Tag: liberalism

Western Liberalism and the End of History

In a rather puzzling way I suspect that many of those people who wedded themselves to Western notions of progressivism over the last decade–notions which betrayed both an uncritical belief in linear concepts of human and social progression, in addition the rejection of their ancestral orientations including modes of resistance and ways of knowing which were incongruous with liberalism–concluded that they had reached the imagined end of history; that is, that the aforementioned paradigm had triumphed over all others, rendering other ideas of human progress as, ultimately, irrelevant. The exposure of liberal social theories (particularly the vulgar identity politics of the last decade) as insufficient vehicles to either explain or confront the current global and domestic political economy, the genocides in Africa and western Asia, and rise of authoritarian fascism in the US all exposed the inadequacy of liberalism. Not only has it been exposed as vacuous, but also dependent on the largess of the state and corporate sector.

One hopes that in times like these that revolutionary ideas are rediscovered and that faux radicalism is dismissed for the farce that it always was.

Cultural logics and the “universal”

I could be mistaken, but it seems that the Western appeals to the universal, while relevant in informing a discourse on equality within the civic arena, have also served as a medium for the colonization of the ontologies and epistemologies of racialized and oppressed peoples. In this way, one might argue (and indeed, Imari Obadele did) that appeals to reform of the existing state apparatus and its default posture of coercive control towards African people, is also a ceding to that state a degree of unwarranted legitimacy.

The alternative to reform, sovereignty, that is Black nationalism, is generally regarded as both illegitimate and unrealistic. However notions of its legitimacy reside with one’s view on the basic question of whether African Americans have a right to self-determination. And history has demonstrated up until this point, and without a shadow of a doubt, that reforming America in such a way as to eradicate the vestiges of anti-Black racism within the society, its vast institutions, and its practices and beliefs continues to be an unrealistic end.

Therefore I maintain that the appeal to the universal obfuscates more than it clarifies. African people have a unique quandary, requiring a unique set of solutions. Solutions that are predicated upon cultural logics issuing forth from an African-centered orientation to reality.