‘The blackman’s dilemma’

The gruesome death of George Floyd which reverberated all over the world has poignantly reopened the issue of race relationship not just in America, but in the whole of the Western world. Frank Luntz, a Republican in the U.S. said to be a ‘focus group expert’ speaking in the context of polling he conducted, believes that America is a different country today: The polling results showed that 57 per cent of Americans now agree that “police are more likely to use excessive force against African Americans.” Luntz went on: “In my 35 years of polling, I’ve never seen opinion shift this fast or deeply. We are a different country today than just 30 days.”

Joe Biden, former Vice-President and presumptive Democratic presidential candidate in November, appearing at Floyd funeral last week by video, spoke reassuringly to Floyd’s daughter: “You’re so brave. Daddy’s looking down on you.” He added: “When there is justice for George Floyd, we will truly be on our way to racial justice in America.” All over America there is the outcry for police reform. So outraged was the Minneapolis City Council by the horror of the death that a majority of its members said they were going to disband the city’s police department. In some places, there were debates on whether to defund the police or not. Only yesterday, the Republicans in the Senate agreed on a proposal to engender police reform which will entail banning chokeholds. State and local police departments which violate the ban are to be blocked from collecting federal grants. The proposal is aimed at ending qualified immunity for police officers, use of body cameras is compulsory, and lynching would become a federal hate crime. Undoubtedly, the measures, when they become law upon the debate on the floor of the Senate next week, will be reassuring. They will douse the prevailing waves of tension that have been sweeping through the United States for more than three weeks now. All said, that is the law, and all men of good will should support the American Congress in the quest to open a new chapter in race harmonious relationships and which confers dignity on all citizens, black or white, as well as enthrone equality before the law.

Law is one aspect, attitude is another. There is covert and there is overt racism and pigmentational discrimination in the American society. As I did write in this column 28 years ago in the case of Rodney King, it never ceases to shock and amaze me that a person could choke a fellow human being and, without any compunction and feeling, watch him die in his hands. There can be no further proof of man’s inhumanity to man arising from a total lacking in Creation-Knowledge and ignorance of the lawfulness that governs all life. In this lawfulness is justice. I may as well share my reflection of that year, 14 May, 1992 which I consider is as relevant today as it was at the time.

The troubling reflection goes as follows:
“The conflagration in Los Angeles has lit up the skies and revealed the daunting difficulties an average black American faces. The problems may be regarded as old, but their enormity, increasing by the day, is certainly new. The form is old; the substance is new in its dimension: Homelessness, unemployment, alienation, disorientation, and single parenthood. Today, two-thirds of black American babies are born out of wedlock, and more than half of the black families are headed by single parent women, unemployed and poorly housed, if not altogether homeless. The problems are perplexing. Why do black American go through the cycle of tribulations and explode in riots to protest their unfortunate plight?

Those who say broken homes are responsible are as correct as are those who see the culprit in racism. For harmony can breed nothing but harmony. It could not have been for nothing that procreation must involve a man and a woman, each bringing into the union what each has but the other lacks and benefitting symbiotically in that complementarity. I should imagine that the matter should not end there, and that the desirable upbringing of a child should involve the combination of those forces which pulled the lever and set forth the reaction in the first place. As a matter of fact, active and passive forces are to be observed everywhere in natural process. No denigration is meant when passive is conceptualized as female and active as male. The differentiation refers only for functional purposes. The female whether in atomic core or in the electricity cable or in battery cells, refers to the store house of power, the passive, while the male, the active, refers to the virulent, outgoing and executive actor. The passive female aspect, of delicate nature and thus more connected with finer currents, is the stronger. It absorbs of this finer current and mediates the power to the outworking, male, active aspect which utilizes it but is held constantly in the female passive aspect. (Never mind the wrong attribution of electrical charges by science). This is the secret of atomic structure, of the core of protons and neutrons (+) which holds electron (-) perpetually orbiting around it in shells, electrons alone which partake of all reactions with the environment.

In this light, isn’t said that woman is psychically stronger than man? What man, who is the man who, at the end of the day, does not bow before the right woman? The joint working of both forces, each in its own allotted role, collaboratively like musical notes, brings harmony, and hence, stability. If the collapse of the atom, or of the huge stars, results from the collapse of this structure, and the collapse of the electrical system arises from the collapse of the two terminal poles, may this phenomenon not also spell the collapse of a human society. With one out of three black marriages collapsing and with one in every jail or somewhere near it, a correlation amasses which would appear to be corroborated by Hispanic family solidity and corresponding social ascent through the same inhospitable forces which hold down black people.

However, this is only one way of looking at the matter, although in the natural setting only a thin line separates this and any other. Another approach is to ask: Why are some black and others are white? Is there any suggestion, even as science has discovered, that the earth is composed of various radiation belt zones and that each body type has been fashioned from and for a specific zone? It does appear to make some sense, no doubt, to imagine that living under water or on the moon requires apparel different from the requirement of normal terrestrial life, even as tropical clothing would be different from winter cloaks.

The protagonists of this hypothesis assert that, since everything is radiation and everything visible or tangible is the outward or coarsest form of the component radiation, everything in a specific radiation belt is steeped in that energy ocean, homogeneous with it from which it derived form and is maintained. Stepping out this radiation belt or zone is, therefore, like fish out of water. And living perpetually not in the natural setting in this wise would be equivalent to attempting to live perpetually on the moon or on the sea bed. With a lot of effort, the power of science and technology no doubt would be a powerful aid. But in the end, Mendel’s Law must always nail home the truth, nature always the wiser, will always prevail; everything must inevitably return to its natural origin.

Everyone who has lived abroad experiences this to the finger nails. Quite often, the body hungers for home food. Food derived from the same currents as the body! By this reasoning, black people living in America are not living on home soil. Being weaker in the ability to work the environment has not helped matters either. They must be subject to another pressure—the phenomenon of the strong overcoming the weak always, everywhere. Losing out at both ends, they find the environment scorching, and break down psychologically (that is, in the mind) and, in the end where it matters most—in the spirit (their being). Once the individual collapses, the family goes under and the race is submerged. A few exceptions to the rule will be individuals who, despite the raging storm, have made themselves strong inwardly. It ought to be unequivocally stated that white or black, every human being is a spirit and may have lived interchangeably —today as white and tomorrow as black—depending on what each needs for his further development or atonement at a given time in accordance with the Law.

The solution to the perplexing problems of black people in America will be uncommon, requiring deep knowledge of the totality of life, the other correlations of life of perfection. It must be stated that no one suffers because he is black or white, but because of himself, how he stands inwardly in accordance with his own volition—strong or weak, clarified or moored in dross.

. The title of today’s write-up is not original. It is taken from the title of a book written by Areoye Oyebola on the struggle by Africans to throw off the yoke of apartheid in South Africa. Oyebola was a former editor of the Daily Times.