana at age 93. Kwame Ture, the international activist who had been known as Stokely Carmichael in his youth, left the United States for Guinea in 1969 and in recent years, Randall Robinson, the founder of TransAfrica and an architect of the anti-apartheid movement in America has relocated to St. Kitts.
But in a real sense, this is all ancient history. The people I heard saying “If Bush wins, I’m out” in the days leading up to this election were a black, white, Asian, Latino coalition of the disillusioned. This time it is not racism, but a narrowly constructed Americanism that has people searching for their passports.
But that’s only half the story.
When Paul Robeson was asked by a hostile, red-baiting Congressman why he didn’t leave the United States if he was so disturbed by American racism, he replied “Because my father was a slave and my people died to build this country and no fascist-minded people will drive me out from it — is that clear?” There is a long tradition of people who knew that changing this country was not an uphill battle — it was a vertical one — and chose to remain nonetheless. The urge, upon watching the ascent of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, is to split toward friendlier terrain outside these borders. But the reality is that 125th Street will remain here. That Auburn Avenue and Martin Luther King Boulevard will remain here. That the 30 million people of African descent whose history has been my life’s work and whose rights have been bitterly gained will remain here. As will I.
The prospect of living under a truculent administration that has shackled God to a set of truly inhumane politics while swagger-stepping across the globe is nightmare-inducing. But my great-grandmother was a slave who built this country and no anti-democratic demagogues will drive me from. I will not be among those planning to leave America – despite the fact that this America left my kind a long, long time ago.
First published: November 08, 2004
About the Author
William Jelani Cobb is an assistant professor of history at Spelman College and editor of The Essential Harold Cruse. He can be reached at
creative.ink@jelanicobb.com. Visit his website at
www.jelanicobb.com.
http://www.africana.com/columns/cobb/ht20041108america.asp
Author
