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Kritika Kultura

Abstract

US imperialism of the Philippines at the turn of the last century raised difficult and painful issues for African Americans struggling to gain justice and equal rights in American society. Kelly Miller, an African American academician and active polemicist for Negro rights, wrote in 1900, at the beginning of the Philippine American War, his essay “The Impact of Imperialism on the Negro Race” to exhort his fellow black Americans to oppose the US colonization of the Philippines and to support Philippine independence. Miller saw through the American government’s policy of “benevolent assimilation” toward the Philippines and recognized its racist underpinnings. For Miller the imperialist wars revealed the moral bankruptcy of the American government in violating the principles of the Declaration of Independence and reneging on its promise of equal rights to black Americans. In this essay I will argue that Miller espoused anti-imperialism as an assertion of a morally ascendant black subjectivity. In the face of rabid violent exclusion of blacks in American national life, Miller proposed an alternative narrative of history that contested the white narrative of racial supremacy. African Americans, in remaining loyal to the principles of equality and justice, would suffer so much more but would eventually and inevitably constitute a superior civilization based on moral principles. I will show, however, that like most other black middle class antiracist thinking of his time, Miller’s alternative narrative of black ascendancy was undermined by his acceptance of Western ideological paradigms of civilization and standards of moral superiority. Yet, Miller’s position raises important questions about the discursive “containment” of uplift ideology in the context of the imperialist debates.

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