Those who ignore the past are condemned to repeat it.* I see some-black activists proposing ideas that are rethreaded concepts from the past. If you don’t know the origins of racism, how will you understand and address it and not repeat past mistakes? Some are creating phantom citadels that mirror the white supremacist ideology of fantasy worlds where they once were supreme. We are all human beings. No one is above or beneath another. We will only achieve understanding and peace when we see ourselves as equals, and we take the time to take care of this beautiful world.
Others are threading the line that we should not antagonise whites because we need them on our side. Therefore, we must hide information that might make them feel uncomfortable — an example of this being how the British used revenue from slavery to partially finance the industrial revolution.
*George Santayana “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The Life of Reason, 1905.
So-called white people are not the only perpetrators of white supremacy. We are all born in a world where white supremacy is the dominant ideology. White supremacy does not refer to skin colour. It references a system of power designed to maintain its privileges. We enable this system to exist by validating it. We are all agents of this ideology. *
Colourism is one of the ways that people of colour support white supremacy. Gender politics is another method used to maintain the system. There are many untouchables because we have accepted the doctrines of some of the intellectual classes’ prominent voices. Black men’s systematic oppression is one of those, the idea that all black men are aggressive, savages, sexual predators, incapable of being faithful, hypersexual, lazy, incapable of excelling academically. If a black man cry in pain, read rage. If he is depressed, read insane.
Very few take the time to research the origins of these ideas. For example, in the Caribbean, black slaves were not allowed to marry. The slave owners saw this as a way of preventing the slaves from creating family units. The family unit they believed was one of the nuclei for creating a community. Once you create a community, you increase the risks of collective action, in this case, an uprising against the system. One could argue…
