With the election of Donald Trump and the advent of "fake news" and "alternative facts", I thought in honour of Black History Month, the best thing I can do is point out what a catastrophic failure it's been. Sad!
Clearly, progress based on the false gods of tokenism and "tolerance" is no progress.
I hold Black History Month as exhibit A.
Do you know what the face of White Supremacy looks like? Usually when you hear that term, you think of somebody like this:
When in reality, THIS is the face of White Supremacy:
Shocked? Don’t be. That’s been the problem all along and it’s exactly why in 2017, you have Donald Trump, who ran for President of the United States Of America on a platform lacking in ANY sort of detail and nuance other than the ones aimed squarely at magnifying and playing to White people's fears and prejudices...and won.
His victory didn't make sense unless you analyzed it through the lens of White Supremacy.
At it's core, White Supremacy is an ideology. Nothing more and nothing less. Anyone can embrace an ideology. Anyone can adopt an idea. White Supremacy is a basic, underlying core belief and positioning in society in the “rightness” of “whiteness” and the wrongness of everything else, with Blackness being it's polar opposite.
Race is a social construct. Don’t believe me? Ask the Irish, Jews, Italians and Slavs who all at one point or another were not considered “White”.
Don’t believe me? Ask the Caucasians living in modern day Russia who are the targets of racists attacks by neo-nazi Slavs. The same Slavs that Hitler considered "sub-human".
(Sound familiar?)
Don't believe your lying eyes. Human bio-diversity is a genetic fact.
“Race” isn’t.
Darwin’s evolutionary dissertations were hijacked by Capitalists seeking a moral justification for treating other human beings like livestock and they found it in White Supremacist ideology.
It is an idea empowered not on it’s own truths and strengths, but by violence, lies, coded words and dismissed concerns.
It has no strength other than in its ability to hide, divide and marginalize…which brings me to Black History Month.
I personally hate it. It’s useless and akin to putting a band aid on a cancerous tumor. Don’t believe me? Ask these college educated Jeopardy contestants:
That’s not photoshop. That actually happened.
I often asked myself, what is the purpose of Black History Month? To build pride in Black people for Black accomplishments and to educate others about great accomplishments of Black people?
It’s clearly failed in both aspects when you have a Billion dollar industry based on Black people calling and treating each others like Brothas and encouraging people to sing along to the former, which reinforces their proclivity to treat them like the latter.
The popularity of degenerate “gangsta” rap / ratchet culture is a by-product of White Supremacy. Why? 70% of the people that spend money on hip-hop and it’s products are White and thanks to White Supremacy, White people are very comfortable seeing Black people acting like this:
But not like this:
This isn’t because “White people” are evil. It’s because they are human. And human brains are wired to see things a certain way, once it’s EXPECTED to be a certain way.
It’s because record companies, being profit driven, Capitalist entities followed the most profitable version of hip hop. Not the pro-African, conscious, funny, happy hip hop…but violent, misogynistic, under-class Hip-Hop.
And then our children are murdered because they are “scared” of that “Thug” image, which they project and some of us embrace.
This is White Supremacy at work. Legendary Black intellectual W.E.B Dubois warned us all about this almost 90 years ago:
"The land that disfranchises its citizens and calls itself a democracy lies and knows it lies. IT ENCOURAGES IGNORANCE. It has never really tried to educate the Negro. A dominant minority does not want Negroes educated. It wants servants, dogs, whores and monkeys. And when this land allows a reactionary group by its stolen political power to force as many black folk into these categories as it possibly can, it cries in contemptible hypocrisy: "They threaten us with degeneracy; they cannot be educated.”
Black History Month has clearly failed when you have “Black” people who would rather be called “Nigga” than AFRICAN.
It’s clearly failed, when the cognitive dissonance needed to find George Zimmerman “not guilty” and Michael Dunn “we don’t know” is defended ad nauseum by otherwise seemingly good people.
It’s clearly failed when on the SAME DAY a bloody, 10 man hockey brawl that literally started the SECOND the puck was dropped
is overshadowed for days by an emotional Black guy screaming in a camera at the end of a big game.
Black History Month has failed miserably because it doesn’t address the issue, the root cause of all this: the false ideology of White Supremacy.
It’s clearly failed because in my opinion it is the most egregious example of a coward's bargain.
White Supremacy has managed to hide behind the mask of “extremism”, but it’s not extremist except in it’s most vile forms. It’s very ordinary and manifests itself in everyday thoughts and actions.
White Supremacy has created a binary world, where “the banality of evil” is commonplace.
White Supremacy is an idea, backed by political policies. It is an idea backed by lies. It is an idea backed by whispered comments, whispered jokes and fundamental beliefs in our differences that simply don't exist.
White Supremacy victimizes us all.
It robs us of our ability to love who we want because of someone’s fears that our children will no longer “look like us”.
(She looks just like her mom if you ask me)
It robs our economies of trillions of dollars and our countries of the ability to reach our true economic potential.
It robs us of our natural right to feel empathy for our fellow man, by turning that human empathy into the pejorative term, “white guilt”.
White Supremacy is a lie told by our eyes and backed by mis-education. White Supremacy is a worldwide system of disinformation that's told in books and preached in pulpits.
("You wanna marry a Black man, you girls, don't ask me to do it. I cannot do it with a conscience towards God".)
White Supremacy is a lie and the only way to defeat that lie is to tell the truth.
Black History Month does not do that.
It’s very name reinforces the binary paradigm that White Supremacy needs to survive and thrive.
It ghettoizes true learning and understanding, by making history someone else’s history, the horrors of the past, someone horror and the trials of today’s someone else’s problem.
“Black” History Month should not exist, when the truth of the matter is…AFRICAN history, is the history of all peoples. If the textbooks were honest, CIVILIZED world history would start in Africa.
If the textbooks were honest, people wouldn’t be outraged if they saw “Black” Romans in positions of power on TV shows and movies and claim it is “Multicultural, political correctness run amok” and realize, they were just being accurate.
If the truth were taught in classrooms and in text books, we would have no need for “Black History Month”.
But it isn’t.
And as long as we have people willing to accept that, then we will be forever stuck in a world where ALL people’s including “White” people are victimized by a lie that tells us we are all different, that some of us are more human than others and some of our lives are worth less than others.
It is a lie that makes it’s own “Black victims” turn around and embrace the same cognitive dissonance & intellectual dishonesty that white racists use and use it to hate homosexuals.
The truth of the matter is, White Supremacy is not any one people’s ideology at this point. It’s too pervasive. The truth of the matter is, we are ALL White Supremacists. We've all bought into and invested in the system of White Supremacy and most of us don't even know it.
White Supremacy is a cancer. A festering infection that we never sought to cure, only contain, while it grew and bubbled, just beneath our skin. Now that Cancer has metastasized and spread and it's now in the White House.
“Black History Month” is just a band aid we placed over a festering tumor and clearly, it's only gotten worse.
KB