Western, Euro-American, Revisionist Racism.
For many centuries, the geopolitical tool of many western nations to dominate and terrorize African states has been based entirely on the hatred of one race. Particularly, the Foreign and Domestic Policy of European nations and nations of European descent around the world (particularly in the US), remains that of a policy of Anti-Blackness.
Make no mistake. Everywhere you look, all European institutions are Anti-Black. That is, they hate African/Black people and they act violently against Black people for absolutely no human reason. Call it a sickness if you may, but those are the facts.
Now, it is a mistake to assume that the obvious truth forces people to admit it. It doesn’t. Some people change. Others do not. You need only take a cursory look at the institutions of white people to understand their mindset—whether they are capable of change or not. To understand who people really are, you cannot understand them by laying-up with either their men or women. You need to look at their institutions—which reveals how they think and act as a group.
A white person like Joe, the bigot, Biden, can say he likes Black people all he wants. Your European girlfriend can say she doesn’t mind Black people, and that her relationship to you is a testament of that reality. Be not deceived—a molecule of H2O cannot reveal the true characteristics of the body of water. To understand Joe, the bigot, Biden, one needs to look at how the man behaves within an institution of whites! And there, among their own people, with the power to affect Black lives, their character is not built, it is exposed. There, Joe Biden, is indubitably, a bigot.
It is a mistake to assume then that the obvious truth about the centuries-old racism of white institutions—like the violent brutality of Police Departments of the United States against Black people—forces people to admit it. It doesn’t. Instead, because Anti-Blackness among Europeans and the descendants of Europeans is non-negotiable, they double down on it.
The best way to double down on racism is to defeat the intellectual argument against the white supremacist group-think of white people. Many projects to obscure the unnerving truth about European Anti-Blackness have been launched to this effect and I shall point out just a few for the sake of brevity.
(1). One is that, not all white people are racist. This is not an argument. It is statistically mute. To say that not all molecules of H20 behave the same way is neither here nor there. Water, remains, water, give or take. This type of obfuscation goes along with pointing to notable Europeans who argued against violence against Black peoples. Statistically, there’s no scientific significance to this view and it does absolutely nothing to the prevailing paradigm that white people are Anti-Black. The fact remains.
(2). The second is that Europeans are not the first to build Anti-Black institutions. Look at Islam and the Arabs. Even look at some African institutions, they (as the European intellectuals would like us to believe were already Anti-Black, and that they the Europeans just bought into what was already present).
This point is particularly troubling, and that’s the whole point. In that, (i) It is partly an admission of the guilt of European Anti-Blackness and (ii) Even if the premise is granted that Europeans were not the first Anti-Black peoples, two wrongs still cannot make a right.
Although, suffice it to say that, this second point has been the west’s strongest project thus far. Many African scholars, religious scholars and ethnographers have been enlisted, funded and commissioned with some of the loot from Africa to paint Islam and even to some extent, African culture and ethnic African wars, as somehow the first types of Anti-Blackness, and that early Muslims, particularly the Arabs, and their fellow Africans were just as Anti-Black as the west has been in the past 500 years. There’s not enough time to refute these claims except to say that these are outright projections of guilt, projections of European Anti-Black whiteness.
(3) The third type of obscuring the facts of a virulent violent Anti-Blackness among Europeans and people of European descent is raising the stagecraft of intersectionalizing oppression and suffering. For instance, they claim that you shouldn’t say that white people are oppressing Black people in America. That is too simple—and what they mean is that that is too truthful.
What you should admit and say, which is the lie, is that single, poor LGBTQ – Black women suffer at the hands of abusive straight, rich Black men and women first, and then perhaps second, they suffer the oppressive racial system run by rich white men. The goal is to spread the blame/guilt of Anti-Blackness to reach closer to one’s own actions (the actions of other Black people), and to spread the victimhood of Anti-Black oppression to include other white people (white women and poor whites).
This way the call to overthrow white supremacism cannot be launched with a proper united front. Intersectionalism has been very successful. And many unsuspecting Black intellectuals wear this craft on their foreheads as a type of clairvoyant honor.
This way these Black people have picked their fight, first against masculine straight rich Black men. And if ever, one cannot expect them to speak of the ills of the geopolitics of western Anti-Blackness.
All this to say that no matter where one looks, the charge of western Anti-Blackness is not going to go without a fight from western scholars. The charge of Anti-Blackness is not going down without the project to first demonize Africa and indict Islam as both the first types of Anti-Blackness. This will be done in the charge to spread the blame away from the west, away from Europeans and to widen the net of victims to include not only the Black victims of this crass, violent strain of European imperialism.
What can you do? The duty of the African intellectual is to read widely, and stay his/her mind on the facts, without giving in to the various western projects to revise African history in their cunning attempt to remove responsibility for their various crimes of humanity that we place right in front of their doorsteps.
The duty of the African scholar is to teach him/herself to identify these Euro-American projects of lies, of misinformation and disinformation. White institutions, because they are essentially Anti-Black, will not and cannot be expected to accept responsibility for their 500 years of violent Anti-Blackness. Their very nature and existence depends on their refusal to admit that they are racist.
You compare the whole complexity that is a human being to a molecule of water and draw an analogy ?Seems to me a great exercise in obfuscation !
Your point?
Kari, I wish I understood what you wrote but I don’t.
Good read.
Narmer Amenuti are you aware both men worked as security officers.?
Human beings of any race are complex -they can be duplicitous ,courageous,change their mind ,lie ,feign courage while afraid to go to the forefront of battle ,love etc -I find it difficult that you draw your analogy with water .
Every molecule of water is exactly the same .
Every human being in any ‘race ‘( it’s a false label anyway) is uniquely different,physical attributes ,psychology and so on
Kari Bannerman So in essence what is your point?
Ofori-Agyekum Samuel That not all white people are anti black -I can’t quiet get his generalisation.
And so that somehow is more important than all he said?
The so called pro black whites are a negligible minority.
Their existence doesn’t change anything about the anti black structures and institutions put up by the white establishment.
So please don’t be distracted by the non essentials. Focus on the main issue.
Ofori-Agyekum Samuel I am still trying to address what I see as a woeful analogy in his point.
Kari Bannerman yes, and the very whites who looted and set fires into buildings that the blacks alone will be eventually blamed for and called THUGS by Potus.
I would admit that I almost always find it hard to agree with your premises. But you do have the ability to express your views with clarity with informed argumentation which I respect. It is indeed a very underrated quality. The parallels drawn to establish and expand your accusation can hardly be admissible. Our societies are way too complex. I’ve not read enough about racism to be comfortable expressing my positions on some of the topics you write about frequently but the premise of collective culpability of the euro-American constitution is something I find hard to grasp ever since I started following you on here. What is the foundation of that philosophy?
If you mean to ask what is the foundation of the philosophy of whiteness, from which Anti-Blackness and therefore white supremacism and Nazism, as practices have been drawn, there are copious amounts of work to this effect. I will start with the English scholar, Richard Dyer. I find his work, “White,” to be a good summary of the philosophy of whiteness. (I have no need to refer you to Black scholars since the idea of a Black scholar charging whiteness is never taken on its truth value alone but something else.)
Just a quick point before you begin that book. Whiteness is essentially intrinsic to the Christian Tradition as it was founded, shaped and fashioned as a weapon for imperialist endeavors in Europe. Dyer’s argument will make that clear.
Which altogether can be said that [modern] Christianity itself as a set of doctrines hold much of the traditions of the philosophies of whiteness. They are nothing humane!
Kari Bannerman I think what Narmer is alluding to is that the few good White people have not been able to counter the White supremacist system and how we Black suffer from it. If these 400 years have taught us anything it is that White sympathy has not been an effective remedy against White supremacy. The White Americans who wanted slavery to end were unable to end the suffering of Blacks in America. The slaves left the plantations without a dime from the government while slave owners were compensated. The system that should have protected Blacks ended up protecting the predators instead. Blacks aren’t living under the effects of good white people, we are living under the effects of White supremacy and racist institutions. It is as if the ‘good’ white people don’t even exist.