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 Sakai ridicules that whites fought for Bacon's dream of a faster extermination of Indians, but black people also fought for Bacon, since he also promised freedom from slavery. So neither white nor black saw his very vocal goal of faster genocide as a deal breaker, both sides saw it as just fine if it meant they got theirs. This is just US history.
Really, if anything, that proves that even a genocidal freak like Bacon saw black people as not threatening to his Virginia, and of course not, because black people were never against the carving of any of the 50 states out of Indian land, because they were always a part of the society that formed them even if they were from a most oppressed segment of it.
Going all the way back to Phillis Wheatley, was she arguing that black people cannot realize liberation within a settler colony against them? No, quite the opposite, she was praising the settler colony, begging the King to decree black people as equal colonists.
>Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,>Taught my benighted soul to understand That there's a God, that there's a Savior too: Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.She here is extolling the culture of her new society, that she is glad to be born in this new more cultured land. And I'm not knocking her for this, this is just an expression of black people in the colonies considering themselves as within the colonial society. She understood Christianity as part of the cultural world into which she had been incorporated.
Then you go to Frederick Douglass, who was quite vocal about his dream: the extermination of the Indian so that a White-and-Black US Civilization could spread from sea-to-sea.
>We are not going to die out, I say. Those who liken us to the Indians make one mistake. They overlook the fact that the negro is more like the white man than the Indian, in his tastes and tendencies, and disposition to accept civilization. You see the Indian, too proud to beg, disdaining your civilization, standing at the corners of the streets, wrapped in his blanket,—refusing to imitate, refusing to follow the fashion,—with a few bead purses and baskets to sell. In his dignity and destitution, he rejects our civilization, and the consequence is, that he dies or retreats before the onward march of your civilization, from the Atlantic to the lakes, and from the lakes to the great rivers. He sees with no complacency your railroads, your steamboats, your canals, your electric wire. No thrill of joy is awakened in his heart by the announcement of any improvement in the means of transmitting intelligence or spreading civilization among men. He sees the ploughshare of American civilization tearing up the venerated graves of his ancestors, his heart sickens, and he retreats before the onward march of civilization. Taking warning by the appearance of the honey bees, six months in advance of your coming, he disappears on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains. He dislikes your civilization, dislikes and distrusts you.>It is not so with the negro. He loves you and remains with you, under all circumstances, in slavery and in freedom. You do not see him wearing a blanket, but coats cut in the latest European fashion. If you should see him going down [a] street on a rainy day, you would think there was a man walking there, if he had his back to you. He looks like a man, acts like a man, feels like a man, and the office of this Society is to make him a man among men. (Applause.) He does not die out.and then
>He will not go to Liberia, because he has immense love of country. There is nothing left for you, but to incorporate him completely into the American body politic: admit him to the ballot-box, admit him to Congress, give him a seat on the benches of your courts, let him ride upon your highways and your byways and your railroads and everywhere, on equal terms with everybody elsehttps://frederickdouglasspapersproject.com/s/digitaledition/item/17959And then,
>The proposed donation of the public lands to actual settlers—to the landless masses as free homesteads—the peopling of the national domain with an enterprising, intelligent, and hardy race of emigrants—transforming the savage wilderness into flourishing civilized communities, multiplying new states, and adding immensely to the wealth and productive industry of the nation [would] extend the area of freedom [and] would increase the political power of the North and West—the power of the people—would dangerously menace the perpetuity of the institution of slavery and the democratic slaveholding aristocracy built upon it.This is even more explicit, the anti-slavery struggle, the primary struggle for black Americans, is directly benefited by the creation of new states, "transforming the savage wilderness," etc.
This is not to denigrate Douglass; this is basically the same as the progressive white US Americans of the time, Thomas Sumner and Mark Twain and whatnot. But it shows that black struggle was not in opposition to the settler colony at all, and black people's interests were ultimately not so distinct to whites in regards to Indians. They were not against the US, but were fighting for black participation within it. There's a reason he praised the constitution as a glorious liberty document, it really is a founding document for the nation he claimed as his own. This is why Twain can argue for genocide of Indians but also write a nationalist story in Huckleberry Finn of a black man and white boy sailing the Mississippi together.
Douglass was followed by a split in two factions, one following Booker T. Washington and the other being the Back to Africa movement. The latter is so obviously settler-colonial I'll ignore it in this post (meaning, Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, pre-Hajj Malcolm X, etc). But Booker T. Washington's entire shtick was in his roadmap for how black people could realize political actualization within the US state, expressed in Up From Slavery. Again, at this time in Reconstruction, are black people trying to refuse the settler state? No, they want land to farm on and they want eventual integration into US society as equal participants. Now, his roadmap of course ended in quite the disaster for black suffrage, but it doesn't change that his goal was the goal of practically all black americans of his day. Outside of a few northern Back to Africa guys, he was the undisputed leader of the black community. So when he argues for black integration in the US state, this is not some token Candace Owens saying nonsense that only whites listen to, this was an expression of black attitudes of his time.
Then, we get to WEB DuBois. This is after the extermination of Indians left them as being not really a demographic threat anymore, and thus we see a new US approach to them with the Indian New Deal under FDR. As such, DuBois is not explicitly against the Indians as Douglass was, but still, he is very clearly in favor of US nationalism. If you read Black Reconstruction, he even goes as far as to consider black americans to essentially be the vanguard of US Nationalist ideals, the real flag bearers for the US nationalist narrative. So he's not against US society at all, in Souls of Black Folk he's very clear that his end-goal is a black community able to assert itself as a factor in US society, and thus cooperate with whites to create a US black-and-white culture. He is very favorable to the US nationalist tradition.
Then, we have others like Paul Robeson. His most famous quote from his interrogation at the HUAC was his saying that the US is his country just as much as it is for the white. Again, this is not to denigrate him, this is just an acknowledgement of what the black struggle always was, to realize black ownership of a portion of the US national idea. Then, we have King and the rest. King's main catchphrase, "black equality," really gives the game away does it not? And this is again, not to put down the man. And he was successful, generally! Black people today in the US absolutely see their political actualization in the state as do white people. There is no relevance issues like bias in the job market has to how black people today view the state and relate to Indians. There is none.