The White Problem

[Tyehimba]

The White Problem
by Chris Brazier

So often ‘the race problem’ is seen as black people’s fault. But they didn’t create racism – and they certainly don’t benefit from it. Chris Brazier argues that white people should now accept that they are the problem.

I once interviewed Bob Marley. My editor’s idea was to send someone who wasn’t a fan, who wouldn’t write in hushed tones about the latest insights of the man who put Third World music on the popular map. And I obliged with a piece that poured incredulous scorn on Marley’s head for his faith in Rastafarianism and even slightly ridiculed the way he talked - he was spicing his speech with Jamaican patois and I found it quite difficult to understand. The editor loved it, naturally -- but it was shot through with racism. Yet at the time I would have considered myself a passionate opponent of racism, campaigning against it both in print and on the streets.

There’s nothing unusual in this - white people often think they’re ‘against’ racism without understanding it or their own contribution to it. And this issue of the New Internationalist may well be making the same mistake, hard though we may try to avoid it. It is an issue written by white people for white people - none of the contributors is black. This is not to deny the black perspective - on the contrary, black voices should be heard and acknowledged much more than they are now. But this magazine is a conscious attempt to acknowledge that racism is a white problem - our problem, and I apologise here to any black readers for addressing the magazine throughout to the white people who make up virtually all of the New Internationalist’s subscribers.

We tend to think of racism as something perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan or the National Front - by ’another kind of person’. crop-headed, red-necked and aggressive in their pathetic notions of white superiority. That’s a very comfortable view. Certainly no one should play down the pernicious effects of the extreme Right. But it is not the small fascist organizations which cause black people to die 20 years earlier than whites in Australia; which leave them twice as likely to be unemployed in Britain; which make their income two-thirds that of whites in Canada. The racism that does this damage, that hems black people in on all sides, is woven into the fabric of our societies. And if we are silent about this we are condoning it. It’s time we woke up to what racism really means.

For a start there is no such thing as a ‘race’. The human family. is not split up into different, self-contained racial types - caucasian, mongoloid and negroid. That was a piece of pseudo-scientific racism which helped whites to persuade themselves that black people were fundamentally different.

Racism is discrimination based neither on ethnic type nor geographical origin but on colour. This makes it, along with sex, the most basic form of discrimination because it is so immediately visible. As one college lecturer put it: ‘inside the college I am respected as a teacher, recognised for my individual qualities and responsibilities. But as soon as I walk out to the bus stop I’m just another wog, just another coon.’ And throughout this magazine the word ‘black’ is used to refer to any non-white group, whether it be Africans in Britain, native Indians in Canada or Vietnamese in Australia - ‘black’ has become a political term rather than a description of skin colour.

In the second place, racism is not the same as ‘racial prejudice’. People have always had wild ideas about other humans who looked and talked differently. As long ago as AD70 the Roman writer Pliny the Elder was retailing weird and wonderful tales about Ethiopians with no noses and other Africans with eyes in the middle of their foreheads or mouths in their breasts. Prejudice emerges out of ignorance, and it thrived in a geographically isolated place like seventeenth-century England, which had no real contact with black people. But racial prejudice on its own shouldn’t have lasted any longer than other irrational oral traditions and should have been dispelled by more frequent contact with Africans. Racism, on the other hand, which wove those prejudices into a pseudo-science, has been going strong for 200 years and is still a ruling force in a world of mass communications, where geographical isolation is now almost impossible.

Racism came into being in eighteenth-century Britain because it was economically useful. The first merchants who entered the slave trade weren’t doing so because they were prejudiced against Africans - they did it to make money. But once that foundation of economic profit had been laid it became very useful to think of black people as inferior, as not altogether human. So all those ignorant rumours about black people’s savagery and stupidity coagulated into a set of beliefs, an ideology that justified slavery and, later on, colonial empires. As the historian Peter Fryer has written, in his important book Staying Power: ‘Racism is to race prejudice as dogma is to superstition ... The primary functions of race prejudice are cultural and psychological. The primary functions of racism are economic and political.’

Just as racism was born out of slavery, so it was the cornerstone of colonial expansion. Fundamental to British imperialism was the notion that it was a noble cause, that white supremacy was synonymous with human progress. And once Darwin’s ideas about evolution had been published they were seen as proof of the scientific truth of racism - white people had evolved to the highest, even the ideal, state. Black people had to be oppressed or even destroyed for humanity to ~ stride onward into the ever-brighter, ever-whiter future. This was also the idea that ~ American settlers had about native Indians - extermination was nature’s way of making room for a higher race. And it was the same idea that justified the genocide of aboriginal people in Tasmania. Charles Kingsley, revered Victorian author of Westward Ho! and The Water Babies, wrote that ‘the welfare of the Teutonic (white) race is the welfare of the world’ while ‘degenerate races’ were better off dead. ‘Prove that it is human life,’ he wrote. ‘It is beast- life.’ He was rewarded for his views by being made chaplain to Queen Victoria and professor of modern history at Cambridge.

Nor was he the only racist among the great British philosophers and writers - Locke, Hume and Carlyle all insisted that black people were inferior, while Dickens, Arnold, Tennyson, Ruskin and Trollope banded together to defend Governor Eyre of Jamaica. Eyre had taken revenge after a slave rebellion by killing 439 black people, flogging 600 others and burning 1000 homes. Dickens and the others claimed Eyre as the saviour of the West Indies and campaigned to get him a seat in the House of Lords.

I mention this not so that we can pat ourselves on the back and think how far we’ve progressed since those grim Victorian days but rather to give some idea of how deeply racism is ingrained in our culture. We still call these men geniuses, acclaim their insights into the human condition. Yet they were thorough-going racists who justified murder.

Like them, we are racist because we benefit economically from being so. Racism has always been at the service of economic exploitation. When Britain needed all the labour it could get to start anew after World War Two, Tory minister Enoch Powell invited thousands of black people over from the Caribbean colonies. Yet as soon as there was no longer any economic need for their labour he became the country’s most famous racist, campaigning for ‘repatriation’. And far from being dismissed his ideas have become common currency - immigration restrictions have become so accepted that they have ceased to be a debateable issue. The question is no longer ‘should we keep black people out?’ but rather ‘how many black people should we keep out?’ And repatriation is no longer just the daydream of the far Right - it is already in action in West Germany and France, in the latter under a government supposedly of the Left.

Racism always becomes more virulent when times are hard - in declining inner city areas when jobs become scarce and money tight, frustration is vented on the most available scapegoats, the black population. My next-door neighbours in London, people of Indian origin from Mauritius, never answer the door unless there is a man in the house. Their fear of attack, their sense of being under siege, is permanent and all-pervasive - and it is a story being repeated in all the West’s cities.

Accepting that racism is our responsibility means dispensing with the old idea that ‘the race problem’ is black people’s refusal to assimilate’ or ‘integrate’. According to this notion, black people should do all they can to fit in, accept white values and not cause the status quo any trouble. But integration with a white majority that holds all the economic and institutional power can only be on white terms. And how can a black person be expected to take on the attitudes of a white society which believes that she is inferior?

Too many people still believe in assimilation, but it has at least been discredited in liberal circles. What has succeeded it is ‘multiculturalism’, the belief that the way to combat racism is to acknowledge the traditions of the black community, to offer them pride in their cultural heritage. In Australia, for instance, there has been a burgeoning interest in traditional aboriginal rituals, a readiness to accept that these shouldn’t be squashed by the juggernaut of European culture.

But this isn’t enough. If ‘racial prejudice’ still existed in isolation then this kind of approach might work wonders. But stopping the offence to black people’s dignity is not going to reduce the material damage done to their lives. Only political and economic change can do that. And anti-racism is an unashamedly political cause which seeks that change.

Later in this issue we offer a few suggestions for anti-racist action. This doesn’t just mean challenging ourselves and the other people we meet - it also involves doing all we can to change the places where we work or have some power. And that means putting forward practical proposals for advancing the black cause, not just pious acceptance of the principle of ’equal opportunities’. Simply getting more black people into positions of power, whether in your workplace or in your political party, will make some difference.

To be genuinely anti-racist we have to take action ourselves - but we must also understand that it is necessary for black people to organise themselves independently. White people often find this hard to accept - and the British Labour Party is a classic current example. There has never been a black Labour Member of Parliament, and the Party’s record on immigration is appalling.

Frustrated by this impasse, black people are now agitating for their own section within the Party, and for politicians in some areas to stand down in favour of black candidates. It is not such an extraordinary demand - black caucuses are an accepted fact of American political life, for instance. Yet all the usual conservative arguments are wheeled out - the same ones put by those same white men to women. ‘You should work for change from within’. ‘You’ll create a ghetto for yourselves’. The reality is that black protest at the moment can be contained, whereas change would threaten people’s power. People with power never change unless pressurised into it - divine light will not descend from heaven to change their minds. Separate black organisations provide that pressure. I am only writing this now. I only care enough about it because of the way black people have challenged racism.

In short, we have to make racism matter to us, to put it much farther up our personal agendas, instead of just thinking ‘I’m against it’ and doing nothing. The cause of anti-racism is not just the cause of the black minorities in our own countries or of the black majority in South Africa; it is the cause of the millions in Africa, Asia and Latin America still suffering from the legacy of the exploitation that produced our wealth as well as our racism. It’s up to us. Not to fly down from the sky in our chariot, making things right, reaching out our hands to the poor, helpless blacks - that’s just the other, paternalist side of the same old racist coin. But to listen to what black people have to say, to respond to their initiatives and to work with them for social change.

The great Trinidadian writer C.L.R. James once said ‘The blacks will know as friends only those whites who are fighting in the ranks beside them. And whites will be there’. We have yet to prove him right.

original link: http://www.newint.org/issue145/keynote.htm

[Oshun_Auset]

Good post, great article...I like NI (it's good to know others are aware of it)... European poeple like this give me hope...

[PatriotWarrior]

Stella Orakwue writing in NEW AFRICAN, Aug./Sept. 2003:

THE PROBLEM OF THE 21st CENTURY:

One hundred years ago, W.E.B Du Bois wrote: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour-line ...” There is no better tribute one can pay to the sheer brilliance of his mind, as clear as mineral water, than to read Du Bois’s beautifully written collection of essays, in this their 100th anniversary year. Much is distressing because much is, a hundred years on, still so achingly true, relevant and necessary. …

What is “Freedom”? I have no idea anymore and would like somebody to enlighten me. I know what freedoms are, but not what Freedom is. It seems, somehow, a word so debased now.

Does it mean the same as “Liberty”? Moreover, “Freedom” to do what? To make lots of money? That appears to be a recurring theme. Is “Freedom” capitalism? Free at last, thank the Lord, to be capitalist(?)!

Free to be good and greedy consumers for consumption-crazed countries. People are ill with consumption. Free to consume liberally so that Western economies don’t dip into their dreaded deflation. What’s so bad about deflation? Deflated economies are good enough for Africans but, clearly, “European standards” deserve much more. Most Africans feel like they spend their entire lives living in a recession, anyway – wherever they are! A globally deflated underclass!

Is it “freedom” to inveigle your way to more money than you could possibly use in your own lifetime? More money than 10, 20, 50+ lifetimes added together. All for me. Multiple millions stashed away to make individual lives bearable. Greed is still good. The impoverished can go hang!

Many countries put up statues to honour those who fought wars to protect their nation-state. Europe’s capitals are crammed with them. Today,  as I walk past these monuments, I can’t help thinking: Will these people’s descendants want to die today to protect the financial markets? Will the future bring forth sculptures  of those who willingly and knowingly died to shield the market states? In the name of “Freedom”.

“There are, today, no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there is no true American music but the wild, sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folklore are Indian and African; and, all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness,” writes William Edward Burghardt Du Bois in The Souls Of Black Folk. There is no better tribute one can pay to the sheer brilliance of his mind, as clear as mineral water, than to read Du Bois’s beautifully written collection of essays in this their 100th anniversary year. Much is distressing because much is, a hundred years on, still so achingly true, relevant and necessary.

Events dictate the difficult choice of which chapter. Here are passages from Of The Dawn Of Freedom. It begins with probably the most arresting opening sentence in the African literary canon. You need make only one alteration: …

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour-line: the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in the Americas and the islands of the sea.

“The war has naught to do with slaves, cried Congress, the President and the Nation; and yet no sooner had the armies, East and West, penetrated Virginia and Tennessee than fugitive slaves appeared within their lines.

“They came at night, when the flickering camp-fires shone like vast, unsteady stars along the black horizon: old men and thin, with grey and tufted hair; women, with frightened eyes, dragging whimpering hungry children; men and girls, stalwart and gaunt -- a horde of starving vagabonds, homeless, helpless and pitiable in their dark distress.

“Then the long-headed man with care-chiselled face, who sat in the White House, saw the inevitable and emancipated the slaves of rebels on New Year’s, 1863. A month later, Congress called earnestly for the Negro soldiers whom the Act of July 1862 had half-grudgingly allowed to enlist. Thus the barriers were levelled and the deed was done. The stream of fugitives swelled to a flood, and anxious army officers kept inquiring: ‘What must be done with slaves, arriving almost daily? Are we to find food and shelter for women and children?’

“It is doubly difficult to write of this period calmly, so intense was the feeling, so mighty the human passions that swayed and blinded men. Amid it all, two figures ever stand to typify that day to coming ages: the one, a grey-haired gentleman, whose fathers had quit themselves like men, whose sons lay in nameless graves; who bowed to the evil of slavery because its abolition threatened untold ill to all; who stood at last, in the evening of life, a blighted, ruined form, with hate in his eyes.

“And the other, a form hovering dark and mother-like, her awful face black with the mists of centuries, had aforetime quailed at the white master’s command, had bent in love over the cradles of his sons and daughters, and closed in death the sunken eyes of his wife – aye, too, at his behest had laid herself low to lust, and borne a tawny man-child to the world, only to see her dark boy’s limbs scattered to the winds by midnight marauders riding after ‘cursed Niggers’.

“These were the saddest sights of that woeful day; and no man clasped the hands of these two passing figures of the present-past; but, hating, they went to their long home and, hating, their children’s children and the children of these children, live today.

“It had long been the more or less definitely expressed theory of the North that all the chief problems of Emancipation might be settled by establishing the slaves on the forfeited lands of their masters – a sort of poetic justice, said some.

“But the vision of ‘forty acres and a mule’ – the righteous and reasonable ambition to become a landowner, which the nation had all but categorically promised the freedmen – was destined in most cases to bitter disappointment. And those men of marvellous hindsight who are today seeking to preach the Negro back to the present peonage of the soil know well, or ought to know, that the opportunity of binding the Negro peasant willingly to the soil was lost on that day when the Commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau had to go to South Carolina and tell the weeping freedmen, after their years of toil, that their land was not theirs, that there was a mistake – somewhere.

“The opposition to Negro education in the South was at first bitter, and showed itself in ashes, in insult and blood; for the South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Nigger! And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know.

“Almost every law and method ingenuity could devise was employed by the legislatures to reduce the Negroes to serfdom – to make them the slaves of the State, if not of individual owners; while the Bureau officials too often were found striving to put the ‘bottom rail on top’, and give the freedmen a power and independence which they could not yet use.

“It is all well enough for us of another generation to wax wise with advice to those who bore the burden in the heat of the day. It is full easy now to see that the man who lost home, fortune and family at a stroke, and saw his land ruled by ‘mules and niggers’, was really benefited by the passing of slavery.

“It is not difficult now to say to the young freedman, cheated and cuffed about, who has seen his father’s head beaten to a jelly and his own mother namelessly assaulted, that the meek shall inherit the earth. The passing of a great human institution before its work is done, like the untimely passing of a single soul, but leaves a legacy of striving for other men. The legacy of the Freedmen’s Bureau is the heavy heritage of this generation. Today, when new and vaster problems are destined to strain every fibre of the national mind and soul, would it not be well to count this legacy honestly and carefully?

“For this much, all men know: despite compromise, war and struggle, the Negro is not free. In the backwoods of the Gulf States, for miles and miles, he may not leave the plantation of his birth; in well-nigh the whole rural South, the black farmers are peons, bound by law and custom to an economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the penitentiary.

“In the most cultured sections and cities of the South, the Negroes are a segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges. Before the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a different and peculiar basis. Taxation without representation is the rule of their political life. And the result of all this is, and in nature must have been, lawlessness and crime.

“That is the large legacy of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the work it did not do because it could not do it. I have seen a land right merry with the sun, where children sing, and rolling hills lie like passioned women wanton with harvest. And there, in the King’s Highway, sat and sits a figure veiled and bowed, by which the traveller’s footsteps hasten as they go. On the tainted air broods fear. Three centuries’ thought has been the raising and unveiling of that bowed human heart, and now, behold, a century new for the duty and the deed.

“[The problem of the {twenty-first} century is the problem of the colour-line].”

-- W.E.B Du Bois (1903).

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[emmanuel]

QUESTION

This hate and confusion in the world... past and presently
rampant... like A.I.D.S....is this not aimed specifically at black people...and generally at peoples of colour...are the so called JEWS...not just secretly confusing the world at their attempt for world DOMINATION ....are the original JEWS not BLACK HEBREWS???.....These are just questions...has anyone an opinion on this topic???...or is this untouchable???...

[gman]

I think people must distinguish the rabid right-wing Zionists from the rest of the so-called jews. Zionists have made a pretty good effort to hijack the Jewish religion so that Judaism seems to equal Zionism, but that's not really the case. There are still a fair number of white and brown (ashkenzai and sephardic) socalled jews, including some religious ones like certain Orthodox sects, who oppose Zionism.
Zionism was always primarily a political ideology, and the people who came up with it always had some pretty strange bedfellows, some of them tried to negotiate with the nazis while urging the masses of jews not to resist the nazis. So now we see them in bed with the Bush family, old cronies of the nazis, and we see them behaving pretty much just like the nazis towards the palestinian people.
I don't think the white socalled jews in particular 'run the world' though. A small group of extremely wealthy white people pretty much run the world but I don't think they're exclusively or predominantly 'jewish'. What the Zionists do have is a symbiotic relationship with the USA, the most powerful single nation on the planet right now, due to Israel's strategic location. The US and Israel need each other but unlike a lot of other client states of the US, Israel realizes that its strategic importance is so great that they can dictate policy to the US as much as the US dictates policy to them.
And yes there's a lot of rich and influential 'jews' in the world, but then there's also a lot of rich and influential anglo-saxons, Japanese and Arabs.
As for who is the original Jews, I don't know that anyone's proved it one way or another, but the Beta Israel and the Lemba people of South Africa give an indication that at least some of the original jews were Black-skinned Africans. Also Yeshua was a jew and there's evidence that he was Black-skinned. (The original jews could have been a multi-racial people too; I know one theory states that the jews really originated from Khemet, their monotheism being influenced by Akhneton, and Khemet was what we would call today a 'multi-racial' society, with black, brown and reddish people from many different backgrounds, remember Khemet was like New York in those times, everyone from everywhere came there). Personally I think that the Black-skinned Jews like the Beta Isreal, and the brown-skinned Jews like the sephardim (the ones who look just like the Palestinians that many of them despise), are more like the original jews, while the ashkenazi light-skinned jews are really descendants of the Khazar people as theorized by Arthur Koestler (an ashkenazi himself).
Well that's just my opinion, but to me it doesn't matter that much, cos I don't think the Jews whether Black, brown or white, are any more the 'chosen people' than anyone else, and I doubt I could trace my ancestry back to them, most likely my ancestors were Igbo or Yoruba or Akan, and I'm proud enough of that without thinking of myself as a Black Hebrew or anything.
An old girlfriend of mine was into this Black Hebrew thing for a while (not the ones in New York with the funny costumes, this was some little local group in Ohio with a woman rabbi). I went to one of their services, and it seemed mainly to be a way for a bunch of poor Black people, mostly women and mostly former christians, to forget their troubles and feel good about themselves for a minute. The Rabbi would talk about how in the times to come Black Hebrews would be "the ruling class" and white people would have to serve them hand and foot, you could see how good that made these women feel who had spent their lives scrubbing floors for white folks. But feel-good mythology doesn't make a revolution as I see it.
Well sorry for running off at the mouth a little bit there... just my 2 or 3 cents... respect