African-American Separatism Essay Example for Free

African-American Separatism Essay African-American novelist James Baldwin (1963) maintained that at the heart of inhumanity perpetrated by whites upon blacks is the projection of their own paranoia, hate and longing. Baldwin supposed that should white people learn how to accept themselves, â€Å"the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.† At the core of Baldwin’s hypothesis is that cruelty to the black man persists because of the white man’s dissatisfaction with its own culture (hence the occasional white man who romanticizes and aspires to black ideals). Few other eras in white American history evoke such a level of dissatisfaction as the era of The Great Depression, a period of downturn not just in economy but in morale. When white culture has descended to such low spirits, it is no surprise that black separatism emerged. Marcus Garvey advocated a form of Pan-Africanism which suggested that black people reclaim and re-colonize Africa in order to form its own black nation. Elijah Muhammad on the other hand, advocated a form of black nationalism called The Nation of Islam, which concentrated more on social infrastructure such as the development of economics and nationhood. The emergence of these doctrines are not entirely surprising: with white culture being at its most broken state, the zeitgeist which results for blacks is to advocate a repudiation of this culture. Black pride therefore takes the shape of one race formulating its own society as a means to escape this broken culture, as well as to evade the white man’s inevitable projection of latent self-hate. Separatism and nationalism is therefore of meaningful use to the black races, simply because it allows them to chart their own national, political and civic self-identity apart from that which has been foisted upon them by the white culture, as well as free them from the scrutiny or approval of the white culture. However, it also poses risks because for every weakness, shortcoming or failure that may arise from nations and cultures created by these movements is the potential for more discrimination from the white culture, which will most likely subject these to more racially-charged judgment.