(ThyBlackMan.com) I dislike the geographic parameters imposed by the term “African history.” It relegates the history of African people, which, as you note later, is synonymous with “human beings,” to a specific place. I will use the Jewish people here to construct a point.
I perceive the Jews as a cultural-ethnic embodiment of the principle of self-determination. The history of the Jewish people, albeit bloody and depressing, is the history of a people fighting relentlessly to remain untethered to states and other religions. Indeed, the Jewish people represent cultures and ethnicities as multifaceted and variegated as any evolutionary history. Rather than submit themselves to their political and religious notions or vice versa, they blend them all together, from Hassidic to Orthodox and beyond.
The Jews battled Egypt, Rome and most of Europe and Russia for about two thousand years. During the Middle Ages, the Jews were relegated from the guilds, aristocracy and monarchy because, simply, they were Jewish. In turn, they were forced into the financial and cultural sectors because Christendom frowned upon usury, which is ironic as the charging of interest is fundamental to feudalist and mercantilist society, and the Catholic Church harbors specific and strange contempt for creativity that does not aggrandize the Catholic faith. The absurdities are seemingly endless and utterly out of step with anything Jesus Christ said even remotely. Martin Luther’s denunciation of the Catholic Church, which brought about the Protestant Reformation, had everything to do with the fact the Catholic Church had abandoned the teachings of Christ in all but name and image. Martin Luther King, Jr. made this exact same 
point not only to racist Southerners and the KKK, but to the passive white churches in the North, much as Paul of Tarsus to the churches of Asia.
– Eric Williams wrote about capitalism and slavery and observed that most of the European societies, at the time America was still dealing with it, were in the process of moving away from it not for any moral reasons; although, the French Revolution ended the institution for political reasons. The European nations ended slavery because it cut into their profits. It’s actually far more expensive to own slaves than pay laborers, which means not only is slavery morally repugnant, it’s capitalistically inefficient. The irony.
Many Jews live in Israel. However, Israel is by no means a representation of Jews generally. Zionism has as many Jewish opponents as it has proponents. Indeed, this same schism emerged during Lincoln’s presidency among blacks: Stay in America or found a new society of blacks in Africa. Both came to fruition.
Liberia, as it was to where many of the more “radical” freed slaves immigrated, did not became an Israel for blacks. (About my usage of the word “radical:” I don’t know what word is appropriate here: homesick and righteously repulsed come to mind. I do not use “radical” negatively. I only mean to note that more blacks stayed in America than blacks who went back to Africa.)
If you plot the developments of the North and South post-Civil War, you will find that the South too was stunted by the “slavery chapter.” Africa’s problems since the birth of modernity derive from countless factors, and Liberia’s relative lack of progress would require a much fuller analysis, but at the time of the migration to Liberia, the rest of the world was nowhere near the industrialization America had already achieved. Europe was immersed in revolutions and civil wars and would remain so until, well, now.
– The colonial storm that struck Africa prohibited Liberia engaging in trade with like surrounding nations, and itself became immersed in the mayhem of diamonds and ivory and other useless bourgeois commodities extracted at the cost of no less than human dignity. The South, as the American North was the only nation really focused on industrial growth and the expansion of education, suffered this same problem, as well. Trade is great for fledgling nations. It’s tendency to construct a monolith of inequality is for another thesis, as well. I consider the Civil War the true American Revolution. What we call today the “American Revolution” was nothing more than a bourgeois coup that ousted one set of white-wigged aristocrats for another. The true American Revolution involved millions of immigrants who had escaped the mayhem of the Old World and found themselves oppressed on American shores, as well as conscientious Northerners, native Americans, and slaves. (Karl Marx even wrote Lincoln a letter in which praised his war on the Confederate bastion of western bourgeois insanity.) The Civil War was no civil war at all. It was the Old World v. a rainbow coalition that formed at a time of necessity to ensure the actualization of the last cosmopolitan nation the Earth will ever host.
“African history” does not allow for the history of black people to reach any depth or scope. As Israel does not represent the Jews, Africa does not represent blacks.
Moreover, I will cite Dave Chappelle. Mr. Chappelle said that he loves black people because they are so great at making lemonade with lemons. I agree wholeheartedly. Rather than adopt the cynical perspective, which necessarily perceives the continued enslavement of blacks as lacking any positive narrative, I prefer the idealistic narrative, which necessarily attempts to reconstruct history to highlight the lemonade and therefore encourage others not to perceive a hopeless cause now utterly reduced to violent revolution, but rather a hopeful cause characterized as leaps and bounds and chutes and ladders no less just, righteous and worth realizing than any other the human race has known.
– Another important character I want to mention is Saartjie Baartman, or the “Hottentot Venus.” Despite whites using her a traveling showpiece, she is remembered for her wit, tenderness, intelligence, and beauty, which, unfortunately, no one would have witnessed had she not been paraded about like a mannequin. She made lemonades of a whole society of lemons. THAT is African history, in my opinion. I wish to have known her.
For instance, let’s take the history of Africa since the American Civil War. Yes, black Americans still endure a relatively less harsh form of enslavement, but Africa’s history has been even more miserable, because the Dutch, the British, etc. I like to think that my ancestors, the Scottish and Irish, who themselves fought with the Union, helped blacks to gain some sort of freedom in America that blacks in Africa still do not possess equally.
– Indeed, you could rephrase the entire quote this way:
“Slave history is but a chapter in the rich history of black people. The post-Civil War American chapter of that history clearly demonstrates the bravery, innovativeness and fortitude of the black survivors of the holocaust that ensued during the first centuries of the Colombian Exchange.”
As the Jews wrestled with God and against the other religions and states of man, so the blacks wrestled with God and against the religions and states of man. In this light, I consider blacks the Jews of the West, and therefore Martin Luther King, Jr. a Christ-like figure.
– Nelson Mandela was, in my opinion, the last noteworthy statesmen on Earth.
Mr. Obama has regretfully faced the primacy of the American corporate-state leviathan, as well as the menacing behemoth of China, which has in every way conspired against America since Nixon, who I believe arranged the assassination of Mr. Kennedy. J. Edgar Hoover obviously arranged the assassination of Mr. King. Indeed, I think China arranged the 9/11 terrorist attacks and through proxy states like Iran and North Korea, has facilitated the rise of Anonymous and ISIS as mechanisms to destabilize America.
Mr. Mandela refused early release from a hell-hole Apartheid prison so as not to abandon his comrades for the sake of appeasing politically the White Apartheid state. Mr. King, as well, rebuked the notion of appeasement and bravely faced death in order to demonstrate, much as Christ, that facing head-on and nonviolently the leviathan of Confederate state-religion was necessary to overcome it.
Moreover, I agree with both Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois.
For people without the intellectual curiosity or aptitude to seek higher education, focus on the labor market is crucial. However, for the intellectually apt and curious, focus on higher education is crucial.
Now, I wish to make the larger argument:
Overcoming slavery is confined neither to one nor twelve facets of civilization. It is confined insofar as civilization itself in confined. And this necessarily includes philosophy, metaphysics, science, literature, film, etc.
A people is not one thing or another.
Consider this: as blacks were enslaved on fields in the antebellum South, many are now enslaved on fields of AstroTurf, or gang or hip-hop turfs: tribalism is a construct that emerges when solidarity is impossible because the unilateral domination of the Establishment is so effective, or because communality generally is impossible circumstantially. Indeed, the field is a useful metaphor for the state of blacks. Prison fields are sardine-packed full of black men who have faced nothing but obstruction to opportunity since day one of American life.
I do not believe institutional racism exists. If you will, allow me to explain.
Institutional racism means the Jim Crow laws, 3/5 Compromise, Dred Scott Decision, etc. Those constructs specifically dealt with the dehumanization of black people for racially motivated reasons. The Drug War and like policies, while racially motivated initially, have now reached so deeply into every facet of society that even spoiled white kids have felt its merciless sting.
Moreover, nowhere in the Constitution does it say anything for or against slavery specifically, because the Constitution was originally vague and egalitarian. Additionally, the Bill of Rights specifically applies to all people. However, as constitutional amendments have come and gone, the initial conditions have changed so profoundly that only a pure return to the Constitution and Bill of Rights could manifest the egalitarianism it was originally designed to realize, despite the statuses or colors of the human hands in which it was placed.
– Consider this: the 14th Amendment was the key amendment in ending the institution of slavery. However, that amendment was used recently to codify the abso-fucking-lutely ridiculous notion that “corporations are people.”
What was once used to free slaves was later used to enserf citizens. It’s not the Constitution that’s the problem, and therefore not institutional racism with which we are faced. It is merely people and centuries of complexity stacked upon bastard power and backward philosophy.
People must interpret and enforce laws. And I do believe that anyone can be racist. Here’s why: when you place the term “racism” within the narrow definition of who has power and who doesn’t, it does not address the inherent ignorance and depravity of racism as a belief and ideological construct. I heard once someone say, “Blacks can’t be racist.” To mean, this says, “Blacks can’t get ignorant.”
However, I believe that what unites us as a species is our collective ignorance. Anyone can be racist, but not everyone can have power in a system in which racist people have and control power.
Indeed, neither classism nor racism truly deals with fundamental inequalities and perversities within the coliseum of power dynamics.
Slavery is merely the state of material powerlessness. But even a slave, such as Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglass, can exercise power of mind and spirit to attempt to overthrow oppression, or at least rescue others from it.
The “N-word,” which I recognize is as ridiculous as the real word, but I refuse to say it because it even sounds mean, was once a benign label for people with black skin. (Ironically, if you consider man’s origins in Africa, white peopled are the “colored” ones. I laugh when I think about it, but just so I don’t cry at the sheer backwardness. I appreciated Randall Kennedy’s book “Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word”.) It was appropriated by slavers and thus became an instrument of oppression. Blacks’ appropriation of the term as a benign pronoun simply resets it to its original status as nothing more than a label.
Linguistically, this appropriation represents a victory of the enslaved over the slaver because language is one of, if not the, most important tool humans employ in the construction of civilization. Indeed, although a linguistic victory hardly notes the persistent struggles blacks face elsewhere, it at least indicates that the first steps toward liberation have been taken. Language is how we define and narrate civilization and our places and roles within it. Linguistic changes characterize greater metaphysical and material changes and so language itself is the intermediary canvas on which material and metaphysical evolution occur.
Yes, there is far to go and yes the “N-word” no longer serves any evolutionary purpose, but it’s appropriation by blacks is by no means indicative of antebellum “slave-mentality syndrome.” It represents, however, that the idea of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois have not been implemented effectively or vastly enough.
Lastly, “slave-mentality syndrome” is a psychological term employed atavistically, I believe, to denigrate those who have not achieved an equivalent state of intellectual and spiritual enlightenment. Psychology itself is a pseudo-science no different than the demonology employed by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. Scientology, which is ruthlessly contemptuous of reason and faith, is predicated almost entirely on the draconian employment of psychological terms to dehumanize people into absolute submission. Radical Islam, the Soviets, the Nazis and the U.S. federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies employ these tactics, as well. And to the doom of this mode of civilization no less. Rather than understand one another an iota, these types of groups employ vicious, atavistic and Orwellian psychobabble to destroy the intellectual and spiritual identities of people so they are likelier to obey and conform or not attempt to fight back when the military-industrial blitzkrieg descends in a rain of hellfire and in broad daylight.
Staff Writer; Stefan Pyles