WHY CAN'T WE LIVE TOGETHER?

My America the Beautiful

My country tears from me
What happened to democracy?
Of thee I sing
Never finalized far from realized
From mountain to country side
Lost in ambiguity

My country tears from me
What happened to liberty?
Which I never knew
Sit slogans aside one great big lie
White immoral pride
Their freedom to rings

My country tears from me
What happened to morality?
Hung from trees
Smelling in the breeze
Freedom’s song died
Wrong is right, right is might
Dirt for prosperity

My country tears form me
Land where my fathers died
Land that killed my pride
Where white supremacy resides
1608 till 0’10
Of Tis I sing
Of thee I sing

Shabaka 7/10


“Simply, we are all too professional to allow disagreements between BP and any other organization to affect our behaviors," Ryan Urik, a BP well safety adviser working on the Development Driller II, which is drilling a backup relief well, said in an e-mail last week.- From article discussing BP et.al. sealing the Deepwater Well.”

The above excerpt taken from an AP article “Congressman: too much dispersant used in oil spill”, by Josef Hebert is my attempt to show two opposing cultural expression and why people like Lincoln, Jefferson and others have thought that African people and European people can not live equally in the same society.

Throughout history there have been conflicts between people of the African phenotype and those of the Europeans. History shows, from the Assyrians, through the Greek, Roman, and Arab invasions of Africa, it has taken pains to obfuscate these conflicts as being cultural, and the reasons why are for another topic. Further, modern history has compressed these conflicts into “racial” ones based simply on how one looks. They were all European types because they needed the African type to have no substantial role in history. They wanted the African phenotype removed to make it distasteful to humanity in both substance and form. To do this culture was removed (because there’s undeniable beauty in all cultures) and replaced with ideas of a “Race” of Africans (Black Race) based on phenotype, which made it easier to demonize because you can see it, make it what you want. However that became problematic because the human beings taste is eclectic, so no phenotype is universality displeasing. It must have been something deeper to promote this idea.

This essay tries to reduce that “something deeper” down to culture, not race, and how cultures think, or in other words, share their Memes over centuries. (Cultural Memes may be incorrect, but it’s more acceptable today than a genetic trait).

The statement in the excerpt that deals with how the three companies are “too professional” to allow disagreement between them is telling of how European cultural Memes are used to foster, for non Europeans, yet hide, for Europeans, the ideas of “race.” BP, Halliburton, and Transoceans are European run companies. They are a microcosm of European world organizational structure. When a serious threat appears, no matter their own disagreement, they will work together because they are “too professional” not to.

Let juxtaposition that against how Africans run/control their countries, or if Black controlled Corporations, how they nearly always need European counsel. There are no two African countries that can work together for any length of time. So far, there are always conflicts and arguments as to how they “feel” about how things should run. To further my point, what do you think African Americans mean when they ask, “do you feel me?” African Americans and Africans will kill because they “feel” someone has disrespected them or they “feel” they don’t have respect from others of a different ethnic group.

To condense the two ideas it boils down to one group is “too professional” and the other “feeling” in their dealing within societies. I suggest that this is basically cultural, but it is made to seem more racial. This is important, because if it were accepted as mostly racial, then that would mean that this concept could be manipulated by social means to comply with phenotypes. That would mean that African people could accept that feeling (emotion) is basically who they are and cognition is foreign or not as important. Europeans would accept that cognition is mostly who they are and feeling is foreign or not as important. That’s why BP, Halliburton and Transoceanic can work together even if they have disagreement. They place cognition over feelings. (Emotion)

This has major implications in society. If African people are stereotyped in the media, educational institutions, and in their own communities as their personal feeling (emotion) being more important than cognition (thinking), they will internalize that feeling is predominately who they are and if they feel like doing something, whether it’s becoming a doctor or a drug dealer act accordingly. The bottom line becomes their individual socialization. But most likely their socialization is the media, educational institutions, and their community, which is mostly controlled by Europeans (over the years the power for shaping children’s ideas has diminished within the family structure, especially in the isolated Black northern “inner” cities) and the European can’t “feel” them, only “think” them, and the African is punished because he than has difficulty living with the European cognitive mode, negating his “feeling” (emotional) mode causing cognitive dissonance.

Why is this in the first place? How can I say such things?

The white man’s burden is the black man’s curse. European culture must suffer the African cultural ideas and the African cultural idea must suffer the attempts of its removal.

Plato expressed the European cultural idea that logic is far superior to [base] emotion.
However the African cultural idea was born out of discussion about life, while the European cultural idea was born out of how to sustain life, strife. This is due mostly to environment. The African cultural idea developed out of Natures bounty and didn’t have to concern itself with daily means of survival. It had time to use equally both the cognitive mind and the emotional mind, balancing feelings with cognition. The European cultural mind had to plot, scheme, deceive, kill to survive, things that had to suppress “emotion.”

Upon contact, it is obvious that they both couldn’t live in the same space, one had to subject the other. Giving their epistemology, which do you think prevailed? This conflict has been ongoing since contact. The ancient (BCE) diffusion of the worldwide African idea needed to be diminished, if not removed, so the European cultural idea (CE) could flourish satisfying it’s natural need for the dominance of cognition over emotion (feelings.)

This conflict, this never ending quest to remove the essential African idea that many people of African descent still carry in their ancestral memory today. This attempt to make it racial instead of cultural thereby promoting the idea that the African phenotype is predominately an “emotional” creature obfuscating the historical evidence that they are both, is why the two cultures cannot live together unless the African cultural idea submits itself making them less human.

Shabaka Tecumseh 8/1/10