An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

US, given that the US was not Black land? Decolonization efforts on the
African continent happened on Africans’ land, marking a fundamentally
different situation than what Black people faced. Indigenous people in the
US settler society did not even register in these analyses except as they
related to the white-constructed idea that white people had simply wiped
out all of the Indians. While attempting to place the Black American
struggle within worldwide efforts for liberation, Malcolm and others
participated in discourses of omission.
Malcolm’s discourse of Black belonging as it related to land
unfortunately perpetuated racial projects in the US—one that was based
upon a Black and white racial binary, as well as a very masculine, settler
idea of how land should be utilized. Though going global in his analyses
and pointing toward a connection with the Global South and peoples’
attempts to rid themselves of colonialism, he failed to clearly understand
the actual social and political conditions in a land they called home.
Malcolm’s reference to the American Revolution presents another point of
contention. In one sense, yes, that revolution was about land. But once the
revolution was won, they needed to remove Native people to secure that
land. Furthermore, Native peoples participated in that fight with their own
agendas of maintaining land, on both the American and British sides.
Though unable to develop fully his ideas for Black liberation, Malcolm did
develop an elementary rubric for placing Black Americans within the global
struggle for human rights.
In the last two years of his life, especially after his split from the Nation
of Islam and Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X exemplified a greater analysis
of the Black American condition within the larger international struggle
against colonialism. He discussed the North Vietnamese’s fight for freedom
and traveled extensively throughout the African continent. Speaking with
dignitaries like Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah, he saw firsthand how
they challenged European colonialism. As a result, he framed his own
thinking about the Black American condition within colonial terms. Yet,
this framing and analysis begs the question: How can you discuss Black
Americans as primary settler-colonial subjects when the US is (1) a settlercolonial
state and (2) Indigenous people still lived on this land? Yes,
everyone is impacted by settler colonialism, but the experiences of people
vary, especially if this is not one’s land. While we cannot have expected
Malcolm to be all-encompassing in his understanding of colonialism, his