Coping with our problems
Part two
The rate at which we are experiencing untimely deaths … added to the premature “natural” deaths and then we include the normal death rate, we are talking about an inordinate amount of mortality.
In addition to all this our birth rates have dropped noticeably over the past two decades. If these multiple trends continue unabated into the future, we are surely facing possible extinction before the end of the 23rd century. Then again, in this scenario, rather than describe our projected demise as extinction … we might more correctly call it … self- inflicted genocide.
At this point in time, our position is by no means hopeless. We can deal with this very real crisis if we are willing to honestly and earnestly question our basic philosophy on life. Or at least question the philosophy that we have allowed to be imposed on us over the past four and a half centuries. It was during this interval of the last three or four centuries that we were forcibly as well as subtly indoctrinated to think like Europeans. As a people … as Black people … we’ve spent the past four and a half centuries deifying and mimicking Europeans and European customs and principles. We did this while simultaneously vilifying and rejecting African peoples and African customs.
These attitudes on our part were incisively and accurately catalogued in a book entitled ”TOM_TOM” by John W. Vandercook, way back in 1926. He wrote as follows: Quote: “The four centuries during which the white race preserved its conquest of the people of Africa were ample time for the imposition of an ideal. That ideal… the gigantic, cruel absurdity that the white race is, through some weird miracle of pigmentation and force, the supreme, heaven-wrought master of the universe still survives. Tragically, the Negro has accepted the truth of what was originally nothing more than opportunist hypocrisy, with the quiet, passive, eternally waiting fatalism of his race. Most conspicuous is the devoted acceptance of Christianity by the American Negro. In Western theology, God is white, Christ is white, and the Church is white. Yet the ‘free” Black has swallowed this bait, hook, line, and sinker. The negro worships the white god as unhesitatingly as four hundred years or force utter weariness have taught him to worship the white state, white manners, white clothes, customs, legends, brutalities, inventions, and material accomplishments. To my mind, there is no hope for the modern Negro in the way he is now vainly going. Slavery lasted too long and ended too suddenly for the whites to ever forget and forgive enough to allow the Black people into our sancta. Our state, our civilization is our own for we made it. It is fair as things in this impartial world can be fair, that we should keep it, use it for ourselves, and shut the outcasts that we made away from it. A race is like a man, until he uses its own talents, takes pride in its own history, and loves its own memories, it can never fulfill itself completely.”
These are the observations of a white Christian. He was a journalist as well a broadcaster for the NBC Radio News Network. He authored several other books about Blacks in the African diaspora. His observations of Blacks as being worshipful wannabees is even truer today than it was when he wrote the book 87 years ago … and that is really a sad, sad commentary on the mental condition of our people.
It’s easy to see that there are many times more white wannabees among us than there were 87 years ago. All one has to do is observe the multiplicity of Black “blonds” that exist in the Black community. There seems to be more “blonds” in the Black community than there are in the white community. At the very least it shows a considerable lack of pride in our own ethnicity and a significant longing to belong to another race. It’s as if we’re saying or implying that white people were made in the image of God and Black people were not made in God’s image. Consequently we need to alter our appearance so that we can look more like the white image.
In order to put this situation in the best perspective, consider this: HOW OFTEN DO YOU SEE CHINESE WOMEN WITH BLOND HAIR?
The purpose of this article and the ones that will appear in the coming weeks is to evoke meaningful thoughts, dialogue and interaction within the Black community. To that end, we encourage your comments and response. Hopefully, an outgrowth of these articles will be the establishment of an AFRO-CENTRIC FORUM. These forums will be conducted throughout the South Florida area, via the town hall format. The purpose is to sensitize, galvanize, and educate the community to the need for Black awareness and afro-centric prospective. THIS IS NOT A CALL TO THOSE WHO HATE WHITES … but rather a call to brothers and sisters of African
descent… THAT HAVE A LOVE AND CONCERN FOR THE FUTURE OF OUR PEOPLE.
Please direct all responses to: khahma@gmail.com Developed and disseminated by: The African Diaspora Think Tank. An incorporated not-for-profit 501 3 (c) entity
