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Race And Rage By Michael D. Roberts |
The paradox of Blacks living in America is that as a race we are largely considered inferior and of little consequence because that justifies continued white supremacist ideology that is at the very core of American democracy. By relegating Blacks to a largely invisible amorphous mass the white power structure avoids the inevitable day of reckoning that will conjure up and expose the level of inhumanity of man to man and by man and sharpen the contradiction between what "good Christian folks" do among themselves and how "un-Christian" and brutal they behave towards others, especially Black people.
And if ever you need an example about just how invisible a people we are then the recent space shuttle tragedy speaks volumes by the mass media's treatment of the white and Jewish astronauts, and the ignoring of the only Black member of the space team. Apart from passing references to the Black astronaut, the focus was on the white members and the hero status of the Jewish member whose only claim to heroism was that he bombed the hell out of an Iraqi nuclear facility and that his parents were holocaust survivors. Nobody bothered to mention that Mike Anderson's parents were descendants of slaves and that his remarkable journey from invisibility to the height of American achievement was infinitely more difficult than all his counterparts combined.
It is this relegation to irrelevancy and nonentity that fuels Black rage. White society stereotypes and presumes that "all of them" are the same and no matter how much Blacks achieve we're considered to be still inferior, underachievers, welfare people, lazy, shiftless people, sexually depraved people, and every social stigma that justifies the perpetuation of white racism and reinforces notions of white supremacy. As we celebrate Black History month again it is not enough to tell our kids that they have to be a bit more Black conscious, love to be Black, and work hard to achieve. We owe it to them to explain the construct that is American democracy and why Black people remain in social and economic bondage in 2003.
We must tell them that it was the pressure of Black invisibility as a people orchestrated by white society that has forced the Black community in America search for its identity. We have gone from colored, to Black, to African, Negro, to Afro-American and finally to African-American. But exactly who and what are we? Along the way whites have called us "nigger" a pejorative, demeaning, and degrading name that suggests a being that is less than a human and barely above the beasts of the field. Therefore a "nigger" is something not somebody to be exploited with impunity and treated with remorseless and brutal inhumanity because white supremacist ideology says that Black people are "chattel."
And so to get ahead Black people must even in 2003 be polite to a fault when it comes to white people, always seek to get approval for our deeds from white people, and to swallow all kinds of insults that ultimately reinforce in white racist minds that we are still "chattel." This in turn breeds self-hatred that manifests itself in deviant, violent behavior against the very people that share the same levels of humiliation, racism and shame. Do you still wonder why the Black community is so riddled with violence today?
The other side of the coin is that Black people still yearn for liberation and to be treated as equals with all other people in America. They do no want to remain invisible and irrelevant. So they escape to the churches and other houses of worship, abuse drugs and imbibe too much alcohol that only helps to aggravate and compound the already volatile situation. Black rage lashes out at Black people in the Black community simply because it is powerless to change the system and right historical wrongs that have been perpetuated by white society. Black society has become the hot bed of every deviant anti-social behavior that is the direct result of the dehumanization visited on Black society by the practices of white supremacist behavior, instutionalized racism, and pervasive social prejudices that reinforces the notion of "separate and unequal."
American democracy is therefore inseparable from the institutions of white supremacy, racism and bigotry. I believe that these three institutions determine the growth, development and progress of American democracy even today. To be sure, there have been some progress made in correcting these imbalances but Southern whites still refer to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s holiday as Martin Luther "Coon Day" a pejorative name that the Ku Klux Klan gave to Blacks living in the south. Up to a few years ago whites still called Blacks "boy," and up a quite recently white corporate board room big shots were still speaking about them "niggers, spicks and spades."
Indeed, if we do not face the realities of the predicament of the Black race in America today then we're not going to be able to wage any struggle for dignity, fairness or equality. The thing is that in this context the first fight must be for the demands of respect and dignity of Black people because a majority of white people not all still don't respect Black people enough to consider them their equals. That is a belief that is predicated on an apartheid-like notion of the natural superiority of white people. As long as this disrespect persists then Black people will always be "niggers, coons, boys and spades."
Do I sound as an angry Black man? You bet. Am I ashamed of that? Hell no. That's because I can channel that anger towards a progressive agenda that never lets me forget exactly what the real situation is. It's that kind of anger that allows me to understand a shriveled up old white woman suddenly refusing to sit next to me on the Number 2 train even though I'm wearing an Armani suit, clean shaven and carrying an attaché case. And it's the invisibility of being ignored that I get when I'm standing in line waiting to be served at a Five-Star hotel and having to exercise an awesome amount of patience not to slap the hell out of a white clerk feeling important at the desk by looking at me, through me, not seeing me as Black as I am, and passing on to a white twit standing behind me.
It's this truth that will set Black people free. And if we recognize and understand exactly where we are and why we're in this position, then those things that we have in common will unite us. That is why Black History Month is so important. Its an opportunity to tell the world the true story of Black struggle and to lay bare and expose the unbelievable levels of racism that are color coated, hidden, and concealed by those who would perpetuate and yearn for the days of Jim Crow.