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Black radical tradition is not just a movement initiated and continued by a specific community; it is rather another of various ways to look at oppression. It is the oppression of the majoritarian discourse in the modern nation-state. The black question, dating centuries back, has taken different shapes and culminated—if present is taken as the endpoint—into the deplorable status of black people in the United States. Though the fundamental difference still revolves around race, that difference has taken many other shapes as well. After the advent of the modern state, we see the racial difference also being translated in terms of a minority of a state who has no place in American society because they don’t simply belong there. This sentiment is most common in the nationalist discourse. The urge to keep the nation a homogenous entity is always predicated on keeping a certain section of the community at the fringes and in case of America, it is the black people.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, a lockdown has been imposed globally. But recently, there has been a series of protests in the United States demanding the lifting of lockdown. The police response to protestors lays bare the inherent racism against black people. They dealt politely with the white protestors but there are reports that the black population, despite not creating any sort of chaos and mostly not even part of the protests, has been penalized physically and legally. This shows how the contempt against slaves which turned into the segregation of the black people has now taken the shape of majoritarian oppression against a stigmatized community. Such practices are hallmarks of nationalist sentiment.

The problematic laws in the name of self-defense have also aggravated the situation by constructing the legal system against the black people. The Treyvon Martin murder case manifests the role of the state in legitimizing hatred against a specific community. The state set the killer free on grounds of self-defense. Such oppressive measures prove to be most lethal because a legitimized oppression leaves no ground of locating violence. There is no one who can compensate for those injustices because the justice system, which provides refuge, becomes a partner in crime. The system itself is designed to make people hate and dominate a section of society. Legitimized violence provides shield to the perpetrators because it leaves no option for the oppressed to turn toward. The entire civil rights movement also voiced against systematized oppression. The Jim Crow, segregation through laws, among others were sanctioned as legal measures by the state.

The black tradition, then, becomes a model to understand the oppression of the modern state as a means to legalize oppression. It plays exclusionary politics under the guise of national security which has a stark similarity with the attitude of white people against black people where the former deems the latter as a constant threat. Legalized oppression is also evident in the case of Ahmedis in Pakistan who are persecuted only because they do not fit into the homogenous definition of Islam. Similarly, the question of Muslim exclusion in India follows the same trajectory. They are not considered part of the Indian nation because their origin is not from India. This standard of originating in India to be part of the Indian nation is also a nationalist idea that is being materialized now. Such ideologies then make the black radical tradition relevant to all the minorities of the world wherever there is violence perpetrated by the modern state whether in terms of religion, race, or origin. It urges us, the majority and the privileged, to bear witness to those who are unable or have been made unable to speak for themselves.