Pseudoarchaeology in Action: Othello’s Children

I know that I keep saying it, but I also keep meaning it: my semester has been hectic. That said, I do try to keep the very tip of my fingers in my ongoing research. Mostly, this amounts to doing some reading and some noodling around on the ole blog here.

I just finished reading Jose V. Pimienta-Bey’s book Othello’s Children in the New World: Moorish History and Identity in the African-American Experience (2002). It’s a pretty fantastic book that offers historical perspectives through the lens of the Moorish Science Temple of American theology and teaching.

The book argues that the term Moor reflects a specific group of people who inhabited a large swath of both northern and even central Africa as well as parts of Spain and the Central and South America. This large “Moorish Empire” left traces in both the extent of the Islamic faith as well as other cultural and political artifacts that ante-date Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean. This maximal reading of Moorish dominions is problematic, of course, especially for archaeologists and historians who reject the arguments that Africans traveled to North and South America before the 15th century. I suspect that Africanists might also challenge the some of Pimienta-Bey’s arguments for the extent of Moorish control or cultural influence in Northern Africa and its historical connection to Kemetic and Asian populations (especially Hebrew speakers). To be clear, these claims are historically and archaeologically problematic.

What is more intriguing, however, is how Pimienta-Bey uses these arguments. He contends that the Moorish legacy provides an alternative identity to many Black Americans. In fact, this identity — in keeping with MSTA teachings (at least in my understanding) — transcends that of race alone. The reason for this is bound up in the legal perspective of citizenship. Since a Moorish state existed prior to the foundation of the United States and since the United States respected claims to citizenship of individuals recognized by other states from some of the earliest statements of colonial political autonomy (e.g. the Articles of Association [1774]), then the US recognized Moorish citizens or individuals who had claim to Moorish citizenship. This recognition of citizenship distinguished Moorish citizens from enslavement or other laws meant to deny enslaved or even free Blacks from rights. At the same time, individuals of Moorish descent or Moorish citizens could become American citizens with the establishment of the various 18th century constitutional documents which recognized denizens of the colonies who were neither enslave or free Blacks nor Native Americans as citizens of the US. As Pimienta-Bey cleverly notes, there were white individuals whose ancestors had also been enslaved and this did not disqualify them from their status of citizen in the US or Europe.

The ambiguous space between race (i.e. whether white, Black, or Native American) and citizenship (i.e. having claim to Moorish or European citizenship) then gave individuals who claimed Moorish descent or identity a political identity in the free colonies. Treaties between the US and the Morocco in 1786 through which Morocco recognized US independence further established the legitimacy of Moorish identity and rights even outside of Morocco. Citizenship then as now was portable. 

Claims to Moorish identity, of course, are complicated legally and historically, and Pimienta-Bey, in keeping with MSTA teachings, tends to offer a maximalist view both of traditional Moorish dominions and consequently individuals who can make claims to Moorish citizenship (irrespective of race). That said, there is something compelling about his approach especially as a critique of the kind of structural racism often recognized in the American legal system. As I have noted before on this blog in my remarks on Stephen Dew’s book on Aliite religions, followers of Noble Drew Ali recognized citizenship as a way to construct arguments that undercut racial views of legal identity. If an individual had claims to citizenship (either in the US or elsewhere), then they had legal rights provided that the US recognized this citizenship.

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This text offers a great example of how pseudoarchaeological ideas can inform contemporary problems. The Aliite intellectual tradition generally seeks to replace identities based on race with those based on the notion of citizenship which they see as conferring certain rights. Leveraging a range of arguments grounded unconventional, pseuodo-, and alternative archaeologies (including the problematic work of characters such as Barry Fell, folk etymologies, and historical arguments, such as those proposed by Hugo Prosper Leaming, that argued for the presence of a significant number of Black Muslim among Slaves and Maroon communities in the US), they seek to produce a maximalist interpretation of Moorish dominions which encompass much of North Africa, Spain, and parts of North and South America. By aligning their identity with this expansive view of traditional Moorish territories, they claim rights established both through treaties and through “traditional” (albeit not unproblematic) land claims.

To be absolutely clear, the claims of contemporary Sovereign Citizens draw on a similar tangle of arguments where they assert rights based on traditional land claims, treaty law, and unconventional interpretations of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. These claims often lead members of this movement, some of whom claim to follow the teachings of Noble Drew Ali, to appropriate private property, refuse to license vehicles, and other illegal acts. The rights claimed by these groups also can undermine and complicated rights asserted by indigenous communities over their traditional territories based on more widely accepted, legally recognized (and often, but not always archaeological) arguments. This is deeply problematic. 

That said, the aims of groups like the M.S.T.A. to assert a post-racial identity which would have worked to undermine the power of structural racism by articulating an innovative theory of rights is significant. It addresses a persistent anxiety existing at the intersection of race, citizenship, and rights. By articulating claims to right based on historic precedent, they exploit the murkiness associated with the emergence of nation-states to demonstrate how alternative narratives can support deeply subversive and even decolonizing and anti-racist positions as relevant in the early 20th century as they are today.

In fact, one could argue that the contemporary migrant crisis, which archaeologists have rushed to address through a range of innovative method and approaches, likewise brings to the fore the fraught intersection of identity, citizenship, race, and rights. While Aliite histories and archaeologies offer a view of how a community of engaged and innovative thinkers sought to invent traditions to support their claim not just to citizenship, but to equality.