Redressing the Blight of Black Subjugation
How can you? How can you give a people back their pride? How can you address the fact that an entire people were thought of as lesser in value than their white counterparts to excuse the dreadful act of depriving them of their homelands, their history, their culture and language, their very identity? How to make amends for enslaving hundreds of thousands of people and in the process of transporting them to foreign locations sacrificing so many to ignominious death as worthless, uncared-for cargo? How to redress the balance sheet, to argue for forgiveness for the arrogance of one people against the other?Apologies can only go so far; they are mere words. They cannot correct or turn around what was done; the enslavement, the tearing apart of families, the forced concubinage, the enforced labour, the lack of humane protection under the law, the total consignment of a people to a secondary life of existence without dignity and honour, without hope, without a future. People of good will have, over the space of hundreds of years, attempted to assuage the fate of the enslaved, to rescue them when and where possible. Racial discrimination is a dreadful human construct, but only one of many, since humans have proven themselves capable of horribly egregious behaviour one against the other.
In primordial times there was a more direct response available to those victimized by others; physical revenge, resulting in ongoing group or tribal warfare. One's territory was always under siege as others sought to improve their survival rates by pirating the geographies, hunting grounds and primally-useful tools used by others. Mankind, we always like to believe, is still evolving socially, culturally; our values coalescing and informing us that we have a dutiable need as human beings to view one another as equally deserving of like opportunities for advancement. But we're notoriously slow learners, and many of us will never accept that others whose features and colour mark them as being unlike ourselves have equal value in the world, deserving of equal treatment.
Where once one group was in the ascendancy, another group prevails and becomes ascendant upon the other. Historical conquests and the absorption of conquered peoples into the mainstream of the conquerors over time; integration of myths, traditions, cultures and economies have served to dilute differences, none of which makes much difference to those who will recognize 'different' when they see it and reject it as inferior to their own brand of exceptionality in every human sphere. It seems that mankind is doomed forever more to repeat its errors; we're hard-wired by nature to resist the change that would have us accept one another. We're functionally incapable of moving beyond the imperative of survival where we resist the stranger and embrace the opportunity to take that which is his.
But the underdog has his day and his alienation from the larger society that still oppresses and discriminates has earned that society the underdog's undying resentment. While we have enacted laws to protect all members of society, regardless of ethnicity, ideology, gender, sexual orientation, historical nationality, religious affiliation, we are incapable of flushing the virus of hostility toward others out of our collective systems. It is as though people have an innate need to curry the emotions that make us inferior as beings by encouraging our feelings of superiority against that timeless 'other'.
So here we have the long-simmering and well-earned resentment of black populations within the larger white, Eurocentric populations that hold them and often hold them back, erupting into a triumphant reversal of racism. Where once the spectre of segregation that ensured blacks could not mingle as equals with whites, since struck down by a universal revulsion of ignorant racism, it is now being resurrected as a potential resource for people of colour, a self-declared and yearned-for positive step resulting in untrammelled Africentrism, a victory of black identity held apart from the larger white community.
In a country that celebrates itself as an outstanding success in social integration and acceptance of differences, the better to mingle cultures and instill understanding in one another, Canada now faces a growing call among the black community to equalize opportunities for blacks by social separation whereby privilege can be bestowed upon a sheltered community through the teaching of its own history, real or imagined, gravitating toward its own dignity, even if it demeans that of others, realizing its own values and historical triumphs, even if these are largely in the realm of fantasy. Like the child whose feelings have been injured, nursing a grievance, certain he doesn't belong in the family he lives with, that his true and loving parents are elsewhere and they would value his attributes.
Young people allied with Black Youth Taking Action convince themselves that they represent a maligned and sacrificed people whose true antecedents as the origins of civilization have never been recognized. "We are the original people", according to one spokesperson. And if she refers to the skull of Lucy thought to be one of the earliest discovered remnants of early man in Kenya, then she's certainly correct. But what she really meant is that she and all those others like her, so long suffering as symbols of white oppression, represent a historical group who invented every known philosophical, medical, scientific, agricultural advance known to mankind. A political project to give pride back to black youth resulting in a new fabled antiquity of original resources.
The fiery indignation against the insults of the past, the incendiary resentment against the de-humanizing of a people resulting in a debate low on the scale of rationality, high on the human emotions relating to sweet revenge, turning the tables on Euro-based centrality and superiority. Offering instead African firstness, mostness, the triumphalism of imagined exceptionality. So that, instead of a cohesive societal wholeness expressed in regret and acceptance, we have the resurgent appeal of separateness, the willing ghettoization of an understandably alienated community.
Cooler heads in that same community want nothing of the sort. While understanding the depths of the anger of the hot-headed youth in their community in rejecting new and more open attitudes in the larger society, they opt for a more inclusive and socially-conscious intermingling of resources and possibilities. The co-chair of Toronto District School Board's Africentric Advisory Committee, Vernon Farrell, characterized the Youth group's anger as misguided, along with their commitment to a vision of the historical superiority of blacks. "We have no interest whatsoever in replacing Eurocentrism with Africentrism, because that is to repeat the same malaise, only in a different colour and different ethos", he said.
"Pride is a construct of alienation. You can see where those kinds of reaches for validation push people into many corners, some of which are healthy and some of which are not, and that kind of reaching out, or searching or digging, has a lot to do with the feeling of alienation. If people are excluded, their selves are deconstructed. It's worse than marginalization. It is a destruction of the self, and we can't have that if we say we are educators." What a marvellous deconstruction of the impulse to avenge past atrocities, the need to raise oneself to heights through the benighted impulse to place the former oppressor in the position of their former victims.
While pride may well be a construct of alienation, alienation in its turn may result from overweening pride. The result will be no prospect of conciliation, just more apartness. Whose interest does that represent?
Labels: Human Fallibility, Justice, Realities
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, May 20, 2007
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