I have always been puzzled about the debate as to whether the Black/African community in the US constitutes an internal colony. To me it was always obvious that we are an internal colony due to the form and degree of exploitation that we are subject to. Our community is subject to racialized containment, state surveillance, resource extraction, labor exploitation and suppression, systemic violence, ineffective/extractive institutions, cultural suppression and malformation, and co-opted leadership.
Racialized containment are the measures employed to restrict our movement within various areas within the US, such as restricting us to certain neighborhoods of the city or certain towns within a region. One one level we are surveilled as a consequence of hyper-policing and the carceral state. On another level our social movements have historically been subject to surveillance, infiltration, and disruption by the US government as in the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program. One of the principle resources extracted from our community is our culture. It is, for instance, commodified by the entertainment industry. Additionally, our community is mined for intellects capable of servicing the dominant system. Further, we are variously displaced from our communities on the basis of racist hostility (via massacres) or capitalist accumulation (i.e., gentrification). Black labor is either eschewed (resulting in high levels of unemployment) or undervalued (resulting in high levels of under-employment) in the broader labor market. Institutions which are located within the community often are ineffective or facilitate the extractive ends of the state or corporate interests. Our culture is either suppressed in practice (consider the suppression of African culture during the era of enslavement) or policy (consider the restrictions on hairstyles or the regulation of Black speech in schools). Further, via the entertainment industry, cultural forms which originated with Black/African people are reconstituted into mediums that fetishize sex, violence, substance abuse, and materialism. Finally, those who are elevated as Black leaders, generally serve the interest of the state or capital.
This is internal colonialism.