The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia http://libgen.li/item/index.php?md5=28C51308F215E77FA12EEA0E3A25F329
…But for many individuals, dreams of a Pan-African utopia in Liberia were tempered by complicated relationships with the Africans, whom they dispossessed of land. Liberia soon became a politically unstable mix of newcomers, indigenous peoples, and “recaptured” Africans from westbound slave ships. Ultimately, Clegg argues, in the process of forging the world’s second black-ruled republic, the emigrants constructed a settler society marred by many of the same exclusionary, oppressive characteristics common to modern colonial regimes.
broke: read Settlers
woke: read Settlers but replace America with Africa and replace “white” with “black”, and replace “black” with “indigenous black”
the woke “freed slaves should go to Africa” ethno-statists
Words that have never before been combined in this way.
There has always been ethno-nationalist petite bourgeois tendencies within the black movement sadly. While white people really shouldn’t condemn any efforts at black self determination, these tendencies do make a habit of openly opposing the broader socialist and communist movements. BMF is talking about a specific colonialist tendency in which black people in the US colonized what is now Liberia, but Garveyists, New Black Panthers, Nation of Islam, “Back to Africa”, as well as other movements represent the petite bourgeois influence in the black liberation struggle. These tendencies plainly ignore the needs of the black working class (the overwhelming majority of blacks in this country), openly advocate either for black capitalism or impossible to return to African modes of production, and would ultimately end up reactionary.
If your question is still “who is calling them woke?” then fair enough. I think you would find that while their following is small, it is extremely dedicated and their ideas have some sympathy on the left and among the poorest blacks in the country (who are the people we want to be reaching). When your world is defined by the contrast of the white suburb and the black ghetto, the white condo and the black tenement, the white police officer and the incarcerated black, it is easy to fall into primordial ideas defining race as the basic contradiction (white people do this all the time to, just in reverse). Meanwhile the only other option is some pasty white DSA kid who only half understands Marx stumbling through an explanation of his ideas, suddenly the black militia proclaiming a New African Republic seems pretty cool.
I assume that the “woke” people that are being referred to were abolitionists who believed in giving freed slaves a place where they wouldn’t be under threat of being made into a slave again. It is fairly similar to the argument for Zionism or something like the Jewish Autonomous Oblast. Doubt black mold futures will go on to call Stalin woke though.
You seem like a guy who knows his stuff. I’m admittedly not very studied on this topic, but I’m just gonna quote a little excerpt from the American Colonization Society’s Wikipedia page that gave me a different impression if you’ll allow me and if you want you can tell me what are the problems with what’s being said.
There were several factors that led to the establishment of the American Colonization Society. The number of free people of color grew steadily following the American Revolutionary War, from 60,000 in 1790 to 300,000 by 1830.[1]:260 Consequently, slaveowners grew increasingly concerned that free blacks might encourage or help their slaves to escape or rebel. In addition, most white Americans saw African Americans as “racially” inferior and felt that “amalgamation,” or integration, of African Americans with white American culture was impossible and undesirable. This reinforced the notion that African Americans should be relocated to somewhere they could live free of prejudice, where they could be citizens.
The African-American community and abolitionist movement overwhelmingly opposed the project. In most cases, African Americans’ families had lived in the United States for generations, and their prevailing sentiment was that they were no more African than white Americans were European. Contrary to stated claims that emigration was voluntary, many African Americans, both free and enslaved, were pressured into emigrating. Indeed, enslavers sometimes manumitted their slaves on condition that the freedmen leave the country immediately.
I feel like it’s silly to act like there’s any chance of that happening. Black people have only ever gotten progressively more integrated into American society even during Republican governments, and the trend is for that to continue. It seems to me like the observed trend is for mainstream Republicans to adopt a civic nationalist discourse that frames African Americans as an integral part of America and makes symbolic concessions to black identity.
