Anticolonialism and civil rights shared core antiracist aims despite different targets

Evidence

Both anticolonial and civil rights mobilizations need to be viewed, then, as vigorous, influential, and effective antiracist movements. Anticolonialism, of course, was principally directed at effecting national independence while the civil rights movement was aimed first and foremost at national integration. Both nevertheless sought to undo the histories of racially ordered social structures, legal enforcements, group-driven exclusions, conceptual colonialisms, and racially indexed foreshortened lives in the metropoles as much as in the colonies. Both sought to “decolonize the imagination” and to “provincialize Europe” (which is also to say to deprovincialize what is not European). In this, they sought to strip from the racially subjugated the imposition of infantilizing and demeaning self-conceptions, with varying degrees of success and less dramatic transformative influence on the imaginaries of the oppressing classes. Where anticolonialism altered the geopolitical status quo with palpable implications for former colonial subjects, the civil rights movement altered the political terrain in the US with equally mixed effect for America’s racially disadvantaged. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 98

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes anticolonialism (national independence) from civil rights (national integration), and introduces the paired slogans ‘decolonize the imagination’ and ‘provincialize Europe’.
• XREF: Echoes Dipesh Chakrabarty’s ‘Provincializing Europe’; links to postcolonial theory discussions in other texts. — connects to: Anticolonialists defended universal rights against cultural-difference exceptions — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 271; Anticolonial and US civil rights struggles form one interconnected antiracist mobilization. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 90; American antiracists and anticolonial activists shared organized networks from 1911 onward. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 93 (+2 more)