East vs West — The Struggle for the Future

(The following article is the foreword to my book of the same title)

“I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being.”

When Barack Obama spoke the above words, during the commencement speech he gave to graduates of America’s elite West Point Military Academy in New York on 28 May 2014, it was impossible to avoid the sense that an almighty betrayal had just been committed. This after two centuries of black and brown struggle against the beast of white supremacy, a beast which had and has defined the land of free far more than democracy since the nation was founded by white slaveowners towards the end of the 18th century.

This particular struggle had borne witness to moments of progress and hope of transformative change, only to see both pushed back under the weight of a reactionary backlash time and again. The grim era of chattel slavery was brought to an end by a brutal civil war. The period of Reconstruction which followed gave way to counter-reconstruction, exemplified by the passage of ‘black codes’ designed to reassert the less-than-human status of former slaves at the hands of their former slaveowners and a culture in the Deep South which still today draws sustenance from a Christian bible in one hand and a metaphorical whip in the other.