It is well and good for every successful Black man or woman to point out that "even though i am from way down here, i am right up here now," but let's remember that personal anecdotes can never substitute for global/overarching strategies that recognize and learn the lessons of history. Louis Farrakhan put it so succinctly in a recent interview on PBS with Tavis Smiley when he said:
"
You are successful, maybe I'm successful, others are successful; but we've got nearly 40 million people in America that are still suffering and falling further and further behind. And those that have done well have not pooled their resources to help the masses come out of the condition that the masses are in. So we don't want the middle class, the successful ones, to be used as a mannequin in the store of democracy to sell to the masses of black people that we can achieve just like you have achieved, when in reality the ignorance--the pervasive ignorance--and the racism that exists in America will allow a few to escape, but the masses are caught in the fisherman's net."
Another of those mannequins used to sell us short is exactly what Dr. Onyeani is espousing: that there is no need to fix the system because it ain't broken -- that the fault is 100% our lack of initiative and failure to work the system to our advantage; like those smart Asians. About two years ago, The New York Times did a wonderful series on "How Race Is Lived in America. That series, now published in book form confirms something that more cold-eyed sociologists, economists, activists, and studies have been saying for donkeys years -- that the systemic odds are stacked the highest against Black people. Many times, quite deliberately, immigration policies and institutional racism are deployed to give non-Black immigrants a leg up over Black people. This partly explains the paradox of non-Black immigrants from outside of Europe seeming to do much better than African Americans.
For example, until 9/11, South Asians (including Dr. Onyeani's wonderful Indian mannequins) were increasingly officially classified as White people. What does that have to do with the African/Black condition? In a country and a world where race still matters a great deal, and a White (or honorary White) status translates into privilege and opportunity we would do well to factor apartheid in any strategies we devise to deal with our condition.
On the global stage, especially Black people would do well to listen to what mainstream intellectuals like Paul Krugman and former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz are saying about how the system is rigged against the poorest of nations. In other words, never do as the World Bank/IMF and conservative shills out there tell you. Custom-design your own solutions and policies because White supremacist institutions and White folk will never act in our own best interest.
On this last point, even Dr. Onyeani and I seem to agree. But there are major problems I have with his approach. I'll mention just three:
1. He wants us to forget history in our calculus and to pretend that suddenly racism, colonialism, and slavery do not matter.
2. He demands that we ignore that Mobutu and Abacha were, like most of our bankrupt leaders, creatures of this wonderful system that we are supposed to work to our advantage.
3. Rather than build on the achievements of the civil rights and anti-colonial movements, he wants us to dismiss offhand the entire leadership and strategies of an era, whose sacrifices have opened many doors for all non-White peoples.
Finally, on a personal note, I do not play victim syndrome politics. There is something better that I do every waking day of my life. If you think that the "pragmatic solutions [that] will do us more good" involves Black public intellectuals running around calling themselves Nigger (Nigga) capitalists, we really don't have any basis for meaningful conversation on how best we can solve the crises confronting us.
vukoni
PS. To you all who are enraged and turned off by Black intellectual shock-jocks who adopt the disrespectful vocabulary of racists to draw attention to themselves and their own version of Horatio Alger stories, there is a great parable that occurred to me last night as I thought about Dr. Onyeani's address. When I get the time to write it down, I'll post it here. For those who do not know who Horatio Alger is, there is a clue in Dr. Krugman's article that I'm posting next.
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