Slipping into Darkness

October 7, 2021

"You know there are no black people in Africa," she said. Most Americans, weaned on the myth of drawable lines between human beings, have to sit with that statement. It sounds nonsensical to our ears. Of course there were black people in Africa. There is a whole contingent of Black people in Africa. His could anyone not see that?

"Africans are not black," she said. "They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele. They are not black. They are just themselves. They are humans on the land. That is how they see themselves, and that is who they are."

What we take as gospel in American culture is alien to them, she said.

"They don't become black until they go to America or come to the U.K.," she said. "It is then that they become black."

[Isabel Wilkerson. Caste. (New York: Random House, 2020), pp.52–53]

In the book Caste, the author speaks of the making of the "New World," the exact terminology used when referring to Christopher Colombus's so-called discovery of America. This New World is based on this caste system of race and is therefore a racist system. For many this logic is simple, however, some do not understand and continue to believe that equality and equity can be gained in a nation constructed on the premise of white supremacy.

I am forced to identify as Black as a consequence of my ancestors being abducted from the place where we were able to be human. Stepping into the "white man's world" confined us to the denigrated definition of blackness made expressly for our dehumanization. Within ancient Africa blackness was not simply a color, it was a descriptive used for the man, the essence of life, and the archetypical seed of origin; without Africa black is a color by which one gauges their apathy toward its existence.

Whiteness must be abolished and humanity must take its place. If it is the making the new world that removed each from themselves we will need to build anew in order to properly repatriate humanity.