People like to say that Black americans cannot be settlers, but why? What does someone's ancestor being forced in a slave ship in 1770 differ from someone being deported from Britain for a crime? What does being over-policed have to do with relations to native Indians? Objectively speaking, black americans practically always considered themselves to be a component part of the US national project. This is a common theme throughout the black liberation struggle. Indigenous nations represented competing political sovereignty. They had their own territorial claims and collective identities, this being a threat to the foundation of the US national project. Black Americans, meanwhile, were understood as a population within American society, even if begrudgingly so. Thus, the black struggle was always to secure an equal spot in US society, never to actually challenge its establishment.
I mean, what was the dream of the black slave in colonial times? Was it to go back to Africa? No, not generally. The Back to Africa movement was mostly of free northern Blacks initially. Black slaves generally wanted an existence independent of their master's farm, meaning, they wanted a farm of their own. This was by far the common dream of freedmen, to get their own farm on their own land. Going back to the oldest colonial times, any slaves that managed to get freedom would get their land plot right in the colonial frontier. So it was in the interest of blacks to get Indian land to settle on just as much the white, the difference was only that the white needed to get out of indentured servitude and pay a sum to a land speculator, whereas the black of course had to seize a miracle of leaving slavery. So I'm not arguing both were the same, but ultimately, their desired endgoals were. Look at picrel from the Museum of the City of New York. These freed black slaves objectively had the material interest of those Mohawk lands being conquered, and those threatening their plots getting exterminated.
I mean, in Settlers by Sakai, white people going along with Bacon's Rebellion is ridiculed, and of course Bacon was a scum of the Earth. For those who don't know, Bacon accused the government of Virginia of being secretly pro-native because it was too slow in exterminating them, and so he tried to overthrow the government. When he failed and was about to get executed for treason, he made demagogic promises to free whites from debt bondage so people would fight for him. So Sa
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