Who am I?

Socrates urged Greek (and thus Western cultures) to “Know Thy Self.” But the Self of Western thought has been busy defining the “stranger” ever since—long before a Malcolm or a Dr. King arrived on the scene—long before the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements of the 1950s to early 1970s.

It was not just the signs or the practice of apartheid, American style, that Black leaders and activists of Civil Rights and Black Power movements responded to, for this generation, like other generations before them, were asking the question, Who am I?, trying to recall the answer from underneath the Western Self.

On waves of freedom came the ships—and the terror.  Great thinkers institutionalized the latter. 

The Negro…exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state…for Africa is no historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit…what we properly understand about Africa is the unhistorical, undeveloped spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be preserved here only as on the threshold of the world’s history.

The great philosopher George W.F. Hegel theorizing in 1830, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History and in the Philosophy of Right, dismissed the whole continent of Africa and the long and mighty walk of its people.  

British novelist Charles Dickens’ depiction of the London outcast enlightened 19th Century readers about the plight of poor and working class whites, but, today, his disparaging remarks in “The Niger Expedition” about the African is ignored: 

Xenophobia traveled in the storage areas of slave ships…

In Observations on Concerning the Increase of Mankind, 1751, the great statesman and scientist Benjamin Franklin, concurring with European thinkers and novelists, wrote

And the great man of liberty himself, thought often on the differences between whites and Blacks. He concluded that yes, the Self is free so long as the stranger remains innately “inferior”:

His notes guided the American Enlightenment and today serve to recall those days when thoughts on freedom quelled the terror. 

We live in a nation’s vague remembrance of a Nate Turner here or of a Yaa Asantewa there. What nerves we aggravated when, in the 1960s and 1970s we first-generation Black college students imagined tackling the gunpowder and the cross of Maafa and restoring our spirits through close readings of Walter Rodney, Frantz Fanon, Marcus Garvey, Aimee Cesaire, Ida B. Wells, Langston. Runaways, they feared.  Rebels!

Who am I? Who are we?

…Hey, down the road there… You, living with the lies, intimately, seek the whole story and then listen!  Listen! Let the drums of Sankofa be your guide.  Go Back and Take your history back!

Who am I? A knower of rivers, Langston answered back.  As old as the rivers, we are, defying the xenophobia in Western thought.  Survivors of the Maafa and more…

Who am I?

The neo-fascist century beginning with Bush II and 9-11 has ushered in a seemingly new era of xenophobia against Muslims and Arabs in general, on the one hand, and, on the other, against Mexicans and, in particular, Spanish-speaking immigrants.  Seemingly—because here in the United States, a reign of terror as result of xenophobic response to Indigenous and African/African descendants remains the foundation for the uprising of violence with the full support of the State’s legal and judicial apparatuses.  As Indigenous and Black citizens of the U.S. know, if he or she is consciously awake in this hour of the betrayal, any “good” Indigenous or Black is a “dead” Indigenous or Black.  For xenophobes, distinctions among the strangers are arbitrary: any stranger frightens him or her.  The stranger and all that the stranger stands for—his or her history, culture, and way of being in the world—threatens freedom, as the only Self made universal and invincible perceives itself. The stranger, creating spells of chill, is in need of “treatment”—civilizing or nullifying.  

Consequently, there is no “good” Muslim because there never was a “good” Indigenous or Black, except for the “treated” Indigenous forced to attend boarding school or the caricature of a “happy” Black, useful, though decisively dead--truly terrorized to death—and we have yet to recover to wage any sustained resistance.

It is problematic, then, to ask young Black children, arriving as they have within one long continuous night of terror, to respond to the question: Who am I?  Appointed leaders and American dreamers too fearful of the answer refuse to ask themselves the question in this era of the dead.

But many voices are not hesitant to respond to our children with ready-made answers.

President Barrack Obama, the man of “just” wars, responds: the irresponsible!  Lift your bootstraps and lift yourself—(but to where?). Mute!

Generations before, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. responded to Obama’s predecessors: a person cannot be asked to lift themselves by their bootstrap when there are no boots! A cruel joke!  How is it that our children cannot read or write, even after spending 12 years in school? Why are Black educators terrorized into silence if they dare to even think or utter the phrase “our Black children” because such a phrase is shouted down as “racist”? 

Who am I?

So our children respond: A daughter of the owner of a Lexus, a criminal, a angry rebel without cause—above all a consumer of products that I cannot produce unless as an enslaved human-clog.

Who am I?

I am a foot soldier defending a turf of run-down housing and terrorizing residents here in the hood or in Afghanistan.  Our children hear the muddled confusion, as John Henrik Clarke would say, of grown Black people answering “American” and, agreeing that “we” have a duty to kill the “terrorists” over there and not allow “them,” the Mexicans, or “them,” the Africans to take “our” jobs.     

That our children cannot answer the question is as old as Earth’s first people, under the sunrays of Ra, bathing in the Nile. A Malcolm or a Dr. King would have recalled from the enslaved’s narratives memory of brutality and cruelty in the formation of this nation that not only denied the reality of the “gentleman” and “gentlewoman” but also exceeded the confines of a specific time and a specific location and a specific collective of oppressed people. 

We had grandparents, too, uneducated in the thoughts of great thinkers but wise in the knowledge of cotton fields and hanging bodies, grandparents with memories, thinking like Langston’s narrator: “goin’ down to de river” because “worries,” in the land of the free and brave, makes life “so weary” but surviving another day, asking us, Who are you?

Who am I?—housewives walking along side an empty bus while high school students march. Survivors entering the backseat of a paddy wagon, waving to organizers Baker, Ture, and Moses, tirelessly passing on the answer while gathering signatures. And, yes, a survivor of prison was Malcolm, a pastor was Dr. King, a young lawyer was Newton—all and others schooled by Cheikh Anta Diop directing them to converse with Ra, Mother Isis, Queen Hatshepsut, the Nubian, the Yoruba, and the Zulu who, they will tell you, are not yours or claim!  

To ask and answer the question, Who am I?, is the difference between life as a free people and death as a collective of zombies.  

 

The question is still being asked today, but our voices are not there to answer.  We are not there to point them in the direction of the answers because the Empire now, more fearful than ever before in its history of fear, fears another movement from within the Black community.  The marginalization of Black thought, past and present, is no accident.  –And why not? The power of the whole of the Black tradition, not just the study of individual figures, is too frightening to those in control of the grand narcissistic narrative of the Self. 

We have known thousands of rivers, “ancient as the world and older than the/flow of human blood in human veins.” 

Who will dare to tell Black children who they are?

Not everyone is able and others are unwilling. 

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.