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”
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.
As ever, the internet is about inventing a guy and getting mad at that guy.
