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Globalizing the South
By
Rudolph Lewis
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Yo, Rudy, methinks thou hast to be lest cynical . . .
you use examples as if all Africans are doing what many
or some are – LRR |
I hope I am not
being cynical; at least, it is not my intent. What
I seek is a realistic appraisal. What I want is a
rhetoric that is not merely a talking to the choir. If
you're going to have a "black psyche" it seems to me a
critical mass is necessary. All is not
necessary. The cultural examples of the negative impact
of Christian myths and the commercial influence of hair
and body styles on blacks worldwide are indeed
representative of a critical mass.
That is, if there
is such a thing as a "black psyche", or a "white psyche"
it is a psychology of fragmentation (shattered
identity), not resulting from a medical condition but
rather from an ethical one, primarily, the valuation of
property over humanity. And that this modern
valuation results partially from a great illiteracy,
an inability to keep up with literate machinations of
our corporate rulers and their political managers. This
phenomena occur in the black
worlds of Africa and the Americas as well as in the industrialized, technological
white West. The "black" oppressed have not had
adequate skills or opportunity to read and study our best minds
and those who have the skills have not had the time, and
if time was available, in their isolation no right means
to evaluate the thinking.. If they have indeed our best
minds have been read, they
have not been updated for changed circumstances. Pressed
to make a life in a barred world, we always operate
behind the curve of necessity. Some of our writers
indeed anticipated the longevity of the problems before
us and their vision remains clear.
I recommend Richard
Wright’s
White Man Listen! His essay “The Literature of
the Negro in the United States” is worthwhile
rereading. He says the “Negro” once had a “simple,
organic way of life” or “entity.” Maybe for that tribal
person, there was such a thing we could call “psyche” in
the sense of wholeness. But we are not at one with our
culture. He speaks further of “stratification” and
“atomization,” the development of numerous “personality
types.”
There is a
“strident individualism” that makes a "unified black
psyche" or a “unified white psyche" an
impossibility, for we are at war within, without—with
others, as well as the imposed “we.” The "we" becomes
difficult to situate. Whether Killens was aware
of Wright's essay, I’m uncertain. If he had, he ignored
it, in speaking of a racial “psyche” and its
implications for post-60s realities. When asked at some
point, Wright said he knew of no such phenomena as a
"black psychology." Of course, a tribe of priests who
argue for such a field of studies. But such specialists
always rise in seeking professional advantage of the
ignorant.
That is, the people
(black and white) are severely programmed for the
corporate interests of others and so overpowered they do
not know what to think—they are “racial” zombies.
Satellite TV, the internet (and other media hooked up
globally) and globalism make this programming even more
of a possibility and a dangerous threat to freedom and
threat to human rights. And not knowing
how to think and valuate, individuals and peoples look
out for self-interest (individual interest), which has
become the new first law of survival. Community
everywhere has broken down under a militarized siege
from a hostile without, by a commercial full
court press.
I'm really thinking
out loud, questioning. What? How we got into this racial
mess we find ourselves in today. Killens (in 1965) says
in a rather militant vein we will no longer “look through white eyes.” Well, it’s
more than forty years later: my examples note that we
are indeed still looking through "white eyes." And these
"eyes" have to do with bourgeois corporate ethics more
than race, with what is valued more than the color of
the skin. And maybe more than ever, we are looking
through “white eyes” that value property over human
dignity.
Chenweizu points
out such a crass expression of this "white-eyed"
valuation in his recent article
USAfrica A Mortal Danger:
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Back in 1962, as
he flagged off his troops to the war front against the
Black Africans in South Sudan, the Arab Sudanese General
Hassan Beshir Nasr declared: “We don’t want these black
slaves . . . what we want is their land.” |
Or we can cite from
the recent story "African Maids Face Abuse in Lebanon":
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Amira is 25
years old. She comes from the Democratic Republic of
Congo. "One time, Madame found dust on the furniture.
She told me that the house was dirty like my
skin."
For four years Amira has been confined to the
apartment of her employers—only leaving to take out the
trash. She came to Lebanon as a domestic worker on a
six-year contract due to ongoing conflict in her
country. Awakened daily at 5.30 am, she is subjected to
18 hours of back-breaking labour without time off.
IPNews |
You do not have to
have a white skin to valuate "immorally" or
"decadently." What happened to that determined "we" of
which Killens speaks? Maybe the complexity of the "White
Problem" was much more complex than Killens could
imagine or dared to imagine openly in his time. And he
thus did not weigh the “psyche” problem rightly for us
now.
A friend
suggested oppressive systems can adapt to militancy, to
the aggression of those they wish to oppress; he pointed
out the
Germans have a term for that process, Verharmlosung."
Albert Murray suggests similarly in his
The
Omni-Americans. Murray says that corporations have
special departments to deal with such militancy. My
further question is: How then do we respond to such
adaptations? For it seems to me Gabriel's pardoning at
the request of the NAACP is such an adaptation.
I understand the
"advanced thought of that time" concept. What I seek is
an "advance thought" of our time, being cognizant of the
shortcomings of the "advanced thought of that time." But
I admire Killens. The "fault of his time" is not
singularly his. We must point the fault out,
nevertheless, in order to avoid that kind of fault in
our time. To admire Killens we need not sustain
his faults.
I see no value or
advantage in posing the existence of racial psychologies
or racial psychoses. I do not think "racial" oppression
results from a medical malady. That is what
Marvin X
is
now arguing in his latest book. I would rather approach
the nature of American racial oppression from another
angle than that. It seems to me that even a Marxist or a
neo-Marxist interpretation is exceedingly more
beneficial than these medical or pseudo-medical
analyses.
But I am not even
certain that a Marxist interpretation is necessary for
the situation in which we find ourselves. Killens' ethical view of the American dilemma is
sufficient for me. Here is what he says:
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We, as a people, at this
moment in the twentieth century, must
determine once and for all which shall have
primacy in our land, the sanctity of private
property or the dignity of man. This is the
question colored peoples all over the world
are posing for the 20th century. This is the
truer, deeper meaning of the Negro Revolt.
The Negro is the conscience of the Western
world. There can be no American morality
without affirmation of black human dignity.
There can be only immorality and decadence
("DownSouth,
UpSouth"). |
Killens is at his
best in DownSouth,
UpSouth. Black people in America know what it
means to be classified and treated as "real estate," as
property. And they know it with a greater depth beyond
such abstractions people now glibly call "slavery.”
In "DownSouth,
UpSouth" Killens avoids the more racialist rhetoric
of his essay "Black Psyche," which goes too far into
racialist esoteric, and one goes even farther in
that direction with terms like "white social
psychology" and the "psychotic nature of this
culture" in trying to sustain Killens racialist
rhetoric. But Killens says elsewhere rightly that all of
America is the South. Well, we can say now that the
entire globe has become the South.
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posted 22 September 2007 /
updated 12 June 2008 |
