Read an Excerpt
ERASING RACISM
The Survival of the American Nation
By MOLEFI KETE ASANTE
Prometheus Books
Copyright © 2009 Molefi Kete Asante
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59102-765-2
Chapter One
THE TORTURED DREAM
Since September 11, 2001, there has been a general impression, maintained by media surveys, that the United States is more united than ever. People from every ethnic group, all social classes, and many religions were impacted by the spearing planes launched against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The national reaction, like that of the international community, was one of horror mixed with solidarity. There was cohesion in the national spirit that was marked by outpourings of assistance and expressions of the "national will." Yet clearly, unity around a common tragedy is not patriotism—nor is it as simple as it seems.
A reporter called me soon after the attack to ask if I would comment about the loyalty and true patriotism of the African American people. I told him that the common expression of horror and patriotism had little to do with each other. The terror that befell New York City; Washington, D.C.; and the Pennsylvania countryside did not trigger the loyalty of African Americans. Indeed, African Americans are not only patriotic but willing to defend their homeland against any external or internal threat.
There has never been a credible question about the willingness of African Americans to defend the interests of their country, even while being attacked by their fellow Americans. We have participated in every war against those defined as enemies of the nation, yet we have an abiding issue that sits at the table during every discussion of national unity. Justice, for the descendants of the millions of Africans enslaved during that terrible period of American history, has eluded our society, and discussion of it creates unusually harsh reactions from many Americans. The lingering effects of the enslavement are current and immediate in almost all sectors of American life: health, education, employment, housing, and law. Our patriotism as African Americans does not lessen our criticism of the way our nation has treated us.
The implementation of justice is the most difficult of all national tasks. How do you bring about real equality except, as the ancient Egyptian priests said, to do maat, justice? Through the numerous protests and calls for political and racial justice, we have seen how fully denial is entrenched in American society. Even before September 11, many Americans, black and white, knew that something more must be done.
I have always been convinced that the nation could resolve the remaining issues of injustice and advance society through a philosophy of fairness. African Americans are not a beggar people; we simply want the nation to confront its own history and do justice. Sitting in the Birmingham Church of the Advent, the Episcopal cathedral in Birmingham, Alabama, waiting to hear Archbishop Desmond Tutu deliver a message of hope for humanity on April 19, 2002, I noticed an anonymous African American man making his way to the front of the church. He was wearing a white T-shirt with the word "ERACISM" on the front and back. No more fitting message could have been brought by any speaker than that delivered by the young man who braved the large, mostly white audience to take his seat in the third pew. No orator could have spoken any more clearly about what the national mission ought to be at this time.
In his provocative book The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, Randall Robinson speaks eloquently about the crimes against Africans in America, stuttering only when he discusses payment for the debt. I believe that reparations can be paid in a variety of ways, which I will explain in this book. However, Robinson raises the issues that must be placed squarely before the American people if we are to truly come together in the spirit of unity: African Americans live inside a fog of accumulated abuses. Until we understand the nature of that fog we will never be able to resolve adequately our national crisis. From political elections to international conferences against racism, African Americans have a number of grievances that further add to centuries of abuse.
In the 2000 presidential contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore, the most startling allegations of abuse occurred among African American districts in Florida. Kwesi Mfume of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) charged that in Broward, Duval, Palm Beach, and Miami counties, African Americans were prevented from voting, blocked by police from going to the polls, given false information regarding their registration status, and had to contend with misplaced ballot boxes. To say the least, there was anger, outrage, and distrust within the African American community to a degree that had rarely been seen after a contemporary election. Many African Americans, among others, still believe that the 2000 election was stolen.
On a Philadelphia radio talk show the morning after the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the counting of ballots in Florida had to stop, black callers raised the question of a conspiracy. Some claimed that had a similar situation—where the brother of the presidential candidate was the governor of the province that would decide the election and the candidate's father had been a previous president as well as a former national intelligence director—occurred in another, less democratic country, there would be no question in the minds of the public that the election was stolen. Others opined that the majority of the justices had ties to the Bush camp, either having sons or relatives working in law firms supporting Bush or being beholden to former president George H.W. Bush for their judgeships.
The vilest and most severe criticism from the African American community was leveled at Justice Clarence Thomas, whom some callers thought appeared to be the proverbial Uncle Tom. Thomas's style of not asking any questions of the lawyers arguing in the Court angered some blacks, who believed that he was appointed by former president George H.W. Bush because he had no depth in the African American community and would support white, often racist, interests against his own people. The late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, they said, would not have sat on the bench without opening his mouth. Of course, Thomas, as always, voted with the conservative side in the 5-4 decision that gave the election to Bush.
* * *
In August 2001 the Bush administration refused to send Secretary of State Colin Powell, the highest African American official in the United States, to the United Nations Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa. This refusal by the Bush administration was a demonstration of the resiliency of anachronistic views in the American government. This was a childish reaction to the possibility of criticism of America's racial history. Furthermore, refusal to attend the conference suggested that the American government wanted no part in a meaningful discourse on racism. The official reason President George W. Bush refused to send Colin Powell to the conference was twofold: He feared the possibility that the conference would declare Zionism to be racism and that is would develop a resolution calling for reparations for the enslavement of Africans. To the majority of African Americans, however, the refusal to even take part in this conference was also a slap in the face.
The United States government did not initiate, promote, or profit from the Holocaust; it did initiate, promote, and profit from the enslavement of Africans. Furthermore, whether or not Zionism as practiced in Israel discriminates against Arabs in the same way that racism in the United States causes discrimination against blacks is a legitimate issue for a conference concerned with racial hierarchies. The refusal of the United States to show up was a troubling reminder to African Americans that victory has not yet been realized.
One cannot forget that the American delegation walked out of the conference just a few days before the attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. African Americans, always ready to defend the honor of their nation, rallied against the enemies of the state—the very state that just turned its back on issues critical to African Americans. The black community saw America's action as a tragic situation because Secretary of State Powell, the most visible African person in a leadership position in a Western nation, had been rendered speechless and invisible in the dispute in Durban. The United States, the nation that had gained the most from the enslavement of Africans and the one that had done the most to obliterate the disadvantages of that condition, refused to take leadership or to even meet in the same room as other world nations.
Add to this record of abuse, the refusal to discuss reparations for the enslavement of Africans, and the lack of a commitment to end racism, and one can see why anger still exists in the black community. I want to vividly depict the sustained brutality against African Americans in order to retrace the steps that may lead us to the fork in the road where our nation took a wrong turn.
* * *
This book will not be an essay on Patrick Dorismond, Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima, Rodney King, or scores of other black victims of police brutality and killings. This is also not an essay about blacks losing their minds and advocating attacks on whites out of some notion of vengeance. This is a story that is more than the periodic urban revolts that occur over police murders of African American men in city streets. This is more; this is about a dream that a dreamer named Martin Luther King Jr. once had. It is a human story that can be resolved only by humans engaging in the most open discussion about purpose and will.
On May 4, 1969, James Forman and his supporters interrupted a worship service at the well-known Riverside Church in New York City to present the "Black Manifesto" and a demand for $500 million in reparations to African Americans. Since that time, low-level discussions about reparations have been held in seminars, workshops, and churches. Books have been written detailing what the settlement should or should not be. Soon after the Black Manifesto was issued, Arnold Schuchter, in his book Reparations, assigned a leading role to the church, seeing it as a bastion of revolutionary activity. He was sadly mistaken about the role the Christian church would play in bringing about justice, for, like the rest of American society, the church has been afraid to confront the sin in its own soul of supporting slavery and discrimination for so long.
In more recent times, attorneys have filed suits against Aetna and other companies said to have profited from the enslavement of Africans. But this meaningful and well-intentioned movement must not lose sight of the healing that is necessary in the nation. It is so easy to slip into a mode of bitterness that leads us away from erasing racism. We must confront racism at its origins, defeat it in the American soul, and move toward a new beginning in national relations.
Reparations for enslavement and discrimination are critical issues. Yet discussions about reparations have not detracted from the countless seminars and workshops on race relations. There are many forums for talking about how we ought to live together in this society. Like a lot of people, I am exhausted by some of the discourses on race and racism in this country. I have been particularly offended by the sociological explanations of racism and the "do nothing" or "blame the victims" attitude that many of those analyses imply.
Racism often becomes somebody else's problem when it is really a national concern. What is often presented about American racism is a detached, sterile view of racial animosities in this society. I believe this is one reason Robinson's The Debt resonates so well with those who care about the future of America. It is not filled with invective, but with a sustained rage against a known evil. Unlike Cornel West's more celebrated book Race Matters, Robinson's work clearly identifies white racial domination in all sectors of society, including education, as the greatest obstacle to racial harmony. West, on the other hand, is memorable for his discourse on black nihilism.
* * *
The election of George W. Bush as the forty-third president of the United States is a watershed in the lives of African Americans, one way or another. It shattered the notion of fair play. It reopened the sores of segregation laws and the evils that surrounded voting in the South during the twentieth century when millions of African Americans were disenfranchised by racist policies. Despite the hype of the War on Terrorism and the subsequent rhetoric of the war on Iraq, historical criticism of the Bush administration will focus on the 2000 presidential election, which forced the nation to discuss how presidents are chosen, voting rights, and constitutional provisions for resolving election crises.
Clearly, the election, inter alia, showed the extent of the political disconnect between the African American and white populations in the United States. Furthermore, private investigations in Florida uncovered voting malfeasance reminiscent of the beginning of the 1900s, which resulted in voter disaffection. To write about race in America, one must write about power, force, custom, social will, law, and double vision. Indeed, the reality of our national injury can best be understood by referring to the Promise and the Wilderness, political and social metaphors current in American society. What is implied by Promise is an express assurance that something good is to be expected. What Wilderness implies is something difficult, perhaps unknown; a place where one does not know what to expect. Indeed, the Wilderness may reveal something beautiful—but it is equally possible for it to deliver something evil. A declaration that something will be given—for example, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—is the crux of the American Promise. The 2000 presidential election was one more piece in a long list of evidence that African Americans had not escaped the Wilderness.
A disproportionate number of blacks remain at the socioeconomic bottom of American society. This has nothing to do wtih intelligence, with industry, with the ability to perform a task, or with cultural values; the Wilderness experience is shaped preeminently by the economic deprivation caused by racial discrimination.
* * *
I am reminded of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, which was written during a period of rampant and uncontrolled capitalism, industrialization, and monopoly economics. Wells envisioned two groups of people living in some way-off century that held opposing views because of their experiences. In Wells's era-shaped imagination, the genteel Eloi were the descendants of the upper classes and the cannibalistic-Morlocks were the descendants of the lower classes. Whatever the meaning embedded in Wells's mind, what we have now is the legacy of this binary thinking as a part of the social and racial history of the Western world.
The entitlements of the Promise exist because of the structure of racism in American society, not because of any special talents or superior intelligence; it is merely the participation in the Eurocentric domination of other cultures that creates the entitlements. Indeed, those blacks, Asians, and Eastern and Southern Europeans—groups not normally thought of as white—may be "Promise people" if they accept ideas such as that whites are superior and blacks are inferior, that America is an Anglo-Germanic nation, and that Christianity is the religion of civilization. On the other hand, one is assigned to the Wilderness because of previous traditions of servitude, skin color, and, sometimes, political perspectives. Of course, one can also choose the Wilderness, but in doing so one is seeking identification with a social, cultural, or political reality. As in Wells's book, it is possible to highlight the duality in our society by stating clear definitions of the ongoing struggle. A chasm of misinformation exists between the two visions, the Promise and the Wilderness, and because it is too large to cross in casual conversation, the chasm often leads to racial hostilities. We have seen this in recent years with the debates about Jewish racism and black anti-Semitism. We have witnessed discussions about black-Korean relations or black-Cuban relations ad infinitum. Most often, however, this is the arena of black-white relations throughout the country.
The 2000 presidential election in Florida turned on the fact that the number of African Americans voting was at an all-time high and the attitude was one of revenge against George W. Bush's brother Gov. Jeb Bush, who had campaigned against affirmative action in a state with a known history of racial discrimination against blacks. The overwhelming burden of Florida's racial history, the competitiveness of the election between Al Gore and George W. Bush, and the African Americans' complaints about Jeb Bush's policies combined to mobilize the African American community as it had never been mobilized before. It is usual to think of two fundamental American conversations about race as the dispossession of the Native Americans and the historical mistreatment of Africans. All other discussions are derivatives.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from ERASING RACISM by MOLEFI KETE ASANTE Copyright © 2009 by Molefi Kete Asante. Excerpted by permission of Prometheus Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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