Whites are the Problem

There is a mural in Reading which grabbed my attention a few years ago. The quote is given as from Malcolm X:

Until the Black Race
Uses its own Talent,
Takes Pride in its own History,
Expressed its own Culture,
Affirms its own Statehood;
It can never fulfil itself.

Unfortunately this talk is exactly the same talk that ever led “Blacks” to see themselves as abused. Malcolm X is expressing exactly the same views as his enemy; indeed he has become his enemy as is always the fate with those who fight.

My point to Malcolm X would be “but I don’t see any Black Race, I don’t see any White Race, I don’t even see any Race.” I don’t see any necessary solidarity between any two people based upon anything; be that colour, custom, belief, hobbies, hair type, shoe size etc. If I told you that someone had a black skin colour would you say that they were more or less likely to steal from someone with a black skin type? According to Malcolm X somehow there is a magical solidarity which makes people with a black skin type stick together. Are we supposed to believe that there is a solidarity based on this skin colour? In reality there is no such connection. A black skinned person is just as likely to steal from a black skinned person as from a white skinned person, and a white skinned person is just as likely to steal from a black skinned person as from a white skinned person: and while there may be a statistical differences there is no law that says skin colour defines anything. Theft in Africa is not reduced because everyone is black and shares some solidarity, anymore than theft in England is reduced because everyone is white skinned.

Amazingly Malcolm X was using the same absurd basis for his “cult” of the black person as the whites used for their various absurd racist cults. It was not solving anything but simply rebranding the problem in a black version. It is to be understood why he did this of course – the consciousness of people being brought up in a society that marginalises them for some irrelevant reason is obviously going to get distorted by that discrimination. But then I’ve experienced discrimination from jobs and colleges because I have refused to do what they wanted – naturally my mind is distorted by this but I don’t embrace that quality and seek to reverse the discrimination. I just see the arbitrariness of it all. I mean Africans have got to realise that they were brought to America as slaves to build the new world. Right or wrong this is not a good place to be. But no reason to feel embittered, this wasn’t the first time or the last time this has happened. All human beings use slavery every day to get things done (in sweat shops in the East or with cleaners and house maids all round the world, or even with wives in most parts of the world). Blacks enslave blacks just as much as whites. It is not a colour thing, it is a human thing. Throw a rock in the air you will hit someone guilty. That the European American colonists came to see themselves as “white” and destroyed everyone who was not considered “one of them” seems to have been a feature of the colonisation as the invaders struggled for an “identity” and a proof to justify the crime they were committing (that was the crime of “property” which must have looked odd as people walked into the East and stole everything they could find). White Americans still struggle for an identity in the World as they run like teenagers from the parental home of Europe. Although today is St Patricks day and I see that Google has a St Patricks themed logo as though St Patrick has anything to do with America? But a lot of Americans are finding identity by tracing lineage to Ireland and Scotland (after William Wallace was sanitised by the film). Interesting to see if they do a St George Day on the 24rd April, or a St David’s day. African Americans are doing the same seeking lineages to Africa. So the world that Malcolm X tried to understand is a complex world but it certainly has nothing to do with skin colour.

I wonder where the world has really got to on this issue. The day it is solved is the day when everyone has simply forgotten this idiocy and can’t remember what they were ever supposed to be solving.

While here: that is another thing that I find annoying about people especially ethnic minorities is this assumed, undiscussed notion of “identity”. Apparently psychologically we need some identity. Yet a moments investigation of the trash that we identify with shows it up as nonsense. I may identify with some music, my parents, my country, my football team, my career, my house and address, my home town, my favourite colour, my skin colour, my religion, my eye colour, my hair colour, my sexual preferences, my race, my culture, my favourite food, some clothes etc etc etc etc etc etc ad nauseam. People from minorities talk about “identity” as though it was some solid definite thing which they carried over in slave ships or aeroplanes. Worse the “British” have been asking what their identity is too. Well my word to all of them is join a football team and get this identity thing out of our blood stream in the stands every Saturday afternoon. Any sense of identity is morphous and changes with the wind so don’t take it so seriously…and no we don’t need identity for psychological well being – Identity is isomorphic with “membership” and that I have discussed many times prior to this entry. Everyone has the same parents (apes in Africa), lives on the same planet, eats the same nitrohydrocarbons and worships the same God (be that God in the form of money, Yahweh, Allah, Krishna, Science, Atheism as nauseam) – how do I know the last bit so certainly?

Assuming that people do not believe in things which are factually at fault then there are no phenomenal reasons to disagree with any one. Given that all appearances are to be accepted, the only argument then is whether they have a deeper explanation. Whatever anyone cites as an explanation of a phenomenon I will suggest has an even deeper explanation still ad infinitum. That infinite infinite, a la Cantor, is essentially God. Anyone who claims to follow the True God, who thinks they know the identity of their God, is a self-deluded fool who has simply chartered and boarded a new slave ship.

p.s. sorry for the inflammatory title I couldn’t resist it.