The ex-slaves of Haiti took the French revolutionary slogans more literally than did the French themselves: they ignored all the implicit qualifications which abounded in Enlightenment ideology (freedom- but only for rational "mature" subjects, not for the wild immature barbarians who first had to undergo a long process of education in order to deserve freedom and equality...). This led to sublime "communist" moments like the one that occurred when French soldiers (sent by Napoleon to suppress the rebellion and restore slavers) approached the black army of (self-)liberated slaves. When they heard an initially indistinct murmur coming from the black crowd, the soldiers at first assumed it must be some kind of tribal war chant; but as they came closer, they realized that the Haitians were singing the Marseillaise, and they started to wonder out loud whether they were not fighting on the wrong side...
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Why should the immigrant not be satisfied with his normalization? Because, instead of asserting his identity, he has to adapt to his oppressor's discourse defines the terms of his identity. One should remember here the programmatic words of Stokely Carmichael (the founder of Black Power): "We have to fight for the right to invent the terms which allow us to define ourselves and to define our relations to society, and we have to fight that these terms will be accepted. This is the first need of a free people, and this is also the first right refused by every oppressor." The problem is how, exactly, to do this. That is to say, how to resist the temptation to define oneselfe with reference to some mythical and totally external identity ("African roots"), which, by way of cutting links with "white" culture, also deprives the oppressed of crucial intellectual tools for their struggle (namely, the egalitarian-emancipatory tradition) as well as potential allies. One should thus should thus slightly correct Carmichael's words: what the oppressors really fear is not some totally mythical self-definition with no links to white culture, but a self-definition which, by way of appropriating key elements of the "white" egalitarian-emancipatory tradition, redefines that very tradition, transforming it not so much in terms of what is says as in what it does not say- that is, obliterating the implicit qualifications which have de facto excluded Blacks from the egalitarian space. In other words, it is not enough to find new terms with which to define oneself outside of the dominant white tradition- one should go a step further and deprive the whites of the monopoly on defining their own tradition.
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