We talk too much about the Black skin of ours and sing too many songs about our remembered (and embittered) History. It is kind of a myopic and destructive arrogance – the sheer joy of our recitations on deprivations, misery and enduring cruelty, heaped upon a marked people. And we clutch our tragedy to our bosom, flaunting our personal history of horror, as though it were some bright, jewel-encrusted pin – the envy of every eye that beheld it.
The Black man. His-story. I am the Black man. The reviled and derided. The used and the much abused Black man; sold into slavery by his brothers, separated from kith and kin by the demon white man, who scattered us afar and parted our land. Woe is me! Behold my peculiar suffering… And on and on and on the song , lulling the Black soul into a deep self-satisfied sleep. The self-absorbed sound of the Black men reveling in the sins done to his Black skin. His-story. It’s history, my friend, and like it or not, it’s time to move on!
This continuing obsession of self has already cost us dearly. Our complete self-absorption has blinded us to the world beyond and to the Truth. Our history has nothing to do with our Black skins, per se. Our Black skins were simply a wondrous convenience. If that distinction had not ben provided by Nature, man would have conjured a contrived formula, some definitive external marking, which would help to make their games easier to pursue with some amount of order. A bright yellow star sewn to ones outer garment might have served quite well (as it happens it did!). Red skin might suffice, what? Slanted eyes, maybe? A foreign tongue, crime enough perhaps? Any marking or characteristic would certainly provide adequate excuse for providing a sinister rationale for the proposed hurt inflicted.
The Black mans history of hurt is not his-story. It is the worlds story! It is the shameful testament of the Evil we have allowed to survive in our midst, unchallenged. How different is the Black mans tale, to that of the Red man, for instance. Read the history of the lies, the hurt and defiling perpetrated upon the Native American Indians, at the hands on the invading hordes…and I dare you not to weep. And yet, its the same old story, nothing new at all. And repeated in the hurt done to all the native peoples in all the other lands that caught the fancy of the aggressor, and upon which he would raise monuments to his glory. Never once sorrowing for the blood and bones of the native sons that lay crushed beneath is impudent drive to power and great glory.
The Black man – lost in his own myopic world view and blind to the wider vision – sees not the painful contradiction, in seeking justice and equity from those who (by reason of grave wrongdoing and total disregard for humanity) established themselves in power by defending injustice and woeful inequity! The Black man, lulled to sleep by the constant refrain of the songs of his own personal suffering, never for one moment thought to ask: “Do I really want to be the one (and bear equal guilt), with those willing to raise their cities on innocent blood, fearless of a justifying God?”
Can it be wondered then, that maybe the Black man finds himself lost and stumbling down the dark path. When the holiest book invites us to be “…our brothers keeper“, while yet in the Black mans lexicon, he has allowed his ‘brother’ to mean only himself! “We sisters need to look out for each other…” And the Black woman only means herself! It is Skin-talk. The Native American…is not a ‘brother’. The dispossessed Maori woman from New Zealand…is not a ‘sister’. Nor are any of the hundreds and thousands other men and women who have felt the hand of the same undivided, unerring, unchanging…EVIL.
We are united in our Skin. And thus, divided…living in solitary confinement and separated from the rest of the world and the rest of mankind…separated from their hurt, their pain and their fear…in the face of the same one, continuing, recurring EVIL that stalks. The flesh (our Skin), has become the whole and the all, and the Spirit has accounted for nought. And so we miss the point. We miss the boat. And thereby we allow Evil to continue its mad rampage. Not understanding that our story, is NOT ‘our’ story! It is not the story of Blackness or of Black hurt…it is just a part (and a very small part), and proof of the “true story” of Evil, and its continuing presence and impact upon Life.
Dialogues In Black 