“There are no blacks in Africa”

I was watching the March 5^th Bill Maher Show, whose guests were New York Times Op-Ed Columnist Frank Bruni and radio and tv personality, Charlemagne tha God. They began discussing what allegedly started as a required Coca-Cola diversity training exercise encouraging employees to “be a little less White” (this is disputed by the Coca Cola Company).  What follows is my paraphrasing of the discussion:

Bill Maher – what is this about needing to be a little less White?  Is this a thing that is coming our way?  I don’t know what it means.  How can I be less than what I am?

Charlemagne tha God – As a Black man I know what it means.  Just use your White privilege to help fight discrimination.

Frank Bruni – I think it is the wrong way to look at things.  I don’t know what it means to be less White either.

In her book, Caste, Isabel Wilkerson was at a speaking engagement in England and struck up a conversation with a woman from Nigeria.  Wilkerson had been talking about how 6 million Blacks in the United States needed to seek refuge by escaping from one part of their own country to another part of their country.  The Nigerian woman at some point in the discussion stated, “You know that there are no Blacks in Africa.”  Wilkerson was a bit taken aback and had to ponder that statement for a moment.  As she thought about the statement, the woman went on: “Africans are not black. They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebale.  They are not black…They are not black until they go to America or come to the U.K…It is then that they become black.” 

Is there a lesson here? In Africa, or at least in Nigeria, if there is no conception or portrayal of someone as Black, then by extension, there should be no “White” people either. But that is not quite the case.  It is typical for a White person in Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, to be referred to as “Oyinbo” or “Oyinbo Pepper.”   There are varied explanations for the term and varied interpretations for its use in different circumstances.  For example, if yelled at a White person in a public square followed by slaps on the back and giggling, it is most assuredly intended as derogatory at most, or intended to be disconcerting to the person targeted at best.  Regardless, it is certainly not meant as a compliment.  However, if used as a simple descriptive, then it may very well not represent any derogatory intention.

But digging in a bit deeper, what does the word represent in terms of cultural attitude?  Does it mean that white people (and light skinned people generally) are seen as inferior, with “peeled back” skin?  Does it mean that White people cannot tolerate spicy foods?  Does it mean that an Oyinbo simply does not have an African cultural background?  It may mean all or none of these things, culturally.  But what I take from this is something analogous to the basis of racism in our own country.  In the United States, “Whiteness” is the norm.  In Africa, melanin-rich skin is the norm.  Can we equate the two?  Yes, but I believe there is a distinction.  To understand the distinction, the most important issue is not how we view one another with regard to differences, but how we operationalize these viewed differences in our social, political and economic lives. 

In Nigeria, and perhaps in other areas of Africa, the term seems only to represent the acknowledgment of a stranger to African culture, norms, and appearances.  If that is all it is, then there is no basis for seeing such acknowledgement as racist, regardless of how the greeting or reference may prove embarrassing.  In the United States, however, race is not an innocent incident of differences.  Race has deliberate social, economic and political consequences.  As stated by Ibram X. Kendi, racism is not a social construct, but a power construct intended to benefit a certain class of people, namely White people.  Such a construct accomplishes two things – it permits the creation of hierarchies and the establishment of norms.  The norms are reinforced not only by those who benefit, but also by those who aspire to the benefits of being accepted into the norm.  This problem of these purposeful and fabricated distinctions, however, is further exacerbated by the fact that White norms eventually simply morph into Whiteness, a hurdle not easy to overcome for people of color.  And, of course, hierarchies accomplish the establishment of a “superior” category of people, and then descending categories most often related to skin color, physical features, mannerisms, customs, language, accents, dress, religion, and other cultural distinctions, but mostly skin color. 

Going back to the title of this essay, there has been much written on when the concept of “Whiteness” was introduced into this country.  I believe it to be true that at least in pre-colonial Europe, Europeans did not refer to themselves or see themselves as White, but rather as people identified by a region or a nation-state.  To a much greater extent than is the case here in the United States, I believe that this is still mostly true.  With perhaps the possible exception of Great Britain, being White, as in White Nationalism, seems to be a uniquely American construct.  It seems that for us there are two important circumstances stamped into our culture that explain this need and expediency for racial classifications.

The first is expediency for profit. Vast amounts of land needed labor to make farming feasible and profitable in the 17^th Century. Slavery became the solution to this problem, particularly since African slaves were different and easily fit into the Old Testament description of a “stranger.”  John Cotton, the Puritan Minister and Theologian, was a draftsman of New England’s (Massachusetts) first Constitution.  In that Constitution, passed in 1641, slavery was recognized and made legitimate.  Of course, as a Christian settlement this institution had to be rationalized.  To accomplish this, Cotton relied on the Old Testament and the concept of Jewish slavery for justification.  Under Jewish law, slavery was more akin to being a servant.  In other words, the “slave” was a member of the household and had some, if limited, civil rights.  The Constitution drafted by Cotton permitted enslavement of “strangers” by capture in War or through purchase, as well as those who entered into “voluntary” enslavement.  But these servants could still be sold.  And over time, the institution of slavery became more accepted, children of slaves became slaves themselves and more stringent laws were passed until slaves had little or no rights at all.  But the bottom line was that religion was needed to justify exploitation and then, having accomplished that task, civil authority was able to complete the process to ensure the success of Puritan farmers and other landowners until such reliance on slavery become less profitable and unnecessary in the North. 

The second expediency, from my perspective, was based on survival of the landed gentry, particularly in the South.  In the latter part of the 17^th Century, there was tension among bonded labor (indentured servants, slaves, ex-slaves), landowners and Native Americans.  There were occasions where landowners wanted (illegally) to take over land occupied by American Indians and spurred indentured servants and slaves to lay siege to those lands under the promise of making them landowners themselves.  One such manifestation of that tension was Bacon’s Rebellion of 1675.  Nathaniel Bacon, a local official, led a rebellion of indentured servants and slaves, resulting in the slaughter of Native Americans and the destruction of the Jamestown settlement.  This rebellion was eventually put down, but it became a warning to the landowning elites that if White indentured servants, slaves and poor farmers found common cause, that could be the end of the propertied aristocracy in America.  Learning (one might say, the wrong) lessons from this rebellion, Whites were given more rights, indentured servitude was mostly phased out and more rigorous and oppressive systems of slavery were established. 

From this point forward, “White” became the hierarchical pinnacle of social and political organization, with declining human worth attributed to all “others.”   Again, over time, religion continued to play a role in justifying racial classifications and slavery, either through relation to the Curse of Ham (more specifically the curse on his descendants) or to the “enlightened” belief in polygenesis, a belief based upon the proposition that Blacks were not part of the human race. These hierarchical designations, and the legacies of those designations, remain with us today.  So, given this, how would someone who looks like me become even a “little less white?”  How much diversity training would it take?

These are difficult questions to answer and, mostly, framed in an unproductive manner.  To start with the latter question, I do not put much stock in diversity training.  The motivation for such trainings is mostly defensive – “how do we avoid lawsuits?”  The intention behind such trainings is to change attitudes and behavior emanating from those attitudes.  However, the best I believe we can hope for is a temporary change in behavior.  The attitudes most likely remain because real, underlying and substantive change only comes from pain, dramatic enlightenment, or a sense of existential trauma. 

As for being “a little less White,” I see the elimination of racism in the same way I see eliminating the perceived inherent inequality of different people.   In other words, I see racism and equality not as goals to be attained, but as outcomes derived from our prevailing culture.  Dorothy Lee, in here excellent book, Freedom and Culture, explains that “Equality exists in the very nature of things, as a byproduct of the democratic structure of the culture itself, not as a principle to be applied. In such societies, there is no attempt to achieve the goal of equality, and in fact there is no concept of equality.”

There is “no concept of equality.”  Just like “there are no blacks in Africa.”  In order to overcome “Whiteness” or even to be “less White,” such aspirations cannot be perceived as or worked on as goals.  They need to be seen as implicit and given outcomes of our culture.  But how is this possible as such outcomes are seldom, if ever, achieved?  True enough.  Achievement is difficult because of the bi-polar culture we have. We profess to have, and continually try to attach, humanistic aspirations and goals to a dehumanizing, alienating, marginalizing, and exploitative economic and political system.  “Reform” attempts are analogous to putting band aids on a cancer, a growing cancer that requires larger and more elaborate band aids as time goes on because we fail to address the underlying causes of the cancer.

The goal must be to create a culture of inclusiveness, human dignity, respect and the appreciation and celebration of diversity.  This is the goal to be aspired to and to work towards.  Having achieved this goal, just like equality, “Whiteness,” with all of its perverse trappings will become moot.  Then I, and others like me, will not have to worry about becoming a “little less White.”