Black folks and foreign policy

“Who will we become if we remain the silent partners to this white arrogance?”

Acidly sarcastic yet full of bitter truth, June Jordan’s essay “Black Folks and Foreign Policy” contains the kind of hard critique that Black folk need right now. Published in the June 1983 issue of Essence magazine — you read that right, Essence magazine — Jordan’s piece is a short and sharp indictment of Black complicity with US imperialism, and the terrible distance that has emerged between Black folks and US imperialism’s global victims. 

In “Black Folks and Foreign Policy,” Jordan returns to the house negro-field negro dichotomy popularized by Malcolm X in his “Message to the Grass Roots” speech, given on November 10, 1963, at the Northern Negro Grass Roots Leadership Conference in Detroit. But where Malcolm was speaking at a moment that appeared to be on the cusp of Black revolution, led by the Black masses — by the “field Negroes” — two decades later, Jordan laments that “now every last one of us is a house nigger.” She charges that Black folk in the United States have retreated to the apparent comfort of the “Big House,” and here, again, she echoes Malcolm X’s comment on the disturbed psychology of the House Negro represented by their identification with the Plantation Master. As Malcolm stated, “Imagine a Negro: “Our government”! I even heard one say “our astronauts.” They won’t even let him near the plant – and “our astronauts”! “Our Navy” – that’s a Negro that is out of his mind.”

For Jordan, Black folks in the United States have come to occupy the Big House. And the field? Jordan writes: “The fields beyond belong to the Vietnamese, the Black peoples of Southern Africa, the Palestinians of Northern Africa, and the Brown and Black peoples of Nicaragua — our victim cousins making their way to freedom.” Yet Jordan also recognizes that US imperialism knows that the separation of house and field negroes allows the system to continue — and that the Big House will only catch fire if we “join our cousins in the field.” And as Malcolm X once stated, when that fire comes, we can only pray “for a wind, for a breeze.”

We reprint June Jordan’s “Black Folk and Foreign Policy” below.

Black Folks and Foreign Policy

June Jordan

Used to be a time when most of us were field niggers. Back then hardly any of us stayed up in the Big House, watching de Massa do his thing, throwing salt or arsenic in the soup. But now every last one of us is a house nigger, for a fact. From Brooklyn to Los Angeles, we all stay in the Big House and, what’s more, we pays de Massa taxes for our troubles!

This Big House belongs to me and you. The fields beyond belong to the Vietnamese, the Black peoples of Southern Africa, the Palestinians of Northern Africa, and the Brown and Black peoples of Nicaragua—our victim cousins making their way to freedom. And whether they speak Spanish or Xhosa or Arabic, these new field niggers expect the rest of us here in the Big House to watch de Massa and take appropriate care of de Massa’s soup!

Why don’t we do that?

We can’t say we’re too few or too weak or too ignorant! How many of our victim cousins own a pair of jeans? How many of them own a radio or have the choice between meat and brown rice?

Over here we eat so much we have to jog around the block. We walk away from public libraries that can tell us of the life of Fannie Lou Hamer and how to build a nuclear bomb. We have telephones and 35 million other house niggers we can call.

Yet, how can we hope to keep our jobs, our books, our music, our base of safety from the avaricious Massa, unless we make this Big House safe for the needy from Soweto to Beirut to Managua to Detroit? Who will we become if we remain the silent partners to this white arrogance?

Everyday de Massa spends your and my piece-a money on nuclear blippety-do and general killer equipment. He delivers more than 6.8 million dollars a day to Israel—a country that has fewer people in it than the city of Detroit! Our money flies to Israel in the form of planes and tanks that do de Massa’s dirty work: Israel sells the stuff straight to South Africa or peddles it elsewhere to subjugate any First World peoples resistant to Israeli/South African/American rule. Can you imagine Detroit with an extra 6.8 million dollars a day pouring into it? 

Granted de Massa and his friends have no business assuming God created the fields of the earth for a white man’s paradise plantation. But we have no excuse letting them take our piece-a money to carry out their fantasies.

This year, Representative Ronald V. Dellums (D. Calif.) is a leading plaintiff in an extraordinary lawsuit (Sanchez v. Reagan) against the President and the Secretary of State, among others. He charges the President with violating the Constitution and the War Powers Act by conducting a war without congressional approval (in 1981, Reagan approved 19 million dollars for the CIA’s efforts to “destabilize” Nicaragua’s revolutionary government).

Is this man crazy?

Well, no. He understands that the heart that hates niggers in the Big House is the same one hatting niggers in the field. He knows that if the house niggers and the field niggers ever got together, Massa would be paying overdue!

Inside the Big House our mothers and grandmothers worked down on their knees so that we could stand up. They kept their eyes on a house ahead of them, a house full of family come to freedom. Now we sleep inside the Big House. Will we let ourselves and our family in the fields just grovel down and die, domesticated by de Massa? Or will we join our cousins in the field — and clean it up?

June Jordan, “Black Folks and Foreign Policy,” Essence, June 1983

This piece, “Black Folks and Foreign Policy,” originally produced by June Jordan, in Essence, June 1983, is being republished from the Black Agenda Report. For more information, visit https://www.blackagendareport.com/essay-black-folks-and-foreign-policy-june-jordan-1983.