THOUGHTS THEN AND NOW

When I was a teenager living in Washington, D.C., I’d be in my room thinking about the challenges my black relatives faced in a white world that just destroyed Emmett Till. I’d wonder why my aunts and uncles were so poor and financially hapless. Why it seemed all the black men were drunks and/or unemployed. I knew something was wrong because when I went downtown, I saw a lot of white men and women working. I wondered why my mother was a file clerk and her supervisor, a white woman, was her superior even though they had the same education. Yes even in 1957, I knew something was wrong and my gut told me that this institutional and personal racism would someday choke white folks to death.

Now fast forward to 2007. I was watching CNN telling us how some “Middle Easterners” living in the West who has ancestral ties to Pakistan and Afghanistan can easily come to the United States on their Western passports. The broadcast went on to say that this is really a danger from al-Qaeda. How these “homegrown terrorist” can strike America, as they did England at any time.

What does all this mean? Is it just another propaganda tactic of fear, nothing at all, or is it both a tactic and a real danger? I believe it’s the latter. I believe that not unlike the systems put in place to hamper my non white ancestral relatives from achieving their real and full potential and those systems inhibited a viable tangible and non tangible (psychological) asset transfer to the present generations, those who have ties to ancestral Pakistan and Afghanistan have similar feelings towards the same European systems put in place for the same purpose of maintenance of their hegemony into the present.

But so what? In 1957 when I felt that white racism would someday choke those who believed in it, benefited from it, and stood silently by, I didn’t expect those possible consequences to have such a broad based impact. If there are “homegrown” attacks on the United States, there’s good possibility that such reciprocity would surely engulf so many innocent people as well. It would indiscriminately affect the white racist and their systems, the white social justice worker working towards some type of parity, and non white people as well. It would not only strike a blow to dismantle white supremacist systems, but the systematic infrastructure of the country upon which I depend. IMO that ain’t all good.

What’s the answer? I have no idea. The situation is so complex that it appears if it is ever to straighten itself; we must all start from scratch. But then again, that’s no guarantee anything would fundamentally change because of the human ego and the cultural influence European culture has had on all of us which begs the question, is the human need for power and control universal?

I don’t know how all this will play but I do know that something is playing similar to my ’57 tune. I just hope that in spite of the human struggles, that we’ll finally move towards a more just world society and white supremacy, along with its bedfellow corporate hegemony, fade into a sensible secular world humanism.