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The Spanish American wars of independence raise some crucial questions about the impact of anticolonial struggles in the development of national racial imaginaries in the Americas. They suggest that the way in which national identity was shaped in opposition to imperialist enemies had a crucial impact on the future of race relations. A brief and tentative comparison between the United States and Colombia underlines this point. In both regions, patriot nationalism exalted the differences between tyrannical European metropolises and American republican freedom. Yet the place of race in the equation of freedom depended less on patriots' notions of freedom -- which, after all, drew on the same Enlightenment tradition -- than on where their colonial power stood on the issue of race. In other words, it depended on whether racial equality was perceived as a colonial imposition or as a patriot aspiration.115 In the United States, war propaganda made England the "champion" of blacks' rights. Patriots denounced England's support of blacks as yet another sign of that country's tyrannical attitudes toward Americans and its evil intentions of degrading them to equality with blacks.116 Their propaganda proclaimed that under the British, "the Negroes shall be free, and the Liberty Boys slaves."117 English propaganda echoed these feelings by highlighting the hypocrisy of patriots who proclaimed freedom while maintaining slavery and applauding Britain, "where Liberty reigns -- where Negro no beaten or loaded with chains."118 As John Sweet points out, one of the "colonists' worst nightmares was the prospect of being degraded to equality with blacks."119 These sentiments were strikingly similar to those of Colombian and Venezuelan whites in the 1790s who denounced Spanish support of black militias as a clear sign of their disregard for the welfare of Spanish American subjects. Yet the Spanish American wars of independence inverted these notions. Patriot propaganda now harshly denounced Spanish "autocratic" opposition to blacks' representation rights, inviting blacks and whites to "unite and give Europe an example of fraternity."120
The divergent associations between patriot nationalism and race that developed during the wars would have an enormous influence on the construction of modern imaginaries in both regions. Nationalism would determine whether racial equality would become a core element of the national ideology, as in Spanish America, or a precarious concept constantly subjected to challenge, as in the United States. In Colombia, the revolution had transformed racial equality from one of several political positions into an unchallengeable nationalist principle. That is why, in spite of the numerous civil wars and constitutional changes that shifted Colombia back and forth from federalism to centralism and from universal manhood suffrage to restricted suffrage, the principle of legal racial equality was never questioned. In the United States, racial equality was only one among a number of equally important and respectable positions, including the support of back-to-Africa programs. Few events represented the disconnect between nationalism and racial equality like the 4th of July celebrations of the 1820s and 1830s. Not only were free blacks harassed and expelled from the celebrations by rowdy mobs who claimed that the 4th of July "belongs exclusively to the white population," but many American blacks chose a British holiday -- August 1, West Indian Emancipation Day -- as their holiday.121 Even at a symbolic level, the American Revolution failed to inaugurate a new era in race relations. That is why even today it is hard to find a nationalist icon in the U.S. who, like Simón Bolívar, can claim the allegiance of the entire nation. The struggle for racial equality in the United States was linked to bloody regional conflicts, not to a unified front against a common enemy. It would not be until another war -- and another enemy -- in the 1940s that the racial constructions developed during the Age of Revolution would begin to be successfully challenged.122
Modern struggles to end formal and informal racial inequality in the United States and Spanish America would have to confront the conflictive associations between nationalism and racial equality that emerged during the Age of Revolution. In the United States, blacks would be excluded from the national imaginary and denied equal legal rights, yet they would form powerful and lasting political organizations that would effectively fight against formal and informal discrimination and prejudice. In Spanish America, blacks would enjoy legal equality and sometimes even become part of national imaginaries that acclaimed the mulatto as the embodiment of the nation. At the same time, however, they would face great difficulty in fighting prejudice and informal discrimination in a cultural environment that had made the denunciation of racism a taboo topic and black organizations a sign of unpatriotic divisiveness.
FULL TEXT: <http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/111.2/lasso.html> -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>