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COLONIAL EXPERIENCE
O'DELL

the other mechanisms outlined above, the basic structuring of the colonial relationship is completed. The black community is not permitted to freely emerge from the chattel slavery system but instead is transformed into a colonial type sector or enclave within the American national community; an enclave set aside by specially designed mechanisms of exploitation and subjugation. Segregated by law, disfranchised, robbed of its share of wages by discriminatory employment patterns, confronted by a police power and illegal mobs acting in the role of an occupation force, the target of a mass culture of racism and the barbarism of lynching, the Negro American community was imprisoned in a colonial relationship, designed by the new industrial power elite of America, at the very time that the European colonialists were partitioning the African continent among themselves. 

To guarantee the effective function of this colonial arrangement within our country the Reconstruction political alliance was broken up before it achieved its potential and remade the South in its image. A new alliance was consummate. The white poor were tied to the white rich and the Unionists united to the Confederates to keep the blacks in slavery-segregation. This strategy implemented within the U.S. scene was consistent with, and part of, the Western capitalist world strategy of continued domination over the people of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.*

an economy of plunder
This structuring of a colonial relationship between the Euro-American and Afro-American populations within our country laid the basis for what our brothers in Guinea refer to in their experience as "the economy of pillage...economy of devastation."** While in Guinea and the Congo this centered upon the forced cultivation of rubber to meet the growing demands for that product in the world market, in the United States it was the forced cultivation of King Cotton on the plantations. Soil exhaustion, the impoverishment of the land-less sharecroppers, tenants and farm laborers, were by-products of this economy of pillage and devastation. Side by side, as part of this economy, were the huge land grabs in the South by lumber interests in the mid-West and the biggest railroads such as the Illinois Central, who made millions of acres corporate property after the

*French Colonial rule in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia was also established during the period (1858-1884). 
**"Guinea Under the Colonial System" by J. Suret-Canale, Presence Africaine Vol. 1 No. 29.

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