question about Sovereign citizen.

[John P.]

what are the drawbacks with being a Sovereign citizen? I heard all the reason why people should filed to be a sovereign citizen but i'm trying to figure out what privileges do you lose when you become a sovereign citizen...1

[Roc]

Hotep Brother,
There are no drawbacks to being a sovereign. we are all sovereigns until we give up our sovergnty to the government. Then I think you are called sheeple or slave afterwards. All the state constitutions protect you and name you as a sovereign.....(A king without subjects), answering only to your gods and held accountable if you harm someone else or infringe on someone elses rightsand they make a formal charge against you under affidavit. This is a small part.....but you get the gist. You do not want to be anything less than a sovereign.

[CreatorsCollege]

Peace!


The biggest challenge to asserting common-law citizenship is that your relationship with the 'State' and the state apparatus changes pernamantly.

Because the trick-nology of the state is so pervasive, you must re-frame your whole relationship with society and consider it differently from the way you were socialized and taught to view the go'ment, society and social order.

The United States is to' up from the flo' up! What that essentially means is that the whole notion of 'sovereignty' is "bigger than" your individual relationship with the "State," and goes to the heart of British Common-law, The United States Constisution, Your respective state consititution, "Public Policy" Law, Statutory Law, Common Law, Jurisdiction, rules of Federal Procedure, Admiralty and Maritime Law, The Uniform Commercial Code, Contract Law, Negotiable Instruments, etc.

Once you are able to step outside of the "box" you've been conditioned into, then untangling yourself from the maze of 14th Amendment Federal U.S. Citizenship -and staying out will be your biggest challenge.

Unless you are willing to learn and study, I wouldn't bother, because you are taking on "the machine," and they're prepared to eat the uninformed.

Stepping into the shoes of "sovereignty" is a metaphysical and Spiritual perspective, and the closet thing that I can relate to the "thought process," because at the heart of it is the point that the "State" is NOT your Creator, and can assert no authority over you, and seperate in action or law you from your unalienable natural-rights.

The essential point of Common Law is that if you harm no man or his property, you are free in deed and action!

Peace!

[John P.]

thank you for the responses...1

[Roc]

Here is some information on Sovereignty. I spoke to someone in Pittsburg and they were very knowledgable. This is what after my studies mandate that we be. Civil rights are a distraction.....Why would I want someone(my oppressors) to give me my Rights (civil) when God has given me and everyone thier Sovereign Rights. I feel that these civil rights are just a distraction.

Leadership and Sovereignty: Visions of a Liberated Future



Uhuru Hotep

Co-Director

Kwame Ture Youth Leadership Institute

Pittsburgh, PA



“Hold on to the idea of an independent government and nation so long as others men have them.�
– Marcus Garvey
Introduction


This essay examines the relationship between leadership and sovereignty in the African American experience. Material on these two concepts is voluminous, but surprisingly, there is little readily available that addresses them jointly from an African American perspective. Ezrah Aharone’s Pawned Sovereignty: Sharpened Black Perspectives on Americanization, Africa, War and Reparations (2003), for example, cogently outlines the social and political consequences of our loss of sovereignty, but it offers little on leadership. And Ronald Walters and Robert Smith’s African American Leadership (1999) provides a brilliant critique of the “theory, research and praxis� of Black leadership, but nothing on sovereignty.



Even more surprising, there is only one work in print, Wade Goria’s Sovereignty and Leadership in Lebanon (1986), which uses both terms in its title. But Goria’s work, as the title suggests, has the politics of Lebanon and what eurocentrists call the “Middle East� as its foci, not Africans in America or elsewhere. As of this writing, there is no work readily available that afrocentrically addresses both leadership and sovereignty as correlated phenomena. Consequently, this essay (and those that follow) may constitute one of the few discussions that link these two concepts using African and African American knowledge bases.



Definitions



Sovereignty is a political science term commonly defined as the exclusive right of a people– through their leadership–to exercise supreme authority within a specified territory. Supreme authority means having the sole right to maintain a military, print currency, levy taxes, make laws, declare war, and staff the major political, economic, legal, educational, cultural and religious institutions within a limited geographical area.



One of the first sovereign states in history was Ta-Seti. Established 4,500 years ago and later known as Nubia, Ta-Seti stretched 500 miles along the banks of the Nwy (Nile) River from upper Kmt (Egypt) into Sudan. Over the past six millennia, Africa has been the birthplace of



_________________________

Uhuru Hotep, Ed.D., is the creator of the Johari Sita, co-editor of 72 Concepts to Liberate the African Mind, and the co-director of the Kwame Ture Youth Leadership Institute. Dr. Hotep can be reached at hotep@duq.edu or 412.396.5171.



hundreds of sovereign states. In fact, prior to the 15th century and the rise of Western Europe as an imperial power, most Africans and most of humanity, lived in sovereign communities. Today, only imperialist nations called “super powers� can practice empire building with impunity. The United States, Russia, England, France, Germany, and China are the major super powers of our times. Most of the European imperialists granted their colonies in Africa symbolic sovereignty (flag independence) during the 1960s, but behind the scenes through organizations like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, they continued their theft, albeit covertly, of the natural resources of these smaller, weaker nations.



Unlike sovereignty, which is concretized as land and armies, leadership is a more ethereal or abstract concept. Political leadership, we can say, is the work of people in whom we invest the authority to make decision for the good of the entire community. As it relates to sovereignty, political leadership is the act of acquiring, organizing and managing people and resources in order to exercise supreme authority within a designated space. A people’s aspiration for sovereignty is embodied in a homeland and their political leadership. But, if they have been deprived of their homeland and their political leadership is not organizing for sovereignty, either it has been co-opted or the people they represent have loss their zeal for sovereignty and are content to live under the dominion of others.



In the context of this essay, there is only one type of leadership, and that is sovereign leadership. But there are at least nine types of sovereignty extant throughout the global community; only two are basic: absolute and non-absolute.Ñ Absolute sovereignty is the raison de existence and exclusive reserve of leadership groups seeking to establish or maintain an autonomous state. Absolute sovereignty demands a land base, the military capability to defend or possibly expand it, and recognition from other sovereign states. Since 1945, the United Nations (UN) has been the major institution used by the “community of nations� to confer legitimacy (supreme authority) on sovereign states.



Non-absolute sovereignty, on the other hand, is the right to exercise “limited authority� within an existing nation-state. It is strictly a domestic or internal matter. In such cases, authority is shared between the sovereign state and the major ethnic or cultural groups occupying its territory. For example, the semi-autonomous republics that comprised the former Soviet Union prior to its collapse each exercised a measure of political and economic freedom over its internal affairs. Unless the U.S. unravels as a nation-state, 21st century, sovereign-seeking Black leadership may have no viable option but to organize for “shared authority� within those areas where people of African descent constitute the majority. We will revisit this proposition in the concluding section of this essay.



At first glance, freedom and sovereignty may appear synonymous, but close inspection reveals that freedom is actually an end product of sovereignty. Nations and peoples are free to the extent

____________

ÑStephen Krasner (1999), in Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy identifies four types of sovereignty: domestic, interdependent, Westphalian, and international legal. In addition to absolute and non-absolute, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy lists three additional types of sovereignty: external, internal and popular.



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that they are sovereign, which means that only a sovereign people can enjoy freedom because

only a sovereign people can exercise supreme authority and have a nation. People who lose their sovereignty (nation) through military conquest also lose their freedom. In fact, they are usually enslaved and abused or colonized and exploited mercilessly by their conquerors. One predictable feature of life under an oppressive system, like colonialism, is that the leadership of

the colonized group will either ingratiate themselves to their colonizers by embracing their political, economic, and cultural orientations, institutions and practices, or they will reject them and strive to re-assert their group’s sovereign capabilities. Contrary to popular opinion, freedom is not just the right to elect political leaders and travel without restriction, freedom, as Baba Sanyika Anwisye teaches, is also having control of the production, distribution and consumption of one’s food, clothing, shelter, education/recreation, medication and self-defense. In the 21st century, control of these essentials of life will distinguish the free from the enslaved.



Historical Background


In the modern world, absolute sovereignty is the practice of a ruling class and its leadership, who use their political, economic, cultural and religious institutions, legal apparatus, and military in concert to maintain (and possibly expand) a landed nation. In the United States, for example, supreme authority rests with the White, male, Christian, capitalist ruling elite, whose “founding fathers� (Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Adams, Franklin, kwk.) fought a war to end British control over 13 of her North American colonies. Their victory over the British in 1784 gave this Anglo-American elite supreme authority to take these 13 colonies, mold them into the United States, write a national Constitution, print currency, levy taxes, and maintain a standing army as a prelude to territorial expansion.



Over the past 200 years, America’s political leaders have used the sovereign power of the U.S. government to extend Anglo-Saxon supreme authority across North America from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This they accomplished by first expropriating the lands of the Native American peoples, and then by expropriating the skilled labor of four million enslaved African prisoners of war (POWs). This same White, male, Christian, ruling class created the Democrat-Republican Party, which they have used for the past 150 years to monopolize the “instruments of governance.� Once the political machinery was in place, they created a corporate-educational-military-industrial complex to manage and maintain the American nation state on their behalf. From its very inception as a sovereign nation, political power in the U.S. has rested solely in the hands of this wealthy and powerful White male elite and its agents. Over the past two centuries, they have used the sovereign power of the United States to exercise political, economic, and cultural dominance or supreme authority over Africans, Native Americans, Asians, Hispanics and other people of color residing within its borders.



The first Africans to exercise sovereignty in large numbers on these shores were men and women the European slave masters called Maroons. These self-emancipated POWs escaped from European-operated slave labor camps, euphemistically called plantations, and established, often with Native American assistance, absolutely sovereign communities. In the U.S. alone, historian Peter Bergman (1969) found evidence that between 1672 and 1864, there were at least 50 sover--



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eign Maroon communities, primarily in the states of Virginia, North and South Carolina,

Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.



So severe were the penalties and so effective was the American slave making process, that in spite of this ubiquitous Maroon presence, the vast majority of African POWs chose to remain in bondage. This decision was based, not on fear of punishment, but on reluctance to sever family ties leaving loved ones behind to face the slave master’s wrath. Wise slave masters knew that these deep family bonds would keep most African POWs from self-emancipating, and thus actively participating in their own captivity. Only the wickedly wise would use the liberating power of love as an agent of enslavement.



Over the past 500 years, our immediate ancestors in the diaspora and on the Continent loss their God-given right to exercise supreme authority over their political and economic affairs. European and Arab conquest (which led to slavery and colonialism) deprived them of this most basic human right, and we, their descendants, have been grappling with this loss ever since. Black American leadership, for example, has been deeply divided over the issue of sovereignty since our forced landing on these shores. Historically, U.S. Black leadership has revolved around two fixed poles. On the one hand, there is the sovereignty-rejecting, elitist, integrationists-assimilationists leadership tradition exemplified by the life and leadership practice of Frederick Douglass (1817-1895). And on the other hand, there is the sovereign centered, Maroon-Pan African-nationalist leadership tradition exemplified by the life and leadership practice of Souanakke Tustenukke (c1780-c1840), the Maroon leader better known as “Negro Abraham.�



Twentieth-century African American leadership history is the story of Black organizations that fit rather neatly into one or the other of these two leadership traditions. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League (NUL), for example, are heirs to the Douglass school of leadership that favors political, economic and social integration for the Black professional elite. The Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the Nation of Islam (NOI) and the Republic of New Africa (RNA), on the other hand, holds fast to Tustenukke’s Maroon-Pan African nationalist leadership approach, which emphasizes self-emancipation through grassroots nation-building.



Over the last 100 years, the Black American integrationist-assimilationist leadership community (which has its origins on the antebellum plantation with the mulatto, quadroon and octoroon house slaves) has rejected all forms of sovereignty in favor of lives of comfortable service to White America’s power elite. Like their predecessors, they have been conditioned to believe that White suzerainty over Blacks is normal, acceptable, and always superior to Black sovereignty, which in their view is an oxymoron. Historian Carter G. Woodson (1933) called this conditioning process, the “mis-education of the Negro.� And it has been highly effective because today the Black community is inundated with mis-educated Negroes of all ages and sexes occupying every stratum and every station in Black American society. From Condoleezza Rice



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and Colin Powell to Suge Knight and Lil’ BowWow, to the millions of Africans who serve in the U.S. military, what all mis-educated Negroes share is their willingness to play supportive roles, even die, to help the White ruling elite exercise supreme authority, domestically and internationally, over Africans, Asians, Latin Americans, and other people of color.



Application


At this stage in history, sovereignty emanates from the political institution called the nation-state. The highest _expression of European (Anglo-Teutonic) sovereignty is the super power called the United States of America. The highest _expression of Asian sovereignty is the super power called the People’s Republic of China. The highest _expression of African supreme authority might be the nation of Nigeria, not because it has super power status, but because it has 100 million people. The decades, in some cases centuries, of subordinate political, economic and cultural status defining the lives of the Kurds in Iraq, Palestinians in Israel, and Africans in the U.S., strongly suggests that ethnic or racial groups without sovereign nations of their own will suffer under the supreme authority of those who do have them. Such is the inevitable consequence of not being in control of one’s own political, economic and cultural affairs.



In spite of the fact that Africans in America number 40 million, earn $900 billion, and are near majority populations in most key urban centers, we are not the supreme authority within any region, state, county, city or neighborhood. If they were not subservient to the Democrat-Republican Party, our Black elected officials, who comprise the most skilled of our political leadership, could exercise sovereignty (non-absolute) within the African American community. But because of their fear of White disapproval, collective inferiority complex, and lack of image-a-nation, they are content to serve as petty collaborators with and low-paid functionaries of the White leadership class and the political, economic, religious and other institutions they created to maintain their supreme authority in this country.



Unfortunately, the Pan African nationalist leadership community, which purports a commitment to restoring our sovereignty, has misunderstood its mission. Their exclusive focus on African historical research and African cultural _expression has resulted in their failure to create grassroots institutions to provide the larger African community some measure of control over its food, clothing, shelter and other basic survival needs. This oversight has effectively undercut their influence and separated them from their primary support base, which is the African American community. Because of their unwillingness to close ranks, marshal their resources, and acquire land on which to create institutions to address our basic needs, the Pan African nationalists have handed the Black community over to petty hustlers and vulgar opportunists of every stripe who have no taste for sovereignty of any kind. It is ironic that those organizations that promote building a Black nation probably own less real estate than the assimilationists who disavow all nationalistic motivations and intentions.



It is a people’s desire for sovereignty that compels its leadership to establish a nation. Leadership at this level means having the will to acquire and the skills to organize and manage

the people and resources needed to establish or maintain a sovereign state. Due to centuries of



5

slavery induced psychic trauma and centuries of mis-education, the innate desire for sovereignty found in all psychologically-healthy, historically-connected, culturally-grounded ethnic groups has been all but erased from the African American’s historical memory. After centuries of slavery-imposed selective breeding and centuries of anti-African/anti-Black social conditioning, most African Americans (and their leadership) are content to live, however poorly, under the dominion of European Americans.



New Beginnings



Ezrah Aharone (2005), in an insightful essay entitled “Unstoppable Evolution Beyond Integration,� correctly observed that our definition of freedom evolves to reflect our changing social conditions and our expanding political consciousness. Black freedom in 1845 for Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, for example, meant ending or escaping from chattel slavery. Black freedom in 1965 for Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jesse Jackson meant ending racial segregation and integrating into the American social order. And Black freedom in 2005 for 21st century Africans means exercising sovereignty (supreme authority) over our communities and our lives in as many ways and on as many levels as humanly possible.



The Civil Rights Movement, the most publicized phase of our larger African Freedom Struggle (which actually began when the first African POWs landed on these shores), brought legal segregation to an end, which allowed for “token integration� by our Black professional elite. Like Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, the forced desegregation of American society by the civil rights activists was a major victory for U.S. Africans. We won an important battle, but not the war. Our victories in the 1960s and 70s merely shifted the focus of the African Freedom Struggle to a new, larger arena: winning back our sovereignty. The most difficult battles are yet to come.



At this juncture, our Pan African nationalist leadership must use its genius for history and culture to arouse the slumbering spirit of sovereignty asleep in the collective psyche of our people. The goal is to spark a national dialogue on sovereignty that spans generations and transcends the class, political, educational, religious, and other divisions in the African American community. Out of this dialogue will come an intergenerational movement to establish the political and economic institutions needed to restore our loss sovereignty.



An essential first-step toward launching this national campaign to restore our sovereignty is recognition by our leadership that our ancestors had it, but lost it, and now we must retrieve it. An essential second-step is recognition by Black leadership that only by restoring our group sovereignty and exercising a critical measure of authority within a specified territory can we enjoy political and economic freedom. These two steps are crucial. No effort to restore our sovereignty can succeed without them being taken.



Toward this end, we can draw inspiration from our history, which tells us that we are the direct descendants of those who built the great and sovereign states of Ghana, Mali and Songhai, as well as Oyo, Benin, and Asante long before arriving in this land to build this country. Diving



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deeper into “our story,� we discover that we Africans are the sons and daughters of the world’s first nation builders, and that our historic mission is to assert our political will and return to sovereignty. Africans and their leadership will never be respected or enjoy freedom anywhere until we restore our group sovereignty and exercise supreme authority within Africa, the Caribbean, and the rest of the African World Community.



Absolute sovereignty, however, for Africans in the U.S., though a highly desirable goal, may not be achievable given the influence of our assimilation oriented leadership, Black comfort with quasi-citizenship, and the exclusivity of White sovereignty/White supremacy. For the foreseeable future, the White male ruling elite and its backers have absolutely no intentions of supporting the restoration of African American absolute sovereignty. Shared sovereignty, however, is another matter. It is attainable if we realize that we must have it and then vigorously organize to achieve it. Shared sovereignty should be our goal because, at minimum, it would allow us a measure of control over the production, distribution and consumption of our food, clothing, shelter, education/recreation, medication and self-defense needs while retaining a qualified allegiance to the larger American nation-state. For Africans in the U.S., any degree of sovereignty would be preferable to the colonial status, which now defines our relationship with White America. But, absolute sovereignty for the Black Nation is still a long way off.



What is certain is that we must not spend another generation languishing under the supreme authority of wealthy White males and their agents whom we know do not have our best interests at heart or in mind. The “fitness test� for 21st century African American leadership must include a track record of pooling resources and building institutions to restore our sovereignty. Only in this way can we signal to the rest of the world that we are once again a culturally-conscious, psychologically-healthy and historically-connected people who love ourselves and our children so much that we would dare to be free.





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