Racism, black lives and the testosterone paranoia

“Working Men of all Countries Unite!”
The Communist Manifesto
Marx and Engels

In Oakland California, in the white neighborhood of Piedmont, the only time in my life I was considered exotic, was during my first encounter with white policemen. I was thirteen in the eighth grade on a bicycle with a summer vacation job of watering the gardens of white families who travelled mostly to Europe.

From their gingerly blue eyes, I appeared to the duo as an instrument to jazz-off their improvisational evening patrol as dictated by their curious mood while they contacted my foster parents to sort out my identity. Passersby and motorists moved along with benign indifference unlike the appealing figure of a black American that would have surely triggered paranoia in the blue-uniformed men. By then the testosterone fever of the white man over the presence of a young black man was yet to permeate all aspects of the Western Psyche.

It took some years for the most reputable scientific journals of the world to consistently publish studies that show that the average black man had from 4 to 18 percent more testosterone than the average white man.

Testosterone is the quintessential hormone in men responsible for their notable aggression, physical activities, and prowess. Men dominate women in most physical activities – and it makes sense that women have their own football and athletic teams – because men on average have ten times more testosterone than the average woman.

At last, a scientific explanation has been obtained on why the black man has been sought throughout the history of humanity as a leading source of physical labor, from the construction of pyramids, roads and skyscrapers; mining, steel and vehicle manufacture; plantation slavery, and even as police, soldiers and mercenaries in world wars. Are black men not in the frontiers of all the military invasions by the American army around the globe, which include Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, to name but a few? Who could have forgotten the irrepressible bitterness and paranoia of Adolf Hitler in the World Olympic games as he observed from his seat in a German stadium the unparalleled domination of the field of athletics by the black American, Jessie Owens, which foreshadowed the demise of the Führer.

But today, the paranoia of Adolf Hitler against Jessie Owens can be found in the killers of George Floydd, Breona Taylor, the Black Consciousness Movement leader Steve Biko, the shooters of Ahmaud Arbery, and the white police officers from Wisconsin who pumped in seven bullets into Jacob Blake. The same test on the bosom of most white policemen in America. The western police institutions increasingly appear as legalized and armed agencies that give employment opportunity to racist organizations and white supremacists such as aggrieved descendants of slave owners, the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazis, Skinheads and numerous others to join their government-protected enclave with the free license and gun to kill black men. Black men are also in disproportionate numbers in the police cells, prisons, and dungeons where these white nationalist killers also serve in subterfuge as security agents. Does the white policeman pull his gun on the black man due to testosterone deficit induced paranoia because he is convinced he stands no chance but defeat without it? Or does the testosterone paranoia syndrome only flare up in response to challenges to historically conditioned norms and privileges emanating from racism, the surviving superstructure from the socio-economic formation of slavery? Also, the right to bear arms, and economic consequence of slavery which enabled the white slave-owner to subdue his rebellious slaves had survived as the second amendment in the American Constitution, often today referred to by President Donald Trump as a reminder to his white fellow racist and nationalist followers.

In Nigeria and around the globe the social progress made in the advancement of multilateralism and the socio-economic formations of capitalism and socialism has daily lead to new forms of work and innovation to enable men and women to utilize their testosterone levels to their advantages under the ideal principle of diversity and equal opportunity. Under a superstructure of racism as a remnant of slavery, testosterone deficit becomes a source of paranoia fueling envy that ends with black genocide while the naturally high testosterone level in the black man in America, her full-fledged citizen, becomes a curse instead of an asset to the development of the American nation.

Racism and the doctrine of white supremacy remain the origin and reservoir of the testosterone paranoia induced violence, the bulwark of white nationalist resistance to repealing of the Second Amendment, and the resulting black genocide spearheaded by armed white policemen. Unless racism and the doctrine of white supremacy which imposed bastardy on the black and colored people of the world are understood as the enabling superstructures for securing the socio-economic formations of slavery in the western world and the economic foundation of western imperialism with the United States of America as its epicenter, catalytic to present-day global capitalism, and is redressed by the united power of workers of all races to create a multilateral and socialist world order with emergent and eco-friendly social relations, racism with white supremacy will not in the present socio-economic formation whither into oblivion or be legislated away by Emancipation Proclamations and Civil Rights Amendments.

While such Amendments have served to tranquilize the erupting rebellions and social unrests in Western Cities, they only broaden the repertoire of strategies available to the ruling white supremacists for reform to sustain their declining national and unilateral global power. Amendments that directly challenge the organized use of violence by the police and their testosterone paranoia to protect racial privileges and white supremacy such as the defunding of the police their disarmament and creation of community policing by the people as proposed by the Black Lives Matter Movement are rejected by most western governments as attempts to end white nationalism, racism, and white supremacy and to hoist socialism on the racist American State.

The Emancipation Proclamation of 1864 by President Abraham Lincoln may have freed the slaves from the plantations in the South with the privilege of share-cropping offered to a few slaves, but of utmost importance is that it delivered the freed black people to the doorsteps of the newly set-up manufacturing, mining, steel and automobile assembly industries – investments from the primitive accumulation from slavery, the proceeds of over three hundred years of labor, sweat and tears of black people, in the banks that have become the booty to be supervised for national and global investments by the conquering Northern ruling white supremacists.

It also meant that a new form of policing, reformed from the break-up of security from the collapsed institutions of slavery was needed to guarantee white or national security with its greatest problems of containing and controlling the newly freed black proletariat, protect private property or white investments and of course the Right (of white people) to bear arms. At this time the Jim Crow Laws were set up to isolate and monitor the problematic black proletariat just as similar draconian apartheid laws were set up many years later in South Africa to contain and as of necessity use the black man with his testosterone endowment and unparalleled physical strength to build civilization, but keep him under inferior separate development, segregated living conditions, schools, buses, and other public utilities and periodically be applying their universal strategy of genocide as the mechanism to retain black servitude and control. Many white supremacists and their organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan were invited to join and expand the racist foundations of the present American police force. The black man had to be contained with guns, unwelcomed as an ordinary citizen but from his testosterone a necessary labor asset that remains a white nationalist problem

To be continued tomorrow.
Professor Onwubiko is head, Department of Biochemistry University of Nigeria, Nsukka