Unlike too many well-meaning people in public life who get caught up in the web of that which is meaningless and unreal, I prefer to remain grounded in what is proven and real. For example, people who know how I think, including those who have followed this column during some of the last six years, are keenly aware of my take on so-called “racism” and my consistent preach about race. Perhaps a terse reiteration may be in order.
The notion of race is a result of 18th and 19th century pseudo science. It was proffered by American and European medical doctors and scientists to establish a human hierarchy with an Anglo-Saxon priority and with Africans as the most inferior human beings. However, there exists no evidence to refute the fact that there is but one race, the human race.
Yet, medical and scientific journals well into the 20th century, along with history and social science textbooks, were replete with such prattle. Renowned white novelists, including Mark Twain, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, portrayed black people as inferior.
D. W. Griffith catapulted motion pictures into wide popularity with Birth Of A Nation, which imaged black people with such stereotypical savagery that even blacks began to believe that they actually behaved as projected in that film. Whites filled theaters to laugh at and scorn the black characters, including whites in blackface, while the propaganda fed their learned notions and boiling hate.
Fifty- to 70-year-old white people in powerful positions today, especially Southern whites, have heard about, seen and/or participated in the lynching of black men. As children, some white boys and girls were brought to lynchings by their parents. Sometimes the poor black man was lynched and then shot several times and his genitals dismembered. And the white folks’ frenzy would become a party, all usually officiated over by the sheriff.
Black men and boys are still being “lynched” by white law enforcement officers, the difference being that today they are increasingly shot on the spot and the officers only have to assert that they were provoked.
The one that really flies in the face of any semblance of justice is this: “I thought he had a gun.”
The landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka has been sidestepped for 56 years because white America decided that any law benefiting black people is unacceptable. Public school integration is largely a farce. So who is the progenitor of this so-called “post-racial America” and what does it mean?
Clearly, the fundamental problem with the idea is that it is based on a pseudo-scientific mindset. The false issue of “race” cleverly obfuscates white nationalism, the inherent contradiction inbred in the very formulation of this nation, with slavery as its centerpiece.
It is quite evident that significant numbers of white people find it difficult to understand why the Western or Eurocentric notion of democracy is not readily accepted by so-called third world and developing nations.
What conscious non-white people see in so-called democracy is its historical precedent, which includes slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism for them, and wealth, power and hegemony for America and Europe.
A so-called “post-racial America” is a white nationalist concept, a confluence of the left and right, Democratic and Republican, designed to lull black people into a dream-like state and away from the reality of both their present and future. That reality speaks volumes to the need to organize, make changes and progress.
Here’s a news flash. The median white American income is vastly greater than quadruple that of blacks.
That is called retrogression, folks. And you and I are allowing some jokers to talk to us about “post-racial America”?
People of African descent make a foolhardy error by engaging in the fallacious assumption of “race.” We should all be together on two things: White nationalism is our problem, not the false notion of “race,” and liberation is the only solution. Liberate the mind and the body will naturally follow.
Remember the truth that Malcolm X gave us. He said that black people have been “hoodwinked, bamboozled and led astray.” Come on, black people, wake up and get busy!
Al Calloway may be reached at Al_Calloway@Verizon.net.
Yet, medical and scientific journals well into the 20th century, along with history and social science textbooks, were replete with such prattle. Renowned white novelists, including Mark Twain, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, portrayed black people as inferior.
D. W. Griffith catapulted motion pictures into wide popularity with Birth Of A Nation, which imaged black people with such stereotypical savagery that even blacks began to believe that they actually behaved as projected in that film. Whites filled theaters to laugh at and scorn the black characters, including whites in blackface, while the propaganda fed their learned notions and boiling hate.
Fifty- to 70-year-old white people in powerful positions today, especially Southern whites, have heard about, seen and/or participated in the lynching of black men. As children, some white boys and girls were brought to lynchings by their parents. Sometimes the poor black man was lynched and then shot several times and his genitals dismembered. And the white folks’ frenzy would become a party, all usually officiated over by the sheriff.
Black men and boys are still being “lynched” by white law enforcement officers, the difference being that today they are increasingly shot on the spot and the officers only have to assert that they were provoked.
The one that really flies in the face of any semblance of justice is this: “I thought he had a gun.”
The landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka has been sidestepped for 56 years because white America decided that any law benefiting black people is unacceptable. Public school integration is largely a farce. So who is the progenitor of this so-called “post-racial America” and what does it mean?
Clearly, the fundamental problem with the idea is that it is based on a pseudo-scientific mindset. The false issue of “race” cleverly obfuscates white nationalism, the inherent contradiction inbred in the very formulation of this nation, with slavery as its centerpiece.
It is quite evident that significant numbers of white people find it difficult to understand why the Western or Eurocentric notion of democracy is not readily accepted by so-called third world and developing nations.
What conscious non-white people see in so-called democracy is its historical precedent, which includes slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism for them, and wealth, power and hegemony for America and Europe.
A so-called “post-racial America” is a white nationalist concept, a confluence of the left and right, Democratic and Republican, designed to lull black people into a dream-like state and away from the reality of both their present and future. That reality speaks volumes to the need to organize, make changes and progress.
Here’s a news flash. The median white American income is vastly greater than quadruple that of blacks.
That is called retrogression, folks. And you and I are allowing some jokers to talk to us about “post-racial America”?
People of African descent make a foolhardy error by engaging in the fallacious assumption of “race.” We should all be together on two things: White nationalism is our problem, not the false notion of “race,” and liberation is the only solution. Liberate the mind and the body will naturally follow.
Remember the truth that Malcolm X gave us. He said that black people have been “hoodwinked, bamboozled and led astray.” Come on, black people, wake up and get busy!
Al Calloway may be reached at Al_Calloway@Verizon.net.
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