(Previously published at the BlackCommentator.com, April 1, 2021)
For history of the American Negro is unique also in this: that the question of his humanity, and of his rights therefore as a human being, became a burning one for several generations of Americans, so burning a question that it ultimately became one of those used to divide the nation.
James Baldwin, "Stranger in the Village"
It's always been Black people.
Listening carefully to a conversation conducted by two "intellectuals" on the subject of Western Civilization. Be patient and you'll inevitably, if honest with yourself and in possession of enough Euro-American history, then you'll be privy to hear the cries of African mothers whose children are snatched from them. In the Empire, where sun will never set, you'll hear workers hammer together the first auction blocks. In a distance, you'll see the unpacking of the first slave ship, the first captured Africans will appear and begin walking ashore. Even if the two white intellectuals never reference the significance of the enslavement of Africans as the foundation of their "civilization," you'll know, nevertheless, how deep-seated and pervasive is the anti-Blackness sentiment in all things Western .
It's always been Black people whites most fear and, as a consequence, hate.
Here in the US, Black Americans always cause trouble for the good citizens of the nation. As if Africans immigrated to the US and volunteered to work their lives away to benefit generations of white Americans present and generations of white immigrants to come. As if African volunteer to be marginalized and disenfranchised. tortured, raped, and lynched.
Recently, I read an article in The New Yorker that seemed to suggests that Black militancy, the rise of the Black Panthers, Stokley Carmichael (Kwame Ture), and the Black Power slogan brought about the downfall of the New Left. White young Americans couldn't sustain their empathy for the plight of Black people, once they took up their generation's fight for freedom, shouting loudly for all to hear, white supremacy is our enemy!
How dare these people, after generation after generation of confronting the terror and torture campaigns of enslavement followed by Jim Crow, how dare these people raise their fist in the air and angrily cry out "Black Power" or assert any expression other than gratitude for white participation in the Civil Rights Movement!
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Thomas Hayden, Jack Weinberg, Mario Savio," university campus protests for change had been the good ole' days until Black youth donned leather jackets, berets, and guns. Never mind the breakfast program for hungry Black children.
It all ended. White American returned home. And what did these white activists do, if not turn their back, most of them, on the idea of democratizing America? To hell with it! To hell with Black people! No wonder our parents and grandparents despised these people.
They are violent! The battle cry of J. Edgar Hoover who seemed to have spent the bulk of his career at the FBI, particularly as its, leader, convincing white Americans (and conservative Blacks) that Marcus Garvey, W. E. B DuBois, Malcolm X, Rev. Martin L. King, Jr., and the Black Panthers were enemies of democracy. Violent, as individuals, these rebel-rousing Blacks could stir up Blacks to overturn the US government.
Hardly any of the Oath Keepers or Proud Boys or other right-wing militia groups that staged an anti-democratic insurrection to overturn the 2020 presidential election on January 6, 2021 were on the FBI's radar prior to their storming of the US Capitol in Washington D. C.
Even while young white Americans march back home, the war in Vietnam was consuming Black lives who didn't have the familial/political clout to burn their draft card and who died on foreign soil fighting against another race of people engaged in their battle to be free of the tyranny of Western fascism (rather than democracy, since the latter has yet to come to fruition in the US). And as Muhammad Ali, pointed out in 1967, when he refused to fight in an imperialist war, he didn't have any "quarrel" with the Vietnamese fighters or their people. After all, what had they done to him or Black Americans?
Maybe it's these days in which Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin (a predominantly white state with a large population of those white liberals who couldn't return home fast enough, just ahead of the FBI COINTELPRO kill-or-incarcerate pogroms for Black activists and an equal number of whites who think Black anything is a threat to their security) isn't afraid to point to the 2020 protests of Black Lives Matter movement and proclaim how their cry for social justice was tantamount to terrorism. The insurrectionists of January 6, 2021, on the other hand, were no threat to anyone! Sen. Johnson recognized them as good citizens, concerned citizens, and above all, unarmed and therefore not violent like the Black Lives protesters. Had it been those Blacks at the Capitol"
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