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Time for an Awakening Media host the The 90 minute Black Power Roundtableon Saturday, October 31th. The Saturday evening discussion was moderated by Sister Zakiya Sankara-Jabar
PANELIST:
Saturday, October 31, 2020
Mukasa Dada
Queen Mother Mashariki Jywanza
**Nkechi Taifa
Kalonji Changa
African Esquire
Dr. Kamau Rashid
Obi Egbuna Jr
.Sister Melo
Dr. Wes Bellamy
Sister Lydia
Prof. James Small
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Bigots are Yelling for Black People to ‘Go Back to Africa!’ – But What Does It Mean? And Is It Possible to Return?
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“Go back to Africa!” It is the phrase du jour for racist whites, typically when used as part of a bitter, angry, expletive-laden rant against Black people. There are so many examples of the popularity of this insult these days.
A Beaufort, South Carolina teacher told a Black high school student to go back to the continent after he refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. In Virginia, the Sons of Confederate Veterans told the African-American community to go back amid calls for the city council to remove the Confederate flag from a local museum. A Black student at Southern Illinois University was told the same thing when she was confronted by Donald Trump supporters in a residence hall. And at Trump rallies in Chicago and Cleveland, Trump supporters were heard yelling the phrase, along with other racial epithets.
“If you call yourself an African-American, go back to Africa. If you’re an African first, go back to Africa,” said a white man to a Black woman and #BlackLivesMatter supporter at a Trump rally in Cleveland this past March, as reported by MSNBC.
And recently, a Bank of America employee in Atlanta was fired for her racist Facebook rant.“When a bigot says ‘Go back to Africa,’ he or she is simply being nasty and irrational,” Dr. Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Ferree Professor of American History at the Pennsylvania State University, told Atlanta Black Star. Moses is the author of Classical Black Nationalism: From the American Revolution to Marcus Garvey and Liberian Dreams: Records of an African Return 1853, among other works. “I am not wise enough to know to how one can best respond to nastiness and irrationality.”To be sure, there is a nastiness to the phrase, particularly when accompanied by other insults, threats and acts of violence. For example, in October 2014, when a group of Black protesters outside a St. Louis Cardinals game sought to bring attention of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, they were met with a crowd of virulent white racists. As Crooks & Liars reported, the white fans responded to the Black protesters by chanting “Let’s go Cardinals,” which changed to “Let’s go, Darren!” in honor of Officer Darren Wilson, who shot and killed Brown. While attempting to initiate acts of violence, the white fans told the protesters to go back to Africa and called them jobless, while one of the white men called a Black activist a “crackhead.”
“We’re the ones who gave all y’all the freedoms that you have!” shouted one white woman at the African-Americans, as a number of fans began chanting “Africa, Africa” – shorthand for the suggestion they go back to the motherland.“Go back to Africa!” It is the phrase du jour for racist whites, typically when used as part of a bitter, angry, expletive-laden rant against Black people. There are so many examples of the popularity of this insult these days.
A Beaufort, South Carolina teacher told a Black high school student to go back to the continent after he refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. In Virginia, the Sons of Confederate Veterans told the African-American community to go back amid calls for the city council to remove the Confederate flag from a local museum. A Black student at Southern Illinois University was told the same thing when she was confronted by Donald Trump supporters in a residence hall. And at Trump rallies in Chicago and Cleveland, Trump supporters were heard yelling the phrase, along with other racial epithets.
“If you call yourself an African-American, go back to Africa. If you’re an African first, go back to Africa,” said a white man to a Black woman and #BlackLivesMatter supporter at a Trump rally in Cleveland this past March, as reported by MSNBC.And recently, a Bank of America employee in Atlanta was fired for her racist Facebook rant.“When a bigot says ‘Go back to Africa,’ he or she is simply being nasty and irrational,” Dr. Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Ferree Professor of American History at the Pennsylvania State University, told Atlanta Black Star. Moses is the author of Classical Black Nationalism: From the American Revolution to Marcus Garvey and Liberian Dreams: Records of an African Return 1853, among other works. “I am not wise enough to know to how one can best respond to nastiness and irrationality.”To be sure, there is a nastiness to the phrase, particularly when accompanied by other insults, threats and acts of violence. For example, in October 2014, when a group of Black protesters outside a St. Louis Cardinals game sought to bring attention of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, they were met with a crowd of virulent white racists. As Crooks & Liars reported, the white fans responded to the Black protesters by chanting “Let’s go Cardinals,” which changed to “Let’s go, Darren!” in honor of Officer Darren Wilson, who shot and killed Brown. While attempting to initiate acts of violence, the white fans told the protesters to go back to Africa and called them jobless, while one of the white men called a Black activist a “crackhead.”“We’re the ones who gave all y’all the freedoms that you have!” shouted one white woman at the African-Americans, as a number of fans began chanting “Africa, Africa” – shorthand for the suggestion they go back to the motherland.
nd part of the assumption among whites is that Black folks should be happy to be in America, which, through its kindness and generosity, has rendered African-Americans the most fortunate Black people around. There is a perverse, outlandish assertion that Black people — kidnapped at gunpoint and brought to these shores in the belly of a slave ship, and, if they survived, were raped, tortured and forced to toil in prison camp plantations — should leave if they cannot appreciate all that white people have done for them. Of course, the parties to whom Black people would presumably return the favor came to North America from Europe — unannounced and uninvited — and stole the land from the indigenous population right from under their feet. Yet, never are there any calls for whites to return to Europe.
This sentiment was best articulated by conservative commentator Pat Buchanan in 2008.
“First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known,” Buchanan wrote on his website.
“Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the ’60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream,” he added. “Governments, businesses and colleges have engaged in discrimination against white folks — with affirmative action, contract set-asides and quotas — to advance black applicants over white applicants.”
While the concept of returning to Africa is pejorative and insulting when articulated by white racists, it also represented a movement throughout history, with Blacks and whites involved in “back-to-Africa” movements — Sierra Leone and Liberia in the 19th century, Marcus Garvey in the early 20th century, and Pan-African activists and intellectuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Kwame Ture settling in West Africa. It is a complicated history.
“In the later editions of From Slavery to Freedom, John Hope Franklin gave a nuanced analysis of the multiple and complicated reasons why some whites and blacks supported African deportation before the Civil War,” said Dr. Moses.
In that book, Franklin wrote that as early as 1714, there was a proposal to send Blacks back to Africa. Whites believed the races could not live together in harmony, and free Black people could not adjust to life in America, and created a problem for maintaining the system of slavery.“There is no adequate history of the American Colonization Society,” said Moses of the organization which helped relocate thousands of freed Black people to what would become Liberia. “There is no satisfactory treatment of Henry Clay’s advocacy of African deportation or of Abraham Lincoln’s decreasing interest in African deportation, as he evolved from a Whig to a Republican. In my view, Lincoln was never convinced of the practicality of deportation, for reasons that Alexis de Tocqueville had articulated,” Moses offered. “I touched on my reasons for believing that Lincoln was not serious in my biography of Alexander Crummell (Oxford UP, 1989). As for Jefferson, I think he was absolutely insincere about African deportation. Jefferson was a complete phony, and like many populists he used democratic rhetoric to cover up aristocratic programs. He never joined the American Colonization Society and contrary to popular belief, never supported the abolition of slavery. Jefferson only called for ending the Atlantic slave trade except in order to inflate domestic slave prices,” he added.“I would suggest that no discussion of the Back to Africa movements, either the white racist ones, or especially the Black ones (such as Garvey’s), is complete without considerable explanation of the nadir of race relations,” said James W. Loewen, the author of Lies My Teacher Told Me; Lies Across America; Sundown Towns; Teaching What Really Happened; and The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader. During the nadir, which began during the end of Reconstruction and lasted through the early 20th century, was a time of white supremacy, Jim Crow segregation, racial terrorism and a loss of civil rights for Black people.
“Going back to Africa was hardly irrational, given how race relations grew worse and worse after 1890. That needs to be explained, lest Garvey, et al., come across as charlatans,” Loewen, who taught race relations at the University of Vermont, told Atlanta Black Star.
Meanwhile, many African-Americans today are crossing the Atlantic to live in Ghana, once a major starting point of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and one of the first African nations to emerge from colonial rule. While millions crossed the Middle Passage by force via Ghana for a life of permanent enslavement in America — 40 percent never making it to the other side — some of their descendants are returning for a better, more comfortable life, business opportunities and to rediscover their roots.
Ghana has a Right of Abode program that grants permanent residency and dual citizenship to people of African descent. According to the African-American Association of Ghana, 3,000 African-Americans live in Ghana, most in the capital of Accra. So, some Black people are going back to Africa, but they are doing so on their own terms. And as the future becomes more difficult and more uncertain for people of African descent in the U.S., certainly more will consider the option
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Home News Malcolm X in the 21st century
What would he be preaching today?
May 25, 2017
What would el Hajj Malik el-Shabazz (aka Malcolm X) be doing at 92 years of age?
Our Black Shining Prince was born on May 19, 1925, and joined the ancestors on February 21, 1965, assassinated, receiving multiple gunshot wounds while preparing to deliver a speech to the Organization of Afro-American Unity in Manhattan’s Audubon Ballroom. He was 39.
Before his passing, the Nigerians gave him the name Omowale. In Yoruba it means “child who has come home.”
No one can say for sure what Malcolm X would be preaching today, but as he taught us, “Of all our studies, history is best qualified to reward our research. And when you see that you’ve got problems, all you have to do is examine the historic method used all over the world by others who have problems similar to yours. And once you see how they got theirs straight, then you know how you can get yours straight.”
These words were uttered at King Solomon Baptist Church in Detroit, Michigan, during a speech on the nature of revolution at the Northern Negro Grass Roots Leadership Conference on November 10, 1963.
One of the founders of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, General Gordon Baker Jr. was in attendance that night and yelled “We’ll bleed” as Malcolm X told the audience, “You’re afraid to bleed. The white man sent you to Korea, you bled. He sent you to Germany, you bled. He sent you to the South Pacific to fight the Japanese, you bled. You’ll bleed for white people, but when it comes time to seeing your own churches bombed and little Black girls murdered, you haven’t got no blood.”
We know that Malcolm X was deeply interested in bringing African and Asian forces together. The first large-scale Afro-Asian Conference, a meeting of Asian and African states, most of them newly independent, took place on April 18 to 24, 1955, in Bandung, Indonesia. We also know that politically his views were leaning heavily toward socialism.
Shortly before he died, he went on record saying, “It’s impossible for a white person to believe in capitalism and not believe in racism. You can’t have capitalism without racism.”
He was a firm supporter of British-ruled Kenya’s Land and Freedom Army and the so-called Mau Mau Revolt against white settlers.
Even as a member of the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X had a non-Marxist class analysis of the struggle. Go back and listen to him talk about the house Negro and the field Negro on the Message To The Grassroots speech.
We can bet Malcolm X, with his one-liners, would use social media with the best of us. He understood the role of newspapers and other media in revolutionary struggle.
All the organizations that moved Africans in North America and the world had newspapers. Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL) had the Negro World. The Nation of Islam had Muhammad Speaks, and Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale’s Black Panther Party had the Black Panther newspaper.
In his book, Remembering Malcolm, Benjamin Karim, Malcolm X’s assistant minister at Mosque Number 7 in Harlem, writes about how Malcolm X loved cartoons to counter what he called “spookism.”
“Don’t get so wrapped up in God that you lose sight of the world,” Malcolm used to tell us, Karim writes. “And don’t get so wrapped up in the world you lose sight of God: you have to maintain a balance. When you are spooked out, you have definitely lost the balance. You go and get that brother and take him somewhere and watch cartoons.”
Karim also tells how Malcolm X taught him and other ministers the importance of communication. “At the first meeting of the class, Malcolm listed some requirements: a notebook, a dictionary, a thesaurus, an etymology text, a library card and an open, willing mind.”
American cultural historian Maurice Berger called Malcolm X “a visual strategist” and “keen steward of the Nation of Islam’s visual representation.”
In a 2012 column for the New York Times, he writes that, “Malcolm X often carried a camera, his way of ‘collecting evidence,’ as [Black photojournalist] Gordon Parks once observed. He relied on photographs to provide the visual proof of Black Muslim productivity and equanimity that sensationalistic headlines and verbal reporting often negated.
“When photojournalists visited the community, he tried to steer them toward the kinds of affirmative images – contented family life, children at play and school, thriving businesses and institutions – that might subtly ameliorate the negative texts that he knew would inevitably accompany them.”
It must be mentioned that Malcolm X’s Grenada-born mother, Louise Little (née Norton), wrote for the Negro World. Georgia-born Earl Little, Malcolm X’s father, and Louise met and married in Montreal at a UNIA convention. Both were followers of Pan-Africanist Garvey.
Malcolm X talked about the importance of languages and hit the nail on the head when he predicted Chinese and Arabic as important in the future.
In The Autobiography Of Malcolm X, written with Alex Haley, he wrote, “I don’t know anything more frustrating than to be around people talking something you can’t understand. Especially when they are people who look just like you. In Africa, I heard original mother tongues, such as Hausa and Swahili, being spoken, and there I was standing like some little boy, waiting for someone to tell me what had been said; I never will forget how ignorant I felt.”
Malcolm X made it crystal clear before his death that he was a Sunni Muslim. However, he also questioned following anything blindly.
In a speech in Detroit on April 12, 1964, he pointed out, “Islam is my religion, but I believe my religion is my personal business. Put your religion at home in the closet. Keep it between you and your God. Because if it hasn’t done anything more for you than it has, you need to forget it anyway.”
Norman (Otis) Richmond, aka Jalali, was born in Arcadia, Louisiana, and grew up in Los Angeles. He moved to Toronto in the 1960s after refusing to fight in the Vietnam War. He produces Diasporic Music, a radio show for Uhuru Radio, and writes a column for the Burning Spear newspaper.
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