The Black National Anthem

A Note on Race Politics

Almost all political issues are due to people not knowing the meanings of words.

Sounds trite, but it’s true.

In this case, the social revolutions and upheavals of the 1800s, culminating at last with the decisive bucking of monarchy as the default political system at the end of World War 1, are mostly to blame. Prior to all that, the ideas of “nation” and “state” were two separate things in the public consciousness. Afterwards, following the “volkish” movements throughout Europe (not just in Germany), the notion that the two things, nation and state, ought be fused, gained a lot of traction. The end result was that, eventually, for a brief period, most of the Western World ended up organized into “Nation States.” A new thing we were all gonna try. The two different words are important. As already alluded to, Nation and State are not synonymous but, inside a Nation-State… they sure try to be.

The State of Nebraska. Not a Nation.

You see, the word “nation” comes from the same root as the words “natal” and “native”. It refers, basically, to blood relation and is more or less the same idea as an ethnicity, a group of people sharing a common genetic ancestry. A state, by contrast, is a strictly political entity, like The State of Germany or The State of Louisiana. It doesn’t have any biology at all. Blood doesn’t enter into it. Instead, states are rather made up of bureaucracies, institutions, laws, various departments, military enforcement agencies, and the like… and they need a well-defined geographical border within which to operate.

Nations don’t need any of those things.

Strictly speaking, it’s actually impossible for nations to have them.

A nation may control or own a state, yes, and following the 1800s that was for a time considered to be the ideal… but the two are not the same thing. Japan for example, Japan the state, is controlled almost entirely by ethnic Japanese people, e.g., The Nation of Japan, and therefore can be considered Nation State. Brazil, by contrast, is a state composed of numerous ethnicities (e.g. nations) that have something at least approaching parity of political power. It is therefore better characterized as a multinational state or multinational country. Importantly, nations don’t need states in order to exist. The Jewish nation persisted for centuries without their own state and currently The Navajo, The Cornish, and The Roma come to mind as three examples of other stateless nations. Generally speaking of course, nations tend to like having their own states, but historically actually getting one all to themselves is pretty rare. Multiethnic states with two or three large nation groups vying with each other for internal control, yet friendly enough to come together militarily to fight off outsiders… that’s much more the norm.

The Navajo Nation. Not a State.

Most people don’t know that.

Most people, from the time they were in grade school, were brought up believing Nation and State were in fact one and the same.

There’s good reason for this, but it’s starting to cause a lot of problems because, in America, fundamentally… the issue is that The State or The Government kinda pulled a bait and switch. Without letting anybody know (because that would’ve meant admitting it was wrong), it swapped from working with one National/State model to another, leading to an angry and very confused populace. Now, stuck in its lie, The State can only double down, repeating empty slogans and propagating messages which don’t really make sense.

I am here to help them.

This is my attempt to create understanding between The U.S. Government (The State), and the people that live in it.

See, prior to, I don’t know, the late 1980s let’s say, The State was still committed to this idea of a “propositional nation.” That’s what The State sold the public. That’s what The State wanted the people to believe. The idea was that in America our “nation” wasn’t going to be based on blood but was rather going to be based on values. No matter where you came from, ethnically speaking, if you believed in American Ideals and wanted to pursue the American Dream, the citizens were supposed to accept you. You could be American. Part of the “American Nation.” In practice this meant that we were all supposed to try and assimilate into the same broad “American” culture and pursue a kind of obstinate race and color blindness that treated everyone as the same. Even, and perhaps especially, with regards to ourselves. The message, in other words, was that you were to leave aside your “Irishness” and put that “Italian heritage” up in the attic because here, in America, we’re forging a new nation. We’re all going to be “Americans.”

Whatever that might mean.

Of course, this project had its ups and downs and you might well say that the citizenry was never very committed to it. Nonetheless, from The State’s point of view that’s always been the goal, and, as a “nation of immigrants”, this has caused a lot of problems. Ones that are hardly new.

In fact, you hear much the same struggle that we’re grappling with today going back to the Civil War, where we find the following on the lips of Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address:

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” — Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863

In other words, “Hey, we know that ethnic-based nations work. This war is the first real test to see if our new, not-ethnic nation can work too.”

Or again, after the first major wave of post-industrial immigrants came to America, you hear the same struggle sounded out in The Pledge of Allegiance, officially adopted by the country only in 1942:

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America; and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

— Pledge of Allegiance, United States.

(The phrase, “under God” was added later.)

Importantly, although Blacks have historically been the most difficult for The State to integrate into its new nation, the struggle to forge “one Nation” out of all of America’s various ethnic groups has not gone over easy with any of them. Poles, French, and Chinese were all also difficult to figure out how to integrate and even Americans of Scottish descent were for a time seen as a bit weird (indeed, the civil war might well be seen as an ethnic struggle between the primarily Anglo North and the largely Scots-Irish South).

The long and the short of all that, is that The State’s messaging, for over a hundred and fifty years now, has basically been, “You’re all supposed to learn to be the same.” Make no mistake, a Nation-State was still the official goal, the idea was simply that we were going to redefine what a nation was.

In recent decades though… that idea was dropped.

And a lot of people haven’t gotten the memo.

You see, The State doesn’t know how to tell the public yet, but the simple fact is that the idea of being “One Nation” has been abandoned. “The elites”, the centers of cultural and intellectual power like Harvard and Princeton and so on (note, all still mostly Anglo controlled)… some decades ago concluded that it simply doesn’t work. We tried, we really did, but people’s ethnic/national ties are simply too strong and the idea of “the melting pot” where we were all going to intermix and interbreed into one new Nation simply no longer felt tenable. The State therefore switched models, without really telling anybody, and is now trying to ham-handedly get people to realize that the apple pie and baseball nation of Norman Rockwell’s dreams isn’t ever going to happen. The State woke up to the fact that, despite its centuries of messaging to the contrary, it’s actually not a Nation State. It’s a multi-national Empire. One with global ambitions. In fact, the nations of America are actually quite numerous. Blacks. Hispanics. Anglos. Germans. Vietnamese… All of these groups are Americans… yes.

But it turns out that’s because American isn’t a national identity.

At least not anymore.

Being American in the 21rst century is like being Roman in the 1rst. Rome wasn’t a nation. It was an empire that projected power around the world and contained hundreds of nations within it.

By the same token, America isn’t a nation either.

…

And that’s okay.

We just have to all be on the same page about where we are.

See, much of the anger coming from Conservatives about The Black National Anthem being sung at The Super Bowl, isn’t actually due to racism… fun as I know it is to accuse people of that. It’s actually a lot more due to confusion. In their minds, that’s not how America is supposed to work. We’re supposed to have one anthem because we’re one Nation. Simple. That’s what The State told them the entire time they were growing up. Hey! It’s in the pledge!

But we’re actually not one nation.

We’re many.

There’s actually no such thing as The American People.

Just The American Peoples.

Recognizing The Anthem of a separate nation within the same State is just the beginning of that understanding. As time goes on, the delineations between the various American peoples will probably only grow in intensity.

This isn’t bad. It might seem scary but, properly handled, I think can make us happier and more harmonious.

In my opinion so many of our domestic problems come from this dogged insistence that we’re all the same and that there’s therefore always a one-sized fits all solution for everybody if only we work hard enough to find it.

But we aren’t and there isn’t.

Blacks aren’t apart of the same nation as others in America. They’re telling you that themselves by wanting to have their own national anthem. They have a different culture, a different set of religious values, and a different set of expectations. That’s fine. So do all the other nations in America. To this day the Scots-Irish southerners have a totally different take on Christianity than their WASPy neighbors to the North. Midwesterners (mostly German) have very different expectations of their government than Hispanics in the Southwest. If we can all acknowledge that, if we can acknowledge that all the people groups in America are different and have different needs, beliefs, and desires… then maybe we can start creating more sophisticated solutions that don’t try to solve everybody’s problems all at once. There simply is no one-size-fits-all solution for a multiethnic empire. Once we stop pretending there is… maybe we can all actually make some progress.

We don’t have to be the same to be unified. America may have abandoned the project of becoming a nation-state but that doesn’t mean it can’t still be good.

Rome 2.0. With electricity this time.

What that’s gonna look like is up to you though, and it’ll help if we can all stop being angry or scared about it. The Future’s going to be great and America (for all its numerous faults), really is a beautiful thing.

Amor Vincit Omnia.