Toward the Unity of North American Africans

Toward the Unity of North American Africans

We must force black unity!
--Elijah Muhammad

This topic has challenged the thinking and actions of our greatest minds and social activists. Our intellectuals have pondered over this topic until their brains were exhausted, depleted, and probably their bodies writhed in pain, after years of work on the subject. Some held on until the end of their lives, giving their all to the matter, others threw in the towel and departed for other causes, other opportunities, and there were those who simply sold out, convinced the cause was lost.

And so we come to the now, a time in the myth of Sisyphus where we are, in a sense, at the top of the mountain and yet at the bottom. Even Sisyphus didn't experience this dilemma, this moment in space and time that defies the law of physics, for how can one be at the top and bottom simultaneously? We're in the White House, yet in the dog house, out house, down and out in Babylon. Clearly we've come a long way but have miles to go before we sleep, miles to go before we sleep--the poet said.

We therefore ask what shall we do at this hour that is such a joy and such a pain, for as soon as we rejoiced over the victory of Obama, the pain of an economic meltdown engulfed the entire world, and of course we were caught in the belly of the beast, robbed and left half dead on the roadside.

Yes, it shall take ineluctable energy to come out of this economic minefield. for sure, if we don't do the right thing, we shall go neither backward nor forward, but we shall remain in stagnation, stuck on stupid.

So we must again don our thinking caps to configure a way out of this conundrum of major proportion. How do we escape the box of Pax Americana, for it is a certainty the American empire is falling, and perhaps the American republic as well. Long ago, Amiri Baraka asked what shall we do when white power falls? For sure, there shall be a power grab by all ethnic groups for their share of the pie as it falls into pieces. What piece of the pie do we want? Other groups shall come with a unified front, but what about us, a divided people, totally lacking a consensus on freedom. Some cling precariously to their American citizenship while slapped in the face at every turn. Others dismiss their American identity for a Pan African fantasy, for what fool would return home after 400 years in the wilderness? But the alienation is so great, the trauma and unresolved grief so severe that there are those of us who would escape from the forest to the jungle, claiming a hut on the Niger is better than suffering in Babylon, for the water of the Mississippi wreaks of blood and bones, and the putrid taste overwhelming. Let us then escape to the Motherland, even if we are called American slaves when we return through the door of no return.

What a complexity we endure, what a schizophrenic act we must perform, an action that awaits a solution, but none shall come until we gain a semblance of our mental equilibrium. Only then can we arrive at a consensus on freedom and the prerequisite unity.

Unity is the key, but we cannot unify while our minds are disparate , while our loyalties are divided between religious and political allegiances , including gender divisions. The post Million Man March Movement is but a precursor of our challenge, for after gathering the men, the post march organization was dead in the water. Apparently the Million Men went back to their sects, cults, fraternities, organizations and groups, splitting the men to winds of chaos and division, in short, to where they were before the march.

We should know now that only a secular non-religious, non-political formation shall bring and keep us in any degree of functional unity. We should understand that we can have no multi-cultural unity until we have forged unity within our group, North American Africans, and this can only come about after we go through the process of detoxification from the addiction to white supremacy in all its vicissitudes. The process begins with recognizing the grand denial some of us pretend, for no problem can be solved until we admit we have a problem, that we are indeed addicted to the American mythology to the degree our lives are unmanageable and we are a danger to ourselves and others. Yes, this is a humbling moment on the road to unity and freedom in the last days of the American empire.

So many of us are arrogant, in the manner of our master, of course, believing that we are exceptional and beyond fault since we have obtained all the manifestations required to live in the world of make believe. Yet there is clear evidence in our behavior that self hatred consumes us at every turn. We are unable to look at another black man and/or woman without feelings of hatred, jealousy, envy and contempt. Even when we have it all (nigger rich), we cannot stand to see another black person with little or nothing. Many of us steeped in Pan Africanism and Afro-centrism, go to Africa but find ourselves eating only American food at restaurants. And our children attend socalled independent black schools yet refuse to clean up after themselves because they say they don't clean at home since they have maids.

No, until we enter a process, some giant or house to house recovery ritual, there shall be no real, functional unity in our community. This addiction has infected all classes of our society, the middle class actually in a mental state more pathological than the bloods in the hood. Yes, the edumaked blacks may need more help, therapy, than the traumatized bloods who are homeless, drug addicted and criminalized.

The edumaked middle class so-called Negro is first a victim of his brainwashing in the white and/or negro universities and colleges. He's more Greek than African. Amiri Baraka says we send them to the white schools/negro too, and they come home hating everything we're about but they don't even know what we're about, don't have a clue, for they are too brainwashed to understand. Classically, he/she is the colonial elite, those privileged to receive the white supremacy edumakation.

Dr. Wade Nobles says while our black boys go to prison, our black girls enter college yet find themselves in a kind of prison as well, for few of them shall find mates, and many shall suffer mental breakdowns trying to absorb the Eurocentric racist mythology called education.

Again, the absolute need for all of us to enter a detoxification and recovery program before we talk about unity as a people, for with our weird, twisted, convoluted thoughts, we are indeed a danger to ourselves and others. And this goes for all classes, from the black bourgeoisie to the grass roots.
--Marvin X

See Marvin X's How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy, a Pan African, 12 Step Model for a Mental Health Peer Group, Black Bird Press, Berkeley, 2007, foreword by Dr. Nathan Hare, afterword by Ptah Allah El, $19.95