This article was supposed to conclude in Part Two. It won’t. Maybe in Part Three. It’s just how things turn out sometimes.
Anyway, here’s William Lloyd Garrison replying to some fan mail in 1855. The note reads: Wishing you a happy new year and that this may prove the long-desired jubilee to all the enslaved in our guilty land.
Our interest is in the meaning of the last three words, “our guilty land.” Garrison’s intended referent for “our guilty land” had been clear at least since an 1829 speech on slavery. “Before God, I must say that such a glaring contradiction as exists between our creed and practice the annals of 6,000 years cannot parallel. In view of it, I am ashamed of my country.”
There’s no doubt or ambiguity here. By the phrases “our guilty land” and “my country” Garrison is without question referring to the nation of white amerika. These are political phrases. They indicate a political entity, a nation, that whites together constituted. And these political phrases are themselves integral to the political statement that Garrison is making in these two fragments. The political statement concerns the behavior of that political entity, that nation, which he has precisely referenced. In full, the political statement asserts that these whites, as a nation, have oppressed, in fact have enslaved, a people – we would of course say an entire nation.
Garrison’s statements identifying white amerika as an oppressor nation and Blacks as the subject of this oppression are by definition a class analysis. What we want (well, what Maoists want) in a class analysis is some good idea of who are the truly exploited and oppressed, who are their friends, and who are their enemies. Garrison provides all this very sufficiently. In this situation the Black Nation constitutes the most oppressed. They have virtually no genuine allies close by. And their enemy is – the white nation, as a whole, in toto, and without significant quantitative exception.
This class analysis was exceptionally honest in its accuracy. It reflects the kind of honesty you can sometimes get from the better oppressor-nation liberals like William Lloyd Garrison when their feet are to the fire, i.e., when the threat from the oppressed is sufficiently clear and present. And that was certainly the case at the time. Garrison rightly perceived each reported slave revolt as potentially “the first step of the earthquake” that could rock white amerika right off its oppressor foundations.
The candor of Garrison’s class analysis is a job well done in the service of saving his oppressor nation from this Black cataclysm. As a good white nationalist his very first responsibility was the duty to warn, to ring the alarm bell loud and clear for the white nation. “Loud and clear” meant a categorically honest assessment of the risk at hand. No shuck. No jive. It absolutely would not do for the whites to have any misconceptions and make even one little misstep based on an overly optimistic appraisal of the situation. It was no time for foolishness.
So you heard Garrison getting very, very real with his white audience. “My country,” the white nation, is “guilty.” Read: “Remember the horror story about ‘Three savage negroes rushed into my house and killed my wife and my child before my face …’? Well that’s what’s in store for each and every one of you because each and every one of you is complicit in the oppression to which such resistance will be a response.” It was a warning of such honest accuracy as to do white supremacist liberalism proud.
Now, as it turned out, John Brown couldn’t have agreed more with William Lloyd Garrison’s class analysis. “The crimes of this guilty land,” said John Brown’s own class analysis in similar wording, “will not be purged away but with blood.”
The difference, of course, was that John Brown arrived at that assessment from the point of view of the oppressed rather than, like Garrison, that of the oppressor. Comrade Mao would say that Comrade Brown correctly identified the primary contradiction at the time: the enslavement of the Black nation by the white nation. John Brown was greatly moved by all of the oppressions and exploitations he saw around him. But it was clear as day to him that the enslavement of the Black nation was absolutely the main thing going on from Kalifornia to the New Yorkkk islands, the main thing that needed fixing because it was the location of the greatest exploitation and oppression. So he agreed that Blacks were the most oppressed. And he agreed that Blacks had few true allies. John Brown had spent his whole adult life looking for real allies of the Black Nation among the whites. He had come up with the Harper’s Ferry handful. Consequently he was in fast agreement with Garrison that the white nation was just plain enemy.
And it turns out as well that Maoists too are in full agreement with the class analysis that Garrison advanced. Like Comrade John Brown, we see the circumstances from the ideological perspective of the oppressed rather than that of the oppressors. But also like John Brown we arrive at the same assessment of the balance of forces as did Garrison. See, sometimes serviceable class analysis doesn’t have to approach the mathematical complexity of an equation from quantum mechanics. Sometimes it can just be the most important honest thing to naturally say about a political situation.
Which brings us of course to Ward Churchill. Well not quite. First we have to talk about how the German communists dealt with their own nation of certified Little Eichmanns after the war. And then Ward Churchill. And then the oppressor nation white nationalist so-called “left.” All in good time. And maybe all in Part Three.
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