“We [therefore] weighing all and singular the premises with due meditation, and noting that since we had formerly by other letters of ours granted among other things free and ample faculty to the aforesaid King Alfonso -- to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery…” - The Bull Romanus Pontifex (Nicholas V), January 8, 1455.
“Four hundred years, it’s still the same philosophy.” – Peter Tosh
What is ‘White Supremacy,’ and is it a philosophy? Some definitions are necessary for clarification.
My dictionary define Philosophy as: “the discipline concerned with questions of how one should live (ethic); what sorts of things exist and what are their essential natures (metaphysics); what counts as genuine knowledge (epistemology); and what are the correct principles of reasoning (logic).”
The same dictionary defines ‘White supremacy’ thus: “a racist ideology based on the assertion that white people are superior to other races. The term is sometimes used specifically to describe a political ideology that advocates social and political dominance for whites.”
I intend to show here that (1) ‘White Supremacy’ (aka racism) exists and that (2) it is a philosophy, if we accept that philosophy is a way of life.
I define White Supremacy as the arrogant belief inherent in the Whiteman (actually the term ‘Whiteman’ is a gross misnomer since no human being is actually white. The Albinos we call ‘Whites’ are pinkish in colour) that the world and its resources (especially its resources, including human) belong to him.
The domination and control of non-white people and their resources is at the centerpiece of this philosophy. No matter how much veneer Western scholarship and leadership try to put on their actions, this is the unvarnished truth. I will urge that we judge the Whiteman solely on the account of his actions, and not on the sanctimonious declarations of his leadership\scholarship.
There is no place in our wide world where the Whiteman is prepared to treat any non-white as an equal. This way of thinking is the philosophy underpinning the wiping out of whole societies where white people find resources that they craved. It was this same mentality that prompted Columbus and his bandits to virtually wipe the Indians off. It’s the same mindset that enabled Captain Cook and his brigands to kill off the aboriginals in Australia and it is the only reason why the British could, without compunction, killed off every man, woman and child they met on the Australian Island of Tasmania. And it is the reason the Boers tried to do us in South Africa.
To those who like to argue that we harp too much on the past, my response is that my polemics would have been pointless and even silly if there has been a change of heart on the part of the white people. Wherever you look, it is the same unabashed lust for other people’s resources using cunning and wholesale violence that they still carry around the world. The Whiteman continues to use every trick in their books to gain control of other people’s resources. They still have the same attitude of: ‘Why pay for it, if you can kill for it.’
No, we are not talking about the past. We are all witness to how the West brazenly stole a whole country, Iraq, right before our very eyes. They humiliated their former client, Saddam Hussein; stripped him of the wherewithal to defend himself, and yet they went ahead and crushed him nonetheless.
Again, the last time I checked, Afghanistan is a landlocked country in Central Asia. How then do we explain the presence of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) troops in that unfortunate country? NATO was set up to defend the North Atlantic, yet the Whiteman was able to rationalize his presence in Afghanistan.
The most visible example of White Supremacy is the disproportionate power that white people wield in the world today. White people represent about ten percent of the world’s people. The question arises as to how and why this tiny minority is ruling the world.
Except for those who are still sleeping, we all know that we live a Eurocentric intellectual, cultural, economical, political and social universe. And this did not happen by chance or by accident; it was a conscious decision of Whiteman to rule and control the non-white world. I don’t know a single white person who has questioned this unjust and unnatural state of affairs. All white people simply accept it as a natural order and, as they have amply demonstrated, most of them certainly would be prepared to go war should there be any attempt to dislocate the unfair status quo.
The most effective weapon in the hand of the white people is the virtual monopoly they wield over global communication and information. This again is a conscious policy. Of all the crimes Europeans have committed against non-white (and God knows that they are vast), the greatest is the colonization of information. Armed with the total control of the means of information dissemination, Europeans were able to rewrite history. Since they cannot wipe Africans away militarily and genetically (not for lack of trying, I should add); they are trying to wipe us off historically. That explains why some of them suggested (with straight faces) that Africans have no history.
What is it if not implicit racism to suggest that Africa, the birthplace of modern man (as every scientist now accepts) is bereft of history? Concomitant to this erasure of Africa from history is the conscious promotion of a Eurocentric world. According to this gospel, every non-white was waiting in darkness until the Whiteman brought him the light of civilization. That the Whiteman has succeeded in making the rest of the world believe in this odious historical distortion is due in large measure to his dominating much of the world’s means of communication.
Contrary to what the Whiteman is forcing down our throats, history showed him a destroyer of civilizations. He didn’t bring civilization to the Mayans, the Aztecs, the Aboriginals and certainly not to the Africans; he destroyed those ancient civilizations.
However this historical fact hasn’t dented the enthusiasm of Western scholars and leaders from promoting the historical distortion of the Whiteman as a Civilizer. That explains why the new President of France, Nicholas Sarkozy, a loutish racist of the first degree, can go to Africa (of all places) and said that: “The tragedy of Africa is the African man has never really entered history.”
I do not know what type of education or mis-education Mr. Sarkozy had but he, and people like him, should look up on just two or three instances in history and tell us who hasn’t entered history, the European or the African.
“Mansa Musa was the grand-nephew of the founder of the Mali Empire, Sundiata Keita, and ruled over the Mali Empire, during which it was the source of almost half the world’s gold. Musa was a devoted Muslim, and Islamic scholarship flourished under his rule. With Musa as a benefactor, Sankore University in Timbuktu reached its height. Craftsmen and especially Islamic scholars came from all over the Muslim world to receive a free education at Sankore’s guild and madrasas. On the way to Mecca, when he passed through Cairo in July of 1324, he was reportedly accompanied by a caravan that included thousands of people and nearly a hundred camels, giving away so much gold that it took over a decade for the economy across North Africa to recover, due to the rapid inflation that it initiated. On the path to Mecca, Mansa Musa had around five or six slaves or apprentices walking in front of him, sprinkling gold dust before his feet, so that he could walk on gold. He had this done because the Mansa would apparently not take a step without stepping on gold. – (all quotations used here and hereunder are from Wikipedia and related sources).
“The Great Famine of 1315–1322 was the first of a series of large-scale crises that struck Europe early in the 14th century, causing millions of deaths over an extended number of years and marking a clear end to an earlier period of growth and prosperity during the 11th through 13th centuries. Starting with bad weather in the spring of 1315, universal crop failures lasted through 1316 until the summer of 1317; Europe did not fully recover until 1322. It was a period marked by extreme levels of criminal activity, disease and mass death, infanticide, and cannibalism. It had consequences for Church, State, European society and future calamities to follow in the 14th century.”
And before they start telling us that it happened only in medieval times, this is what history also tells us:
“The Great Irish Famine (known as The Great Hunger, An Gorta Mór in Irish, or A Drochshaol, the Bad Life), refers to a famine, and its aftermath, in Ireland between 1845 and 1851. The famine was caused initially by potato, which almost instantly destroyed the primary food source for the majority of the Irish people. The blight explains the crop failure but the dramatic and deadly effect of the famine was exacerbated by other factors of economic, political, and social origin. The impact of the Great Famine in Ireland remains unparalleled, in terms of the demographic decline, the Irish population falling by approximately 25 percent in just six years, due to a combination of “excess mortality and mass emigration.”
And before you start entertaining illusions that it was only famine that was plaguing Europeans in those times, read this:
“The Black Death, or The Black Plague, was one of the most deadly pandemic in human history. It probably began in Central Asia and spread to Europe by the late 1340s. The total number of deaths worldwide from the pandemic is estimated at 75 million people; there were an estimated 20 to 30 million deaths in Europe alone. The Black Death is estimated to have killed between a third and two-thirds of the population.
The same disease is thought to have returned to Europe every generation with varying virulence and mortalities until the 1700s. During this period, more than 100 plague epidemics swept across Europe. On its return in 1603, the plague killed 38,000 Londoners. Other notable 17th Century outbreaks were the Italian Plague of 1629-1631, the Great Plague of Seville (1647-1652), the Great Plague of London (1665–1666), the Great Plague of Vienna (1679). There is some controversy over the identity of the disease, but in its virulent form, after the Great Plague of Marseille in 1720–1722 and the 1771 plague of Moscow it seems to have disappeared from Europe in the 18th century.
The fourteenth-century eruption of the Black Death had a drastic effect on Europe's population, irrevocably changing Europe's social structure. It was a serious blow to the Roman Catholic Church and resulted in widespread persecution of minorities such as Jews, foreigners, beggars and lepers.” (Italicized to show that the Whiteman persecution of minorities is as old as his history).
When African emperor was dazzling the people of Arabia with gold, Europeans were dying of famine and plagues, today we are being told by the children of those whose parents were living in alpine caves when our king was making his pilgrimage to Mecca that we had no history!
Actually, our message is not directed to the European; leopards cannot change their skin. Our message is directed to the African who still remain unconscious of the realities he faces as a Blackman in a very hostile, white-dominated world.
Curiously, whenever Africans protest against the clannish behavior of the white people, we are labeled racists and we are accused of preaching racial hatred.
Nonsense. Except by some incomprehensible logic, I fail to see why asking Africans to start taking care of their own affairs is akin to preaching hatred. I believe that it is duty and the obligation of every liberated African to tell his less-conscious brothers and sisters what we have gone throughout history so that such calamities do not befall us again.
This is the message of liberated Africans and it is a message to which every African, irrespective of his philosophical or political leanings, should try to relate to. This is not different what the Jews are doing. European Jews were persecuted by their European brethren in Europe. Jews all over the world took up the noble cause of ensuring that their people never again face a holocaust. Strangely, no one come out to accuse the Jews of preaching hatred. No, the Jews are not preaching hatred. What they preach is Self-Love, Self-Respect and Racial Solidarity.
But when we black people, who have suffered more than any other racial group, preach the same things the Jews are preaching, we are tagged extremists, radicals, racists, hate-mongers. And then the so-called Western Liberals are swarming over us asking for understanding. Maybe some of us are just tired of understanding. As I tell any liberal who come to me that he should go and preach to his government, his NGOs and the white supremacist groups in his country. They are the problem; I’m not.
Another manifestation of White Supremacy philosophy is the conscious negation of non white people through media manipulation or should I say annihilation. A visitor from Mars who landed in a white society might be pardoned for thinking that the only inhabitants that matters are white folks who are always assisting their dark-hued co-earthlings dying of AIDS, famine and wars. Or what do the CNN and the BBC and the other media of the Whiteman show you? This gross distortion is what we are being fed day in day out. And we must not complain; just accept it because it came from the Master.
There is also this pervasive tendency for the Whiteman to arrogantly dismiss the institutions, cultures, including religions of non-white people. We saw how the White missionaries destroyed complex African traditional religions because their materialistic, one-track minds cannot grasp them.
They made bonfires of the African gods only to replace it with the image of a redeemer (?) nailed to a cross. We see this also in the glib dismissal by Western anthropologists of Africans who go semi-nude in their hot climate. Yet, when we go to any beach in Europe in the summer we are confronted by the sight of naked people. They are white, so they cannot be primitives: They are called NUDISTS.
By White Supremacy, we are talking about how white people gave themselves the right to determine what they pay for the labour, the resources and the produce of non-white people.
This is an awesome power which Western analysts never liked to talk about. They talk about a mirage they call ‘market forces.’ What magical forces gave a Whiteman sitting behind his computer in London the right to determine the prices he will pay for cocoa grown by the peasant farmer in Ghana or gold dug up in South Africa or diamond from the soil of Sierra Leone? And this state of unjustified theft the world has come to accept as a natural state of affairs. And they pretend not to know why Africans are still poor!
And what is not in contention is that white people always act as one unit against non-white people. We see ample demonstration of these during the wars in Africa. Wherever there is conflict, the priority of the West is the evacuation of Westerners irrespective of nationality.
Again, we see this in their interactions in the international front where the West always presents a solid front against non-westerners. The Whites always act in consort, be it in trade negotiations or in their slapping of criminal sanctions against the nation of Zimbabwe.
While it’s true that it is not every Whiteman who is a racist, the indisputable fact remain that in the Eurocentric world in which we live today, every Whiteman is born with an advantage conferred solely by the colour of his skin.
As Albert Memmi wrote in his classic, ‘The Colonizer and the Colonized,’ “While it is true that it is not every white person who is a colonizer, but the Whiteman needs only to step into the colony to start enjoying the advantages of the colonizer.”
You can confirm this simply by observing how Europeans posted to Africa easily and automatically ease into the roles of colonizers. People who were yesterday struggling in their home countries immediately start to enjoy the paraphernalia of the colonizers: the big mansions, the servants, the security guards, the gardeners and the washing lady as though they were born with the privileges.
If tomorrow, as we hope, Africans take their affairs firmly in their hands and start dictating the prices of their commodities and produces and, more importantly setting their own agendas, we shall see whether or not every Whiteman is not wailing: “What a tribulation!”
Peace, Love, Respect and Solidarity!
