Excerpts from my rant on (Black) racism

This is an excerpt of my letter to a friend with whom I was discussing race. It's been edited to remove several terrible jokes and references to mutual acquaintances.Enjoy











Four times this week the issue of race has come up in some way or another in my life. Thrice in discussion with my friends in which we speak freely and hence any detailed re-telling of the words uttered may lead to our subsequent arrest and sentencing as criminal elements, and once on the morning radio program on Sanyu FM on Saturday.

The general tone was the same in all but one of the discussions. Fuck these white people. They is the scourge of the earth and they have kept the black man down too long. The only thing missing were Afro combs and dashikis as we worked ourselves into a fury over the invisible scars we were supposedly carrying from the whips of the white master.

Sirkumstance, in his Americanized Ugandan accent, spouting off a list of achievements of Africans. How white people only brought gonorrhea and syphilis and how their greed is the reason for lack in the nation. All while a newspaper detailing the OPM scandal, the latest in what is becoming a count the number of grains of sand on the sea shore of corruption type situation in this country. The irony was thick and I assume the show was supposed to be very tongue in cheek.

Imagine my surprise then at some among us that actually without  irony agreed. Agreed with the vitriolic ideas that melanin somehow made one a superior being to another. That they nodded their heads to the degradation of other people to show their own superiority.

That's what troubles me about the pro-African stance as it currently stands  It's more anti-western than it is pro African. The rhetoric is teeming with snide remarks tearing down or degrading other cultures and people for being different, or for slights committed either by a pocket of their community or committed hundreds of years ago. Have we stopped to think that maybe this is not the way to elevate ourselves: -by dragging people down, by being dismissive and really just myopic.

Like everyone else, I remember watching Sarafina and that other movie with Denzel Washington as Steve Biko , (Cry the beloved country?) and thinking, "How cruel these Bazungu are. "Remember reading how they took us black people as slaves and made us do all the hard work, the images of Kunta Kinte having his back cut up by a whip in an effort to force him to adopt a foreign name and him resisting near the point of death in Alex Haley's Iconic work, " Roots" , the very Euro-Centric storytelling of our history-as though without the white man, we were a dirty lost race in need of saving.

Ain't nobody got shit on us black people when it comes to suffering. I think like many I got a chip on my shoulder. A sorta disdain for the second level status we seemed to be given by the dark hues of our skins. I cringed at the representation of Africa as a wilderness, as a place in need of perpetual aid, of flies around mouths when my reality was more complex than that. I had a video deck for God's sake!!I went to the mall, where is that representation?

But then I had the fortune of studying in a historically black college in the Us. The biggest HBCU  system in the US actually and this opened my eyes in ways I never thought. I was never a black panther or anything but I found a lot of ignorance and a lot of enlightenment at the same time. For every person with a dumb view of my background and nature as an Africa.  I found others intimately acquainted with what goes on on the continent.It was weird seeing someone with whom I shared skin color with, my love of chicken and an unhealthy obsession with the rounded bottom of a young Nubian lady(I tried to class it up but still sounds like i'm saying "Dat Ass") could know so little of 'the mother land". In fact I found that many felt that they were hated by Africans for not being "African enough"and more than returned the favor. I came into contact with Mexicans and half Japanese half Black people who we all assumed were Samurai's just by the look of them, never mind the fact that they didn't even like martial arts. I was learning that people are not subject to stereo types.

But more importantly I came into contact with my own ignorance. I faced it head on and took a healthy helping of humble pie. Maybe I wasn't the only one that felt was being burdened with an unfair stereotype. Maybe people are just people who happen to occupy a certain skin and belong to a certain culture. That fuckin big picture was starting to blur out the minor differences that once seemed so huge.

I was coming to come to terms with the fact that I'd been taking it easy on myself and my brethren. Beliefs are a beautiful thing when they go unchallenged. They help you feel good and safe, and the true complexity of the facts well, when you fill the room with opinions that you agree with only. In fact one of the most important things I gleaned from Obama Land is that diversity is not just people of different races being in the same place together, it requires a voluntary action to engage.


New York wasn't a melting pot as they said. It's just a bunch of pots boiling next to each other. A Chinese Pot over here, a Greek one over there, An African one right next to an African American one etc. We're largely still tribal creatures that are suspect of the other funny looking people across the river and throw stones at them never stopping to wonder why.

All the Ugandans hang out with other Ugandans and maybe some Nigerians perhaps as a means to enjoy some of the bravery and crazy goings on that follows any gathering of two or more Oga. I felt this defeated the purpose of being in a foreign country. Huddling together over some matooke and beef that one lucky member who had been in the mother land brought over to complain about these Americans lacked good food or culture.That irony rares it's head again.

The fact is I think it's just lazy of us to blame others and tell stories about how we are somehow better than those chaps whose wealth we want, whose technological innovations we use and whose aid we take begrudgingly. We sit and complain about how we loathe them and their mentality that we need saving. We go to stress owned by Indians and roll our eyes and hope for a Ugandan working there to show up so we can in solidarity find a way of getting a 'discount'. There comes this license with having been the downtrodden that allows you to get away with sayign all manner of things about the oppressor, the oppressors great grand kids and all that even appear to look like the oppressor.

Well, I'm not taking that route. I'm not going to throw salt. I think it comes form the same place as the hate we so loathe in the people that once ruled over us. How can I complain of being stereotyped, dehumanized and pre-judged and go ahead and do the same thing to another race of people. MLK is remembered more than his more militant brother Malcolm X because one preached equality, and judgement based on content of character and not color of skin while the other preached black supremacy.

For now, I think I will grin and laugh it off, most times because racial humor is funny because it's honest, it's raw and makes for great one-liners. I know that it can be the letting off of steam, and I truly see humor in it. But I will also remember that these are probably the same things said about Adolf Hitler yeah, I'm playing that card) at some point. Just some funny mustached struggling painter who would rant about those damn Jews and no one paid him no mind.

I think it's best just to remember that all of us, black, white, yellow, whatever bleed red, love , laugh, love chicken and a good beat. We can be irritated by cultures and mannerisms, but know that people are more than what their group's characteristics are. Except those fucking Amish people, they don't use the internet so we can say whatever we want about them ;-)



Peace, one love and all that other good stuff.