Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

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pcting nationalisms, Zionism and Ethiopianism (of the American variety), must
be recognized and taken seriously.
I
In colonial British North America and subsequently the United States, a collective
sensibility among Africans emerged. Before 1700, the bulk of this Black population
consisted of African slaves, many from other New World slave societies.
During the course of the eighteenth century, more and more slaves came directly
from West and Central Africa. Both Old and New World provenance inspired
uncommon efforts to reconstitute a rudimentary sense of community among Black
slaves from a wide variety of African ethnic groups, or peoples. This incipient
communal ethos included the New World offspring of African slaves: Creoles.
As historian Sterling Stuckey has perceptively argued, Black slaves in the
Americas pioneered the development of an African consciousness. 3 This Pan-
African sensibility powerfully shaped their identity as a New World people. New
World African consciousness is diasporic and, therefore, clearly related to Old
World African consciousness. It is also fundamentally different. These determining
differences cannot be conflated or ignored. The most crucial difference is historical
context: while African Americans are both Americans and Africans, over
time they become more American than African. Herein lies the rub for Black
nationalism and Pan-Africanism.
Building upon cultural commonalities from their African roots, New World
Africans constructed mixed New World cultures which drew as well from their
exposure to European and indigenous cultures. Out of these fundamentally
African yet increasingly Creole histories emerged the collective sensibilities which
distinguished the development of New World African Americans.
Being both African and American as well as, prior to 1865, both slave and free
complicated the collective sensibilities of Blacks in the United States. More narrowly
denned collective identities rooted in differences such as a particular
West/Central African ethnic group or a particular West/Central African religion
eventually gave way to an increasingly more inclusive sense of group identity.
Enduring the common oppression of slavery and anti-Black racism, on one hand,
and building upon a common need to alleviate that oppression, on the other,
inevitably encouraged the budding Pan-African American consciousness.
The Black American nation's collective sensibility also drew upon the communalism
and group-centered forms of identity common among the African forebears
of Africans in America. The social emphasis of their self-definition thus
reinforced the tendency toward a sense of nationhood, as did the sense of shared
religious tradition/ 1
Neither Black nationalism, nor the Black nation, should be confused with a
nation-state. In light of their recognition of a union at once psychic and moral,