Rootsie

Last Tuesday was a big day in Burlington Vermont.

In the same moments Archbishop Desmond Tutu delivered his address at Patrick Gym,  KRS-One,  aka Chris Parker, a ‘godfather’ of hip hop culture, was at Spectrum One-Stop addressing the homeless youth and adults gathered there.  KRS experienced 5 years of homelessness as a teenager in South Bronx, and he had important things to say to youth who are experiencing the same.

Both men embody a spiritual authority born of struggle against racial injustice, and in their respective spheres, both speak with potent and fully embodied voices of this planet’s overwhelming need for peace, love, and unity.

For a black man born in Apartheid South Africa, born in South Bronx, attaining a certain age is miracle enough.  For Bishop Tutu and KRS-One to come to overwhelmingly white audiences with messages of historical forgiveness and racial reconciliation shows a generosity of spirit truly remarkable.

It is also problematic.  Though I understand and agree that ultimately, we humans must come to ‘embrace our diversity, I don’t believe that this is the message whites need to hear. In a nutshell, it lets us off the hook, gives us the warm fuzzies that people of privilege are so used to expecting, and it skips steps.

If white supremacy were a thing of the distant past, if whites had fully come to terms with history, if whites did not still benefit directly from systemic racism, our work would be done and the ‘One Love’ philosophy would have substance and reality.

None of these are the case. I don’t think whites should be admonished to ‘get beyond race.’  I think we have to get into race, specifically our own, and understand with clarity what our phenotype buys us, and figure out whether we can sit pretty with that, morally speaking.

Speaking of morality, I am in agreement with Jean Paul Sartre about the ‘striptease of our humanism’ which has accompanied 500 years of slavery and imperialism.  It is ironic that European interest in ‘Ethics’ coincides exactly with the worst of European behavior towards Africa, America, and Asia. The truth is that the West is morally bankrupt, which accounts largely for the materialism, militarism, vulgarity, and disease so prevalent in our culture. Nobody who’s littered the earth with a billion dead bodies has much helpful to say to the world today.  I am being deliberately provocative, and if people feel defensive, they would do well to start here and get to work.  Follow that anxiety. Deconstructing our white arrogance is a big favor we can do to for the rest of the world.

As Archbishop Tutu knows very well, you can’t skip to the reconciliation part until you do the truth part.  Instead of talking diversity, let’s talk race.  Skin color looms huge in the conception and consolidation of our capitalist system, even if race itself was a fiction constructed in order to make the game go.

“Know your self. Understand value.” KRS-One’s remarks to oppressed young people stressed these ideas, but it is important advice for everybody.  White people cannot know themselves on the spiritual level or any other level without interrogating the assumptions born of their whiteness.  ‘Embracing’ or ‘celebrating’ diversity without considering race and history may temporarily relieve some of our anxiety, but in the long run serves no one.  

I am not writing this to criticize our guests of last Tuesday. The journey through this terrain is different for blacks than for whites.
No one ever had to tell them to consider race, for they certainly had no choice.

You can feel the relief in the room when a black absolves whites. It’s just another of the numerous opportunities privileged people receive to feel good about themselves. The thing is, as I look at what my tax dollars are paying for, and the short attention spans and self-absorption and apparent amnesia of so many of my fellow citizens, I don’t feel good at all.  Which, I believe, is as it should be. I will feel more comfortable when I am doing all I can to serve justice. Refusing to skip truth in order to arrive at reconciliation when it comes to race is a large part of that effort.

Racial Classification
by Cheikh Anta Diop

A racial classification is given to a group of individuals who share a certain number of anthropological traits, which is necessary so that they not be confused with others. There are two aspects which must be distinguished, the phenotypical and genotypical. I have frequently elaborated on these two aspects.

If we speak only of the genotype, I can find a black who, at the level of his chromosomes, is closer to a Swede than Peter Botha is. But what counts in reality is the phenotype. It is the physical appearance which counts. This black, even if on the level of his cells he is closer than Peter Botha, when he is in South Africa he will live in Soweto. Throughout history, it has always been the phenotype which has been at issue; we mustn't lose sight of this fact. The phenotype is a reality, physical appearance is a reality.

Now, every time these relationships are not favorable to the Western cultures, an effort is made to undermine the cultural consciousness of Africans by telling them, `We don't even know what a race is.' What that means is, they do know what a yellow man is, they do know what a white man is. Despite the fact that the white race and the yellow race are derivatives of the black which, itself, was the first to exist as a human race, now we do not want know what it is. If Africans fall into that trap, they'll be going around in circles. They must understand the trap, understand the stakes.

It is the phenotype which as given us so much difficulty throughout history, so it is this which must be considered in these relations. It exists, is a reality and cannot be repudiated.

SOURCES:
African Origin of Civilization by Cheikh Anta Diop
Civilization or Barbarism by Cheikh Anta Diop
http://www.africawithin.com/diop/racial_classification.htm

Those who accuse blacks, the ones who don't automatically reach out and embrace whites, of being "racist"...

Those who take the mtDNA evidence as an opportunity to say there is no such thing as race, and all blacks have to do is "get over it"...

Those who speek about racism in the past tense...

lack the historical understanding that would cause them to realize they're being foolish.

The "Rogues' Gallery" on this Forum demonstrates that European identity is intimately tied to the glorification of the white phenotype.  It is more than ironic that the founders of the philosophical school of "Ethics" like John Stuart Mill took white supremacy as a given, not even worthy of debate, that Charles Darwin and his followers took the theory of Natural Selection and constructed evolutionary ladders with dark-skinned blacks at the bottom and whites at the top, that most 'great minds' which college students are required to study today, the philosophers and scholars who considered the most minute aspects of human characteristics, took the superiority of the white phenotype for granted.

It could be argued that Sir John Speke's preposterous "Hamitic Hypothesis" led in a direct way to the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

The primary statistical method of 19th century evolutionary biology was "Craniometry", the measuring of human skulls and the weighing of human brains.

A Twa man from Congo was put on display in the monkey cage at the Bronx Zoo in 1906.

"Race" is not a fictional or abstract concept.  It is a foundation of Western thinking and plays out in pleas for 'aid' for 'poor countries', in who's in jail,
who's poor, and in countless other ways down to the interpersonal relationships between human beings.

I see inborn unexamined white arrogance on the part of people who come to the Africa Speaks and Rastafari Speaks froums to lecture and scold blacks about the nonexistence of race.  What they don't get is that it's easy for them to say so, since, being white, they are never encouraged or compelled to think about race at all. And they don't realize in how ugly a manner they reveal their own arrogance born of unexamined privilege.

Privilege is granted according to skin tone, and the argument that some whites are poor and oppressed too, or that some blacks are privileged, fails to recognize the systemic nature of white supremacy.

It is not possible for a single white person to say "I am different' or "I am beyond it". We are literally born into it, and only through ruthless self-examination can we begin to move from it.

"God sees no color" they say. Aside from the question as to how they know WHAT this otherworldly abstract being they worship sees or not, this statement points to one of the many problems with religion as most people see it. Mostly unconsciously, they think to trump the argument by abstracting it, taking it off the planet. There is nothing abstract or supernatural about the way resources and privileges flow on this planet. They flow from dark-skinned peoples to light-skinned to white