http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4367
When offered the opportunity of return to Africa as a solution to the issue of racial incompatibility, Frederick Douglass was keen to make it known that blacks had an http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4241 in the culture then current in the U.S., and that the milieu present domestically was to be preferred to that of Africa. The implications are obvious. Even the conditions wrought by the experience of slavery (which it is claimed were wholly detrimental to the prosperity of blacks) were superior to the conditions of native Africans. Offered the opportunity to create, ab initio, a nation after their own image, post slavery conditions of the U.S. were to be preferred.
Black post-slavery culture in the U.S. cannot be described as a black culture http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4228, as existed in Africa, but rather as wholly hybridized, bringing with it all the (apparent) benefits of the slavery experience. It is an open question, though, whether the experience of slavery in and of itself engendered this improvement. Slavery was ubiquitous among native Africans. Indeed, through much of Africa, the most recognized form of currency was the slave, male and female. African native tribesmen had been taking prisoners in war and enslaving them for many centuries before the slave trade ever cast its shadow on African soil. This being the case, the subsequent question naturally arises why the benefits to culture of the slavery experience did not occur in African slavery, but rather only in the agricultural slavery of the U.S. The control in this thought experiment is the presence of White culture in the one case, and the absence of it in the other. Douglas was tacitly admitting what few today will acknowledge. Namely, the conditions of slavery and post-slavery culture were to be preferred over any and all conditions in Africa, even an African territory to do with as they saw fit, and this merely due to the presence of White culture. There is no more candid admission of the essentially dependent and parasitic nature of North American black culture than this statement of Dougas’. One thing is clear, the abject nature of African slavery is incommensurable with the status of the African slave as a chattel of the white plantation owner. Even today, in post-colonial, post-aparthied, post-white Africa, as Zimbabwe,South Africa, and Sudan descend into chaos, hunger, crime, and internecine bloodshed, the end of contact with white culture, or active opposition to it, has left an undistinguished record. Meanwhile, blacks in the U.S. have reached heights unknown to the black race through the paternalistic impulses of whites.
Throughout the civil rights era, when blacks were given the opportunity to choose between the separatism and supremacism of Malcolm X and The Nation of Islam, or the Black Panther Party, time and again the large majority chose the integrationist, accommodationist Michael (Martin Luther) King’s approach. King’s movement had as its objective the seizure of political and social power from white society, but not as a prelude to exodus from it into a “millennium” of black freedom, but, paradoxically, to live cheek by jowl with the very race that had been responsible for their captivity in America. Is this not a tacit admission of the utter rejection of real black independence by blacks themselves. Had King joined with Malcolm X and pressed for black independence, the social and political climate of the time would have ensured a hearing of such a proposal. Having chosen the path of accommodation, we yet see that, far from adopting the “color blind” integrationism of the slogan-wielding “civil rights” movement, the preference for black representation by blacks is itself a form of separatism and racism that belies the rhetoric of the equality mandate.
Nor can it be persuasively argued that the black independence movement has no history or legitimacy in the black community. Prominent blacks Martin Delaney in the 19th century, and Marcus Garvey in the early 20th, publicly called for African Americans to undertake a return to Africa and establish themselves in Liberia. This was also the goal of Abraham Lincoln, patron saint of American blacks, who in freeing the slaves also readily admitted their incompatibility with White culture. A century-and-a-half later, blacks largely remain incompatible with white culture, and in self-imposed segregation. Yet another notable black public figure, Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, looked to form separatist colonies in the American West. The Nation of Islam, much more subtly, continually makes public overtures of support for an independent black state on American soil. Even within the mainstream black community, gradually rising black separatism holds that blacks would be better served by exclusively black schools and businesses, as well as by black local politicians and police.
This mainstream black separatism is sharply opposed by anti-segregationists and integrationists within the African American community, who generally insist that blacks can and should advance within the larger American society and call on them to achieve such goals largely through the use of political activism and capitulations from the majority white community (if it can be called such) in the form of affirmative action, with some increasingly marginalized figures (typically referred to by militant black racists as “Uncle Toms”) suggesting that personal responsibility, personal improvement, educational achievement, and business involvement, are the best means. The unfortunate truth is that the latter course of developing personal responsibility among blacks is being rejected in the main by the average black who looks on his highly successful and articulate black brethren who refuse to espouse the race demagoguery so prominent among them as compromised figures, lacking “street cred”, or credibility within the mainstream black community. The fact remains that beneath the rhetoric of equality, blacks want two things: dependence on what Steve Sailer called the soft bigotry of lowered expectations for their prosperity, and a culture of grievance that opposes and alienates both those who call for black independence and those who call for the reinvigoration of the sense of personal responsibility among blacks.
The overwhelming dominance of such resentment toward “sold out” blacks betrays a lingering, intractable, almost instinctive separatism that enjoys an uneasy truce with the integrationist approaches of the more “effete” forms of black activism. But it is an incomplete separatism that still envisions economic reliance on whites, while black culture is maintained as something distinct from white. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, who maintained his separatist sympathies until May of 1964, may be said to personify the opposition between the two views, although it has recently come to light that even the sainted Dr. King entertained separatist thoughts toward the end of his foreshortened life. We can only conjecture in what direction he might have led the black community had he lived. One suspects that despite his increasing sympathies for the separatist path, the exigencies of the realpolitik with the black community would have prevailed. After all, it is a fool who does not know where his bread is buttered. As for the Nation of Islam to which Malcolm X belonged until his turn from separatism, despite the anti-white venom spewed by its leader Louis Farrakhan, even today it calls for a return to self-reliance among blacks. The cynic in me is tempted to believe that this is why the NOI is not more popular than it is.
Returning to King, why would the leader of black integrationist activism in the 1960s take such a radical turn of thought? For the same reason that “polite” black separatists do today. Blacks are not achieving parity with whites, despite monumental efforts to close the “achievement gap,” a fact which is an embarrassment to those who claim broad-based biological equality of the races, a notion which science is rapidly undermining. Recently, Liam Julian at National Review online called studies that categorize results by race “offensive and useless.” It seems that the formerly conservative National Review has joined the camp that desires desperately to hide the achievement gap until the presence of minorities in white schools erases it through the pressure for lowered academic standard, one supposes for the sake of racial reconciliation that blacks don’t want, since their interests are not vested in racial peace, but only in white submission. As the persistent performance gap seen among blacks (and Hispanics, we hasten to add) continues to underscore biological racial inequality in a way that black dominance in sports has never been able to do, the calls for black separatism will grow louder. We can only hope that our “leaders” are listening, a highly unlikely prospect.
http://www.kinism.net/index.php/weblog/more/black_dependence/