We know that after the Soviet-Nazi Pact of 1939, Communist and non-communist Black Americans had a decision to make. Should they stand with America and fight for Europe’s freedom from Nazism, thus subordinating the fight against Euro-American imperialism (colonialism) or should they stay home, don’t enlist in the military but continue to battle against fascism abroad and at home? Fight on the side of imperialism or stay home (Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950). What is Britain’s role in South Africa? What is the Australian government’s policy toward its native population? To aid England and France was to aid colonial empires.

Before they could work out an agenda, Hitler intervened. His troops captured some 400,000 “colored” (Africans and Arabs) soldiers after the invasion in France. But European newspapers declared that there was “no place for the new order of European civilization” for Black people.

We know the stories of returning Black American vets from WW II. Many of them ended up at the end of rope hanging from a tree. All were subjected to second class citizenship and Jim Crow. The Rev. Dr. Martin L. King, Jr. once said that it’s a wonder Blacks in America didn’t all turn to communism.

The word “American,” all these many years later, all these many years after establishing the foundation of American wealthy and ambitions of Empire, still conjures up images of Caucasians. Given the history of institutionalized racism and the goal of American Empire, if Black Americans say “I am an American,” what do we forfeit? From whom do we spare the truth? What are we sparing?

In an America some 40 years after a systemic purge of the Black Left, there’s the dilemma, the sacrificial crisis of 1939. Do we say “American” and take claim to Pax Americana, to the occupation of Iraq, the conflict in Afghanistan, to the genocide of Native Indians, to the encampment of Japanese citizens, to the brutality of repression of voices here and abroad, to the millions of lives snuffed in Vietnam, Guatemala, Chile, Congo, Granada, and on an on? Do we claim these tragedies and the tragedies of our own people here in America, too? Our tax money fueling F-16s, even our blood on these foreign fields, the warmongering mentalities of a Colin Powell and Condi Rice, and the heartlessness of an Alphonso Jackson are examples of what is wrong within Black Americans.

For those of us on the Black Left who are still committed to keeping our eyes open, to listening and to hearing, to recognizing the danger of capitulating to the “we” of America - we also recognize that we’ll lose sight of our autonomy, our right to self-determination - our human rights as Black people, here in the U.S. To accept the agenda of the U.S. domestic and foreign policies is to forfeit our spirit of resistance against such fascist repression. America is the greatest purveyor of violence, Rev. King once said, yet it hasn’t any intentions of turning away from its impending collapse - even at the risk of destroying Earth itself.

I’ve lived in a state where a Black person is guilty until proven white. If you are Black and don’t pass the “test” you are labeled a “militant” and held up for others, mostly Blacks, to recognize the discarded “non-being” and to remember the rules of play in white America. In this atmosphere, I watched the Pennsylvania Democratic debate on April 17, 2008, and I couldn’t help but remember how I have been in interviews where I certainly felt as if I were under attack from a barrage of identity-busting bombs. “What’s your perspective?” “What books do you intend to teach?” Here, in the heartland of white America, in a state that incarcerates more Blacks than any other, I watched as two white functionaries of the State tried to pierce the “identity” of someone who consciously determined to have his identity emptied and absorbed for a role as a functionary in the army of the State.

“Bitter,” Obama, is a label we place on Blacks who have a different perspective about America. Angry Blacks are bitter: they want what we have! Do you understand the code words we have here in America? Bitter describes ungrateful Blacks, Obama.

Is that Rev. Wright an American? Do you believe America is damned to hell?

Do you associate with white people like Weatherman Bill Ayers in Chicago? Do you agree with his views about America?

Who are you Barrack Obama?

Do you love America? Where’s you flag pin, the emblem of your faith and loyalty to us? Do you love us?

Yes, Master Charlie Gibson and Master George Stephanopoulos!

No misstep, Obama! LOVE US and power (pseudo, for sure) could be yours – you, our creation (surrogate victim, potential fall guy). Put no other god before you!

There should have been music! “We are the world,” with Obama holding hands with Hillary Clinton and Masters Charlie and George!

There’s isn’t anything innocent about the business of white interrogation. Under the government of Pax Americana, the military, social, cultural, political institutions, and the media has a mission. It has its orders. Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos performed their tasks - well.

A visibly upset Sen. Obama who, bent to proceed with the interrogation, answered with appropriately submissive responses. Confronted and tested, he, a man of no origins, answered repeatedly - yes, Masters Charlie and George. He showed his love, his reverence for the power these corporate news functionaries share with the government; he showed the Masters his commitment to the fascist rising in America.

You can cover up white American fascism and call it “right wing” or “Republican,” but it’s American, Democratic, left, and right down to its bone. White America is in love with itself - this is the bottom line. And everybody had better love white Americans or there’ll be consequences, here and abroad! This debate of U.S. presidential candidates couldn’t address ways to end corporate greed that feeds on the poverty and deaths of millions of people - not with the representatives of the Walt Disney Corporation. Since the end of the U.S. Civil War, the great debate has focused on whether or not this nation’s white population can/should (even) “cohabit peacefully”(Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II) with freed Black people. Look again at the debate in Pennsylvania 2008. The answer: Can’t! The freed Black slave has never been free of those with the power to declare us decadent and see it through to the fruition of this declaration. Unless we, the Black, be absorbed through a process of whiting more than our teeth, unless we forfeit our identity as Black, as free human beings, we can’t enter the Kingdom of Pax America. To be American is to be non-Black! We ultimately spare America of its Black population!

Empire rest on the expansion of these principles of white supremacy: the ultimate absorption of other sovereign lands is America’s goal. Absorption! Capitulation to Pax Americana is the only way to “cohabit peacefully” - the U.S. commits all the necessary violence to make a better world!

Here is the danger: We spare the truth about America’s inhumanity to certain of its citizens and to others in the world. The truth for us is that we hurt ourselves - for we can’t, as an individual or a collective, save white America. White America has to save itself. We, in turn, must not forfeit recognition of America’s inhumanity within its borders and without or we will capitulate to the will to hate. Hate - not love - is the real story about white America! Its “humanitarian” and warring missions are one and the same business of corporate domination motivated by hatred, blinded by self-love, and ultimately serving a god that reflects the deeds of a decadent civilization. Indeed, the greatest American business of all is that of assuring worship of hatred: the repression of Black and Chicano/a people in urban American cities, the CIA-backed coups, the occupation of sovereign states and pre-emptive wars against other resisting nations, the 700 air bases around the world, the Haitians dying daily, the secret meetings to approve torture for others, and the mining and drilling of other nations’ resources, leaving their people with bulging stomachs and bulging IMF debts. U.S. discourse on the Other (a discourse promoting white supremacy), ascribes to Black people living in America the classification of decadents while rejecting (forcefully) its responsibility in the Euro-American attack waged against Black people globally.

This time, Blacks living in Amerikkka should respond and declare that we reject a function within - a “cohabiting peacefully” dead existence - within any new order that advocates a decadent idea of civilization!

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer, for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.