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Emancipation in the United States is often romanticized as the political and social release of enslaved peoples of African descent. It’s a narrative that often depicts Blacks casting down their bags of cotton, tossing down their shovels and heading towards a somewhat ambiguous space called “freedom” somewhere in the northern half of the United States. However, often times this narrative is not transmitted onto the lives of displaced Africans in the West Indies. In addition, the idiosyncrasies of political and economic Black incorporation into majority white societies are often overlooked. Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies, argues that what is most neglected is a critique of how the European “Enlightened” bourgeois liberal emancipatory framework relied heavily upon maintaining a capitalist class structure supported by the oppressive system they were supposed to be opposing. By constructing homogeneous yet separated, national identities grounded in the ability to access resources and justified by phenotypic differences, the contradictory framework was doomed to fail. In Eric Foner’s chapter “The Politics of Freedom” in Nothing But Freedom, he writes that throughout the African Diaspora, freedom for enslaved Blacks did not constitute the same political, social, or economic state as the term engenders. What Blacks discovered was that the “liberal” rulers created boundaries that inhibited Blacks’ integration into their respective majority white societies. Those political, social, and economic boundaries included discriminatory notions of how emancipated Blacks would conduct themselves once released from their plantations. As a result, Blacks who were able see their dreams of a large-scale manumission come to fruition, woke up only to find their previous “masters” from the “big house” would remain so in a reformulated government.
Once embarking upon the task of emancipation, rulers of the US and the Caribbean found themselves in a conundrum: How can formerly enslaved peoples be elevated to social, political, and economic equals to their past enslavers in order to stay true to the newly adopted unbiased classical liberal ideology? Free labor and equal citizenship could not co-exist among European/European-American
What appears ironic is that US freed people eagerly wanted to be a part of the very system that created their subjected status. The Lockean notion of a political actor carried with it an “anthropological minimum,” –such as age, gender, race, property ownership, or literacy –that was said to be requirements for citizenship. Locke, who formulated ideas about race during the Enlightenment period which occurred simultaneously with the creation of the liberal universal individual, helped set the stage for contradicting philosophies that could not find a ground upon which to coexist. Instead, the European capitalist construct implemented across the Atlantic and grown out of European nationalism prevailed to the detriment of displaced peoples who resided in the “New World.” In order to spread the wealth, the wealthy would have to sacrifice. Are there capitalists willing to do that? Arguably socialism is synonymous with liberalism. Therefore, if socialism holds a substantial distance from capitalism due to a socialist society implementing equal distribution of wealth amongst its members as opposed to the wealth being concentrated by a few, how could a society built on the concentration of wealth placed on a small portion of the population, implement a complete overhaul of resource distribution that includes the very people they treated as sub-human only days or months prior? In addition, how could the creators of classical liberalism simultaneously invent the concept of racism during the Enlightenment period and not see the inherent paradox?
Although, Blacks did, and still do, highlight the blatant contradictions in the United States’ laws of supposed equality and the limited implementation of those laws (e.g. throughout the Black Liberation struggle), was it the goal of freed Blacks to enter the political sphere in hopes of having a seat at the table or making the liberal rhetoric a reality thus obtaining a fighting chance at access to basic resources such as land and a political voice? In the Caribbean, there was “…mounting anxiety that Black political power in Jamaica might actually be used in Black people’s political and economic interests. From that point forward, colonial officials sought ways to blunt the impact of Black political participation.” Blunting political participation went hand-in-hand with restricting landownership. By inhibiting landownership opportunities for Blacks, that, in turn, limited Blacks ability to generate agricultural products to be place within a free trade system for profit, resulting in Blacks having limited abilities for economic improvement which worked in tandem with castrated political involvement.
What happened in the minds of the European/European-American
