I don’t understand why it still exists, but I feel it in my mind and in my soul, that weighty feeling, like being stuck in hours of traffic, that feeling that your progress is being blocked, its that tiresome feeling that unfortunately occurs whenever I interact with some white people, that surfaces because they think they are superior to me, just because they are white.
Even my forefathers who were probably slaves were not inferior to the greatest white person who has ever lived on this planet.
My ancestors before Slavery who were Africans were not inferior to the conquerors that invaded their lands.
The aggression perpetrated by the white race against black people throughout history and in the present day is born of a feeling of superiority, and whether that feeling comes from narcissism, fear, greed, pride or any other notion – it isn’t factual, it is a feeling that has been reinforced by the following cultural and social institutions or constraints:
- Colonialism
- Slavery
- Religious hegemony
- Apartheid/Segregation
- Discrimination
- Inequality
Any rational person can look at that list and can see the injustice that lies behind any term in it. So for me there is a conceit, a blindness, an arrogance and ultimately an irrationality associated with those white people who believe they are superior to black people, and the reverse is true, bring any race or nation of people into the same framework and the truth still holds.
The notion of superiority is a social construct that feeds off a slanted view history and historical injustice which seeks to perpetrate that injustice in the present. Why would you pride yourself on the effects of your ancestors inhumanity in the past to perpetuate a notion of elevated status in the present and believe yourself to be superior, especially when in the presernt day we condemn nations that try to mimic those inhumane actions done in the past?
Is it really a case of, when my race or country did this inhumane act in the past – it was ok, but when your race or country attempts to do that same inhumane act, even if on potentially a much smaller scale, it’s a serious crime that should be abhorred? Equality and justice isn’t just about how we treat others now, it is also about how we frame the past and how that helps us contextualize the present.
Today in general terms white people and the Western World fear Muslims – people talk of feeling like they live in a different country because of the influx of immigrants. Let’s not be blind, there are Muslim terrorists and there are illegal immigrants, but the proportion of those people in the whole of those populations that live in our lands now is small – and that’s not to say that very small minority can’t do harm either.
The point I want to get at however, is that one needs to compare the situation now – where people already feel threatened, where we allow people to come into our lands in a controlled manner – and where those who force their way in find it very difficult, with the situation where a land is brutally pillaged and over-run by an invader. What we have now in the Western World doesn’t compare with Colonialism or the institutions that followed it.
If society now feels threatened by groups of people on the fringe of it that disrupt and challenge the core of society because of their beliefs and cultures (e.g. Muslims and immigrants), consider the threat felt by a minority group of people in a society who face institutions that have existed for perhaps hundreds of years that suppress them that are already a core part of the society in which they live.
Consider the lasting impact to a society or race of people transformed by an event in their history that, not through their own choice, or as a consequence of anything they have done leads them to be mistreated, and the mark of their future is the branding of their mistreatment in the past, and upon their burden more inequality and injustice is cast to perpetuate the sting of the past in an endless cycle of cause and effect.
So many people fail to see the bigger picture, or see such thinking as an excuse. However, if we divorce the condition of people in the present day from their historical context, then we arrive at false conclusions. Dismissiveness of people’s history can never erase the inhumanity of that history, either on the part of the perpetrator, or the people who have suffered – neither can it truly deal with the reality of the present.
To the superior I ask – if you are so good, and superior why are you keeping me down? Why are you holding me back? What stops you from letting me be free? Don’t the qualities that you think you have enable you to rise up, without limiting me? Can you build a nation by yourselves without exploiting me, without injustice to my people, and without economic imperialism?
I can do well even you try to suppress me, I can do better with your support. As a society, equality and justice nurtures the best out of people, it creates an environment where the best things become possible because the life-blood of society, ideas, effort, expression, power, wealth etc are open to all equally, and we all share in building a future equally.
To me, equality and justice must exist as absolute things, or they simply doesn’t exist at all. Indeed, the only way to heal the past is through equality and justice, and that’s why I have absolutely no time for anybody who thinks they are superior.