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Black supremacy

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Black supremacy is the arguably racist belief that blacks are superior to members of other races.

Black supremacy versus white supremacy

In its simplest form, black supremacy is the belief in the inherent superiority of the "black race." Historically, white supremacy has been reinforced and sustained worldwide by instruments of Western economic, political, and military power and, as a result, it has been a central ideology in the shaping of world history. Black supremacist ideology, however, has not had a similar impact because of a lack of institutional power.

In Killing Rage: Ending Racism, author and social activists bell hooks writes:

Why is it so difficult for many white folks to understand that racism is oppressive not because white folks have prejudicial feelings about blacks, but because it is a system that promotes domination and subjugation? The prejudicial feelings some blacks may express about whites are in no way linked to a system of domination the affords us any power to coercively control the lives and well-being of white folks. That needs to be understood. (1995, p. 154)[1]

In modern history, black supremacy has been a reactionary phenomenon most evident among various religions or cults. In this context, it has been used as an ideological tool in framing a kind of liberation theology for the societally marginalized and oppressed. Scholar and philosopher Cornel West comments in his essay Malcolm X and Black Rage:

The basic aim of Black Muslim theology -- with its distinct Black supremacist account of the origins of white people -- was to counter white supremacy. Yet this preoccupation with white supremacy still allowed white people to serve as the principal point of reference. That which fundamentally motivates one still dictates the terms of what one thinks and does -- so the motivation of a Black supremacist doctrine reveals how obsessed one is with white supremacy….[2]

Due to the similar racialist and separatist ideologies, some black supremacist organizations have joined forces with white supremacist or extremist organizations. Marcus Garvey invited a Ku Klux Klan spokesman to speak at one of his rallies, and the Nation of Islam has ties to George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party, both of which are known for their anti-Jewish sentiments. The NOI also has established ties with a number of organizations across racial and ethnic lines, including the Unification Church; and has a working relationship with the organization of wealthy economist and outsider politico Lyndon LaRouche, widely considered a neo-fascist by the mainstream media. White supremacist Tom Metzger of White Aryan Resistance spoke at the "National Black Power Summit and Youth Rally," hosted by the New Black Panther Party.

Rastafari

File:RoyalParchmentScrollBlackSupremacy.jpg
The Royal Parchment Scroll of Black Supremacy.

The Rastafari movement was originally founded on principles that included a belief in the inherent wickedness of the white race and the superiority of the black race, though these beliefs rapidly evolved into a more universalist approach which accepts converts from all ethnicities. One of the three major Rastafari orders, the Bobo Ashanti Order of Rastafari, however, continues to adhere to a black supremacist doctrine.[1]

Marcus Garvey, black nationalist and recognized Rasta prophet, believed that white achievements were due to white children being taught that they are superior. By the same token, he held that if black children are taught that they are superior, then there is a greater chance that they will succeed in life.[2] [3] Garvey faced criticism after he even met with prominent leader of the Ku Klux Klan. W.E.B. DuBois claimed that "Marcus Garvey is the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and in the world" and Asa Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, publisher of the Harlem magazine "The Messenger", called Garvey the "messenger boy of the Klan".[4]

Along with the Holy Piby, the Royal Parchment Scroll of Black Supremacy, written during the 1920s by proto-Rastafarian preacher Fitz Balintine Pettersburg, is recognized as one of the root documents of Rastafarian thought. It influenced Jamaican Garveyite leaders of the 1920s, and was promulgated by early Rasta leader Leonard Howell, who adopted some of Garvey's black supremacist tenets. Howell used the Royal Parchment Scroll of Black Supremacy as the basis for his book The Promised Key (also published under the Hindu name Gangunguru Maragh which means "teacher of famed wisdom"), which he wrote during his imprisonment in 1934-36.

Nation of Islam

In the 1930s, the Nation of Islam emerged, coming to prominence during the 1960s, when charismatic minister Malcolm X became a spokesman for the movement. This was during the time of the American Civil Rights Movement, when a number of African American organizations became more militant in their demands for equality.

The Nation of Islam teaches that white people were genetically engineered "devils", created to be liars and murderers (sometimes also known as the Seed of Esau myth[citation needed]). White people are held to be the enemies of all black people. The group's founders, "Master Fard" Muhammad and Elijah Muhammad, preached the Doctrine of Yakub, which held that the Original Man was an "Asiatic black man." White people, it contended, were "grafted" from black people 6,000 years ago by an ancient black scientist named Yakub.[5]

Besides the Yakub doctrine, it is the teaching of the Nation of Islam that Allah, (God) himself, is the original and supreme black man; that all black men today are a part of this God-race; and that the black race is thus divine and superior to all other races. It is also the teaching of the Nation of Islam that sometime in the future, Allah will bring a spaceship into the earth's atmosphere and bomb the cities of the world so that the unconverted white race will be purged from the earth. This ideology culminated in the creation of the Death Angels, a branch of the Nation of Islam. Between 1972 and 1974, the Death Angels murdered 14 whites in the San Francisco Bay area. These murders would later become known as the Zebra murders because the police used Radio Z to keep up to date with them.[6] [7] Some members of the Zebra task force suspected that up to 71 murders in California could have been the work of the same group since only four Death Angels were convicted out of a believed fifteen. Since many victims were drawn from the homeless or hitchhikers there is no certainty about the actual numbers.

Elijah Muhammad also preached black self-reliance, black separatism, cooperative economics, strict moral and physical discipline, and opposition to black-white miscegenation. Since its founding, the NOI has gone through reorganizations and internal conflicts, but even as it moves closer to the mainstream of Islamic belief and practice (such as the observance of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting), Farrakhan's organization has not rejected any of Master Fard's doctrines. It opposes any changes in the major beliefs and programs that were instituted by Elijah Muhammad, including the annual "Savior's Day".[8] [9] [10]

Members of the NOI have been criticized for making anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, anti-handicapped, and anti-homosexual statements, even urging the murder of such people.[11][12]

Most historians and social scientists classify the Nation of Islam also as a black nationalist, or black separatist, organization. Recently, the Southern Poverty Law Center headed by Morris Dees placed the Nation of Islam on its list of hate groups.[13]

Melanin Theory

Based on the single-origin hypothesis, black supremacists believe that, because human beings first evolved in Africa with darkly pigmented skin, blacks are more advanced than other peoples of the planet. They claim that the early, powerful civilizations of Nubia and early dynastic Egypt are proof of inherent melanin-based superiority, as well as other examples of Afrocentrism. This contention, known generally as "melanin theory", is founded upon a combination of scientific information and pseudo-scientific claims, and has been a subject of interest among some African-Americans since the discovery of melanin as an organic semiconductor in the early 1970s.

The purported qualities of melanin, some accurate, some based on distortions of scientific fact or speculation, are used to justify black supremacist assertions. The central idea of "Melanin Theory" is that the levels of melanin in dark skin naturally enhance intelligence and emotional, psychic and spiritual sensitivity.

Believers in melanin theory claim that the greater concentration of cutaneous melanin functions as a semiconductor of sound and heat energy. Some assert it is a superconductor of electromagnetic radiation, and others that it can convert light and magnetic fields to sound; that it can process information without reporting to the brain; and, further, that it is the chemical basis for what is commonly called "soul".

They also claim that, because neuromelanin, which is found in the substantia nigra (in Latin, literally "black substance") of the human brain, plays a role in the transmission of neuronal impulses, higher levels of melanin in skin enable nerve synapses to fire more quickly and efficiently as well, thereby enhancing the natural athleticism of blacks. However, no direct correlation between race and the level of melanin in the substantia nigra has been observed.

One of the most widely accepted and fundamental notions of melanin theory is that whites are "mutants", that white skin is an aberration, a form of albinism. Melanin theorist Wade Nobles takes this notion even further, stating that only blacks are fully human because of their higher levels of skin melanin:

That in the evolution of the species, in what some people call the ontogenetic evolution of humankind, that in the evolution of the species the human family separated in a sense that one branch of the family stopped its evolutionary path and simply depended upon the central nervous system as the total machinery for understanding reality. Whereas, the root of the family continued its path and not only evolved a central nervous system but developed what I called at that time an essential melanic system. And that I even went so far as to try to develop a little formula and suggested that CNS + EMS = HB. CNS (Central Nervous System) + EMS (Essential Melanic System) = HB (Human Being). That the central nervous system combined with the essential melanic system is what makes you human. That, in fact, to be human is to be Black. To be human is to be Black. (Nobles 1989).

Others, such as psychiatrist and writer Frances Cress Welsing, express the same idea by their use of the term "hue-man" instead of "human,". Welsing is the author of "The Cress Theory of Color Confrontation" and "The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors", which in part ascribes certain purported, inherent and behavioral differences between blacks and whites to a "melanin deficiency" in whites:

On both St. Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, the white male gives gifts of chocolate candy with nuts…. If his sweetheart ingests "chocolate with nuts," the white male can fantasize that he is genetically equal to the Black male…. Is it not also curious that when white males are young and vigorous, they attempt to master the large brown balls, but as they become older and wiser, they psychologically resign themselves to their inability to master the large brown balls? Their focus then shifts masochistically to hitting the tiny white golf balls in disgust and resignation—in full final realization of white genetic recessiveness.[3]

Welsing also claims that the prevalence of high blood pressure among African Americans is due to the fact that melanin exchanges "black photons" with other electrons and, therefore, picks up the negative energy vibrations from white people.

Welsing proposes that because it is so easy for pure whiteness to be genetically lost during interracial breeding, light-skinned peoples developed an aggressive colonial urge and their societies militaristically dominated others in order to preserve this light-skinned purity. This sort of idea is easy to discredit - besides its obvious reductionism (painting every topic in terms of race), it also contains the logical implication that we should expect the darkest-skinned peoples to have also developed similar anxieties and goals, since extremely dark skin is as subject to lightening as extremely light skin is to darkening. Welsing presented these ideas at a 2003 conference on race at Michigan State University, but seemed more interested in simply asserting them rather than having them critically evaluated and molded into an actual developing theory.

Melanin theorist Carol Barnes claims that white scientists have deliberately created drugs such as cocaine, which are specially structured to chemically bind with melanin. Barnes claims that melanin and cocaine have a high affinity for each other because both are alkaloids, and that blacks get addicted faster, stay addicted longer, can test positive for cocaine even a year after its most recent use, and suffer more from these drugs because cocaine co-polymerizes into melanin. Yet, melanin is not an alkaloid, and there is no evidence that melanin co-polymerizes with cocaine in vivo. He further writes in his book "Melanin: The Chemical Key to Black Greatness":

Melanin is responsible for the existence of civilization, philosophy, religion, truth, justice, and righteousness. Individuals (whites) containing low levels of Melanin will behave in a barbaric manner. Melanin gives humans the ability to FEEL because it is the absorber of all frequencies of energy. Since whites have the least amount of Melanin, this is why they are perceived by People of Color as generally being rigid, unfeeling (heartless), cold, calculating, mental, and "unspiritual." [4]

This hypothesis is supported by black academic Leonard Jeffries, who was dismissed in 1992 from his post as chairman of the Harlem's City College Black Studies department for having allegedly made anti-Semitic statements. Jeffries claims that the pigment melanin is the source of intelligence and creativity. He divides humanity into African “sun people” and European “ice people,” the latter being not only melanin-deficient but born cold and greedy, militaristic, authoritarian, and possessed of a host of other racially determined defects.

Most scientists consider Melanin Theory pseudoscience; it has no credibility in mainstream medicine or science.

Black supremacists and organizations

References

  1. ^ hooks, bell (1995). Killing Rage: Ending Racism. New York: Henry Holt and Company. ISBN 0805037829.
  2. ^ West, Cornel (1993). "Chpt. 8". Race Matters. Beacon Press. pp. 95–105. ISBN 0679749861.
  3. ^ Frances, Cress Welsing (1990). The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors. Third World Press. ISBN 0883781042.
  4. ^ Carol, Barnes (2001). Melanin: The Chemical Key to Black Greatness, Vol. 1. Lushena Books. ISBN 1930097352.

See also

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