African americans and reconceptualization of identity: black participation in world war i and the rise of the new negro consciousness

Before the beginning of the twentieth century, the American Negro had undergone an allencompassing process of Otherization and inferiorization which represented blacks as inhuman, heathen and demonic. Under the tenacious hold of Calvinism, Capitalism and most notably Social Darwinism, blacks were forced to internalize the dominant negative stereotypes and thus over time came to view Uncle Tomism and assimilationism as the only possible survival strategies in the white-dominated United States. However, there emerged a paradigm shift in African Americans' conception of themselves and their status in the country when a number of factors went hand in hand in the early twentieth century to undermine the long-held assumption of white supremacy and black inferiority. One of these factors was African American participation in World War I. The up-to-then subalternized, obsequious American Negro experienced relative freedom in Europe during war time and came to appreciate and later implement concepts like collective political entity, cultural identity and social activism. This paper tries to analyze African Americans' contribution to the cause of World War I and the way it managed to usher blacks into an age of redefinition through politicizing them.

World War I ,

African Americans ,

New Negro ,

Self-determination ,

Identity ,