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The notion of "right" and "left" politics breaks down when addressing Blacks or any colonized people. "Right and left" originally referred to the seating arrangement in the British parliament and is most suited for a society without national liberation as a political issue...
...The right side of parliament was where the more conservative members typically sat, the left wing was where reformers and progressives sat. "Conservative," "reformer," and "progressive," are all relative terms...
...Conservatives valued tradition and a shared national past, reformist, progressives etc., wanted major change. We've come to associate "left," with socialism, Marxism etc., because in a society primarily ordered around class, that's what progress, reform, innovation meant...
...Left-right terminology presupposes a shared historical trajectory, backwards and forwards, the "we," is pretty much the same, even immigrants are assumed to be in the process of becoming "we," by progressives...
...Anti-colonial, anti-White supremacist, Black nationalist, Black separatist politics in America doesn't assume a shared trajectory with the American majority. The "we," has never included us, and the goal is to somehow separate "us," from the White man's "we."...
...In the same way that decolonization movements were not about making progress within the empire, they were about separating from it. They may have wanted to separate just to reproduce the same governing and social structures, but, they wanted to change who was in charge...
...Fanon referred to the colonial world as a Manichean world, a world divided in two, not by class, but by race. Those who controlled and owned society and those who were controlled under it were irreconcilable, the entire social order was predicated on their irreconcilability...
...So it does not matter whether the decolonizers wanted to return to the precolonial traditions, or, reproduce the governing structures that existed under colonialism, or, create a totally new system. By replacing the colonizer with themselves, they instituted a new order...
...This is why it is absurd to call a Black man who thinks White people are genetic defectives and wants Blacks to have a separate state "conservative," or "right wing," what he wants is a complete inversion of the American and Western value system...
...He may or may not keep the form, I'm not claiming Farrakhan or NOI has a fully fleshed out socio-political plan. He's a religious leader, he leads a religion, they tend not to publish a lot of detailed political theory. But, Farrakhan isn't right or left.
...Black politics mixes right, left and everything else because our goal is to get free. If that's progress towards the global unity of mankind, cool, if it's a return to our glorious, independent African past, that's also cool.
Correction: I've just been given to understand that I got my White people mixed up. It was the French parliament during the revolution. All other points stand as before.
