GLOBAL NEOCOLONIALISM

“Neocolonialism” usually applies to ‘Third World’ countries , not to the United States of America. But in reading MODERN AFRICA (1994) by Dr. Basil Davidson, “neocolonialism” seemed to pertain to our historic American internal political plight also. While my initial thought was that the conditions of neocolonialism clearly appeared to apply to post-civil war suffrage among the freed slaves and free blacks in the South, certainly in the turbulent post-Reconstruction, when attempts to “peonize” the former slaves were notoriously carried out by white Southerner economic interests. But further reflection required that I broaden my first conception into the present day, into 2019, and into the remainder of the United States of America; to view “neocolonialism” without regard to race or color , but as practical philosophical phenomenon. After all America was an actual colony, itself, from 1619 until 1781, when with the defeat of Great Britain, it gained a form of independence. It was still a colony philosophically until 1789, when its imperfect Constitution was ratified; and until 1814, when the resurgent British colonizers were again defeated in their war of 1812’s “recolonization” attempt. Americans, as a matter of organic law, remained colonists by legal rubric until after the North-South “Freedom War” of 1861-1865, when it adopted the transformative, uniquely American, more perfecting, 13th, 14th, and 15th Constitutional Amendments that not only made state and federal citizens of African Americans; but had made true citizens of everyone else, invested now with Equal Protection” , “Due Process” under law, privileges. Its unsteady attempts to become “a more perfect union,” however, have fallen short, repeatedly. In 1877, the “Hayes-Tilden Compromise” gave the White House to Republicans, but gave renewed license to the South to resume its economic oppression of its black citizens (now again denizens). In 1881, resurgent legal repression arose with the United States Supreme Court’s “Civil Rights Cases” declaring the unconstitutionality of the “Civil Rights Acts of 1875,” that had criminalized personal racism and had guaranteed equal rights to blacks in public accommodations everywhere . Repression came again in the form of the assassination of President James A. Garfield also in 1881. And with 1896’s “separate but equal” legal imprimatur in Plessy v. Ferguson, old repression re-achieved hegemony . The incessant attempts to recover from these legal reversals resumed in the courts in the 1930’s with the state and federal court legal victories achieved by NAACP’s lawyers: Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall, black/white associates, or classmates, from Howard University Law School. After 1954, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., our own black philosopher-king, reinvigorated the neocolonial freedom struggle by “taking it to the streets” by massive civil disobedience marches, boycotts, demonstrations, sermons , lectures, across cities and states, into living rooms, schools, governments, churches, synagogues, and abroad. Dr. King was aided by and inspired by SNCC-black students’ “freedom rides” and “sit-ins.” He was transformed by attorney Mahatma Gandhi of India’s “Sarvodaya”, 1947, nonviolent philosophical victory against British neocolonialism. That productive restorative post-Reconstruction era ended in 1968 when, then-vilified, as “too conservative” Dr. Martin Luther King, jr. was shot, killed, in Memphis, Tennessee, glorified, like Gandhi. “Neocolonialism”, as used by Dr. Basil Davidson, was “the handing over of power to African groups and persons who could be relied upon to safeguard the interests, at least the economic interests of the former empire-owners. Dominant ‘middle-class’ interests in Europe, in other words, were to be defended and reinforced, in any prospective decolonizing process , by the promotion of subordinate middle-class interests in Africa.” P.81, “Colonialism in Crisis.” “Neocolonialism” is the now-current, dissembled, political philosophy used coyly by prevailing economic interests to protect, preserve, perpetuate their privileged power and wealth by proxy. As such it yet remains in America, India, elsewhere in varying degrees.