Racial Dialectics & Faith

First of a series of realisations on midwinter day.

I awoke recalling an argument that i had had with this racist guy at college. Many hours of argument had stripped away the facade of philosophy and revealed the simple atomic argument that blacks should leave the country. I was actually frightened at this raw display of bigotry and my adversary’s seeming satisfaction with what seemed to me a compound statement with no cohesion. Yes some people are black. Yes there is a country here on the British Isles. And yes some of the people on these Isles and in the country are black. But some people are white also. For him it was OK for white people to be here but not black but there was no actual argument to link skin colour to anything else. He needless to say was white. I’m not saying there are not important points in the immigration debate but this was a dead end. I walked away quite shaken at his blindness and my faith in the power of reason was severely dented.

So I awoke with an answer to him over 10 years late. It is an immanent approach. Let us take his position which is that black people should go home and let us perform this segregation. What occurred to me is that this implies that white people should not leave home. If you strengthen the location of people based on colour it works for all people who have colour. Blacks should go there and leave whites here, which means whites can’t go there. Whites segregate themselves at the same time! This is why dualism is a prison and why dialectics is the source of freedom. I would be fascinated to see if he liked the implication of his own caging?

Now Tamar (as he was called) would probably resent having his wings clipped and recall the power of the empire and our right to roam the planet. But the moment he resented it his position was internally broken. The practical implication of racism then is three sided. We would have to create reservations for those who wanted to be segregated, white and black. Everyone else who did not want segregation would live in the free lands outside the reservations. Is this what racists really want however?

That morning (22nd Dec) my faith in the universal power of dialectic was re-strengthened. There is a pure and entirely clear and powerful way of seeing the world free from any imperfection, lack of clarity or confusion. When we have this wisdom everything is straightforward and unvexing. All we imperfect mortals need is faith that such a solution exists, a light to guide us through the misty worlds of twilight that characterise our imperfect lives. I had lost faith that there was a solution to the problem of “my muse” amongst other things – now I know there is to this and every other problem that we are faced. We may see things in such a way that there seems no way out, that we are doomed and will perish – but actually such a view is simple ignorance. Nothing in reality is a problem except the lack of clarity and wisdom required to see through it. This led to other realisation that day.