The Revenge of the Black Pacific?

Hong Kong, like Los Angeles, has that peculiar combination of sunshine and smog that can make a day both gray and bright simultaneously. This particular day I was walking from my fortress-like apartment building that faced the South China Sea to my high-ceilinged, commodious office at Hong Kong University. The route I took went uphill and down in this crowded, hilly urban metropolis where British marauders had seized power in 1842 in a manner not unlike the way they had ousted Native Americans decades earlier in the nation that had become the United States. As my thigh muscles strained and my chest heaved during this late morning stroll, as ever I was left to wonder if this was due to the steep hills or the poisonous air I was breathing, exacerbated by the whirring cogitation of my mind.

For I had come to this former colony, now a constituent part of the Peoples Republic of China, to study the much discussed "Race Question"--more specifically, Japan's attempt during World War II to reduce the European colonists in Hong Kong to the status of slaves in a brutal imitation of what European colonists themselves had perpetrated against we Africans, e.g. in my own home state of North Carolina. Tokyo's ultimate plan was to extend this scheme to North America and there, in conjunction with presumed allies--particularly among African Americans--to "flip the script" and enslave those who proudly referred to themselves as "white."

Hence, though I was in China, thoughts of home were rarely distant from my imagination. In fact, on the day of this particular morning stroll early in 2000, I was on my way to my office to read online editions of various U.S. newspapers. I strode onto campus on this Sunday and ambled to my office, nodding hello to the elderly Chinese who, per usual, were engaging in their mannered, slow-motion exercises that mimicked the movements of the cranes that could be found on the distant outskirts of the city.

I walked to my office, opened the door, settled into my chair and turned on my computer, my mind occupied with thoughts about my research and what archives in the region I would have to visit in coming months. But these ruminations were jerked rudely from my contemplation when I read the story that was blaring from my computer screen: tens of thousands of African Americans in South Carolina had marched in protest of the flying of the blood-stained symbol of treason--the Confederate flag--high above the state capitol.

I had long wondered why it was that the flag of those who had sought to overthrow the government by force was accorded such an honored place. It would be akin to the Rising Sun--the flag of Japan--continuing to fly over Hong Kong, though this invading power had been ousted forcibly in 1945. Of course, the flying of the "stars and bars" is no mere act of symbolism. Above all, it is designed to reinforce the idea that a right-wing rebellion against the U.S. government should always be a live option, should never be discarded and is always to be honored: a left-wing rebellion, to be sure, is something else altogether. These kinds of revolts were to be treated with contempt and force, not unlike those Black Panthers who had been slain in their beds by government agents in the wee hours of the morning of December 4, 1969.

This right-wing bias that inheres in the U.S. is nothing new. It is present in such quotidian though powerful institutions like the Electoral College which chooses the President; it was designed to favor the slaveholding states of the South with its odious provisions proclaiming Africans as "3/5" of a human being: predictably, before the Civil War virtually every President hailed from this charnel house of a region. Thus, unsurprisingly, the promise of freedom that motivated Africans to fight for the...