A Black Paper on White Racism Part 1 (1971)

[Music] good evening this week and next we will present a black paper on white racism frequently the definition and effects of racism are greatly misunderstood certainly the impact on blacks can only be described by us an operational definition of individual racism is subordination of a person or group because of race but we will focus on the institutional practice of racism when a group is subordinated by factors indirectly related to race an example would be a union with all white members you can only get in the union if a member sponsors you and automatically whites select one another so this pattern of selection automatically keeps blacks out the union is white in the first place because its membership reflects the leftover patterns of slavery therefore racist behavior is both intentional and unintentional our institutions mostly involve unsuspecting individuals who are part of a racist pattern all definitions of black people's standards and values have been defined by whites in a society basically european as simple as it may seem we have never made any definition of our condition beauty standards social etiquette even our names have been given us by white culture to make an authoritative statement of our concept of christianity history education values and culture war colonialism and imperialism and psychological development and how these institutions operate in a white racist society six black scholars and philosophers have been invited to present positions and analyses of these topics with me tonight are john henrik clark an associate professor of african and afro-american history at hunter college in new york mr clark is also author of 11 books including harlem usa preston wilcox head of the education workshop of the congress of african people is president of afram associates a black educational consultant firm and as an outstanding author reverend albert clegg is pastor of the shrine of the black madonna in detroit michigan and an advocate of black christian nationalism he is author of a soon-to-be published book black christian nationalism new directions for the black church brother clark i'd like to begin by establishing some kind of a frame of reference exactly what are we talking about and i think in order to do this i'm going to try to dismiss the subject then come back to it and deal with it there is no such thing as a race nature created no races man created races racial classifications and he had his own reason for doing it now who benefited from this artificial creation at first who benefits from it now now let's look at the historical roots of this whole thing and you're not going to understand it until you understand the implications the far-reaching effects of the opening up of the so-called new world christopher columbus and other thugs coming suppressing the um the indians and finding a justification for this kind of thing let's look at europe in the 15th and the 16th century because racism has its roots in that second rise of europe in the 15th in the 16th century they had to justify what they were going to do to most of mankind they were about to take over the whole world now there's a myth about an argument about whether the world was round or flat that's an old wives tale the european had gained enough knowledge and had enough guns and he had been hungry enough within the body of europe until he decided that he was going to go out and take the world be it round our flat now in order to understand the religious basis of racism we have to go back to a papal bull that the pope issued in 1455 in an argument between portugal and spain he turned to them impatiently and said you are both authorized to reduce to servitude all infidel people and it just so happens that most of the so-called infidels were non-european people non-white people europe not only had its bases for racism it had its basis for the slave trade and the same basis would be good in the colonial system that followed racism was created to justify the slave trade to justify the colonial system and to justify the up to ruthlessness that had to go into the making of modern capitalism mr wilcox let me begin by suggesting that the clearest evidence of racism and education is the essential control over black education both in so-called integrated settings and in segregated settings by white people many of whom are incapable of responding to the people that are educating as people many of whom are incapable of understanding the culture and the history of the people who are educating many of whom really do not see any kind of responsibility for involving these communities and managing their own education the second kind of aspect is the the ability of white communities to keep black people out of their communities and still yet exercise some influence over the education and black communities that is uh even when there's no blacks in the white community whites are still having some kind of influence over the education in black communities a third example is the ways way in which our schools are organized despite the fact that we know we live in a racist society the schools continue to be organized as though racism does not exist that is there has been no real shift of power within the school there's been no effective change in the content uh there's been no uh forthright recognition of the politics involved in in education for instance in new york city about 55 percent of the students are black and puerto rican yet we have one black and one puerto rican member on a school board of five people so three white people are making decisions that affect 55 of people who they may not be able to respect his people reverend clay well i think the the basic uh reason or symptom or proof for the racism of the christian church is the simple fact that white people have pretended for so long that that jesus was white and that they've had the necessity to interpret jesus as being white when essentially white christianity is racially uh is historically false and theologically absurd and practically in terms of its effect on black people it's a debasing institution that enslaves black people i think we have to understand though that this we're not making moral judgments here any institution that exists in any society exists to serve the interests of the people who set it up and christianity uh began as a black man's religion it's an african religion we have to remember that israel went into egypt with 70 people and after approximately 750 years came out with over 2 million people and hordes of other slaves who came out and became also part of the emerging new nation of israel so israel the biblical israel was a black nation an african nation that came out of uh of africa and kept constant ties with africa and so we have to remember then that jesus was a was a black messiah not a not a white messiah and he comes out of the whole historical background of of africa of african traditions of african history of african culture the concept of communalism the concept of the chosen people the concept of kingdom of god on earth all these things were out of african tradition not out of the white man's tradition and jesus was essentially a revolutionary messiah who was trying to lead a black people in a revolt in a struggle and conflict with a white gentile oppressor so the whole church has to be viewed from the point of view of the white oppressor the white oppressor has one kind of christianity as one kind of church the black church has to become independent and go back to the historic african roots of christianity because the slave church that the white man set up for black people tends to continue the enslavement of black people so the black church has to become again a revolutionary instrument in the hands of black people controlled by black people fighting as jesus fought for the liberation of black people against white gentile oppression i'd like to continue well from reverend klig's point and deal briefly with image because image is the paramount factor in keeping racism alive now exactly when did the christian church become um become white in as much as christ is described in early literature as being swarthy and heaven hair like sheep's wool and that's surely not a caucasian's hair um the first image of the church the first image of the madonna was the black madonnas and these black madonnas were very prevalent in the churches of europe up until the 16th and the 17th century there was no white madonnas in the churches of europe and some of the churches of europe to this very day have black madonnas all right at what point did christianity become um all white and at what point did christ become a blonde blue eyed person that hangs in your churches and with a haircut and a uniform he'd probably be a good nazi all right um one thing the jews seem to have forgotten is that the pitch of christ as in present-day literature is an insult to them because there's nothing particularly jewish about him physically um or otherwise all right now another thing we're going to have to look at seriously is that when the europeans projected themselves out into the broader world they not only colonize most of mankind they colonize the teaching of history itself and gradually so many things black became um became white i'd like to just say one little word about the when did christianity become white the process uh by which christianity became gradually to be interpreted as being white began at a very early point with apostle paul who wrote the epistles of the new testament and who was even at that time with black israel and black jews an uncle tom jew uh he was an uncle town black jew and he wanted to identify with white gentile world he prided himself on being a pharisee but more on being having roman citizenship so as soon as he had sunstroke on the damascus road and said he's been converted he started out to take the christianity the teachings of jesus to the gentile world now he could not take the revolutionary teachings that jesus had actually taught because jesus was a zealot and they they were engaged in revolution i mean open revolution he was one of the the zealot leaders of that time so he couldn't take that to the gentile world so he had had to make an image a symbol out of jesus on the cross which was compatible with the heathen symbolism of the roman and greco-roman heathen world so he made jesus a kind of a heathen symbol that he could take to the gentile world and the whole writings of the apostle paul tend then to destroy the basic uh african background of christianity and to make it compatible with the uh greco-roman heathen world so it it began there but the actual identification of christianity as being a white religion didn't really take place until the 14th 15th 16th centuries when the pictures were being painted uh and paid for by the catholic church at that point white people had decided to declare black people inferior and so the whole concept of of of jesus being black or the madonna being black was unacceptable to white people at all a whole new type of slavery was beginning to emerge the old type of slavery in egypt joseph was a slave who rose to be second only to pharaoh a whole different concept to slavery you were a slave only in the terms that your labor was taken but gradually the white man declared that anyone who was non-white who was enslaved was declared to be inferior therefore had a whole different kind of existence so the whole gradual thing was a part of the slavery process that dr clark mentioned a part of the uh the betrayal of the apostle paul and a part of the fall of uh jerusalem and the fort and when jews were scattered all over the world we have to remember one thing i think it's very important that the white jews that we see today have no bloodline connection with with the jews of the biblical period they were converted to judaism in europe and in in in russia they were converted and have no bloodline connection with the black jews who make up the biblical israel that the bible writes about and of which jesus was a part well what happened to the black jews the black jews are still in existence they're black jews in america they're black jews all over africa they're black jews in palestine they're black jews everywhere diane's daughter complained not not more than two years ago that black jews had moved on either side of her house and therefore her property had depreciated in palestine black jews had depreciated her property jews had moved directly from palestine to india and the community celebrated its uh 1900th anniversary or something and they had white jews who had emigrated from europe and black jews would originally come from jerusalem at the fall of jerusalem had an uninterrupted straight line of connection from the fall of jerusalem to india all over the world there are black jews but the the zionist jews who had been converted to judaism have taken over the the control of the definition of what judaism is that's why people do with anything if they come into it they take it over and define what it is as you state in your introductory statement so we have to remember that white jews when you see them on the street are not the jews of the biblical period and that sometimes confuses black people who ought to be black christian nationalism one of the things i'm hearing from both of the brothers is that not only if whites tried to deceive blacks about uh the realities but they in effect deceived each other about the realities that is uh i'm sitting here thinking about uh the institutions in society all of which are racist you know which quite created in which whites have used in order to advance themselves but never at any point uh stopping recognizing for instance that the prisons have nothing to do with rehabilitation or the courts in most cases really have nothing to do with justice what about school what what specifically is uh is a racist pattern in your opinion as far as the educational process or the schools is concerned well i would say that the overwhelming educational process that is racist is a tendency to educate people against their own interests that is to educate black kids to hate themselves to educate blacks uh to feel alienated from their own people uh to educated blacks to become advocates for the mainstream against their own people how is that done specifically well i would say that you know the traditional educational process is number one the concealing of the truth about history uh the educating of black students away from the problems of their own community for instance very few black students on college campuses are unable to use their minds to work on the problems that bedevil the black community like sickle cell anemia or the housing problems the drug problem problems that are imposed on the black community by by the outside very few black students on white campuses or any campus are spending their energies and their minds on trying to find solutions to those problems in most cases they're being educated say with a drug problem learn how to uh use methadone you know now look let's deal with our own historical naivete until we deal with it we're not going any place black people have no right to expect anything from this establishment because it wasn't set up for them they wasn't brought to this country to be given democracy it was brought to this country to do some work to labor and to obey and once the machines made a whole lot of these jobs obsolete it tended to make a whole lot of the people obsolete now we keep worrying about the american promise in the american dream and we forget it wasn't made to us the white man has not betrayed anything because he didn't promise us anything in the um in the first place now the role of institutions in a dominant in a society is to reflect the power that controls that society so we have american institutions arrayed against us and we not even expect these institutions to reform themselves because if they reform themselves that's tantamount to presiding over their own demise i'd like to say one thing on that i think the question you asked is how how do the schools accomplish this i mean you were concerned about the process i think we got to understand that there's no such thing as objective truth which is implicit in in everything that clark says that white people use the institutions to accomplish white purpose the white purpose is to maintain a power position and keep everybody else in a subordinate powerless kind of position now that's the institution's purpose and that's what it's that's the way it functions and how it functions and we've got to realize that that everything that the schools teach is designed to fit into that purpose the schools teach not objective truth but what the white man wants to project is truth now that's from the from the very kindergarten right straight on for example what uh sociology sociology is not a science in the sense that it's dealing objectively with the way people live together it's dealing with the white man's pattern of living together as the norm by which we judge how other people live if you live like white people live then you're living the way you are supposed to live if not you're either primitive or insane as a people psychologically it's the same thing psychology does not deal with any uh objective kind of discussion or development of how people live or analysis of how people function as individuals but how does the white man function if the white man does it this way then this is the norm by which we judge all other people if the white man is violent then actually all people have to be violent to be normal if you're not violent obviously there's something wrong with it you should be in an insane asylum the whole pattern that's set up as a norm for human behavior by psychologists all the whole library full of it psychiatrists everybody that's dealing with it is dealing with it from a white point of view so they have they teach white children black children and white children to look to white eyes from the kindergarten on the black child is beginning to look at the world and interpret it through white eyes everything he is is wrong everything that exists in his community is wrong we ought to declare that white music really is no good that white psychology is no good the black the white man either acts like we do or he's insane white sociology is no good the very structure of white society indicates that white people obviously in social structure are either insane or they're abnormal so we have to project down a black psychology of black sociology or black music a black history that takes in the realities and that is essentially sound as opposed to the mythology that the white man has developed out of his own uh ignorance for one thing out of his non-creativity because white man has never created anything he's stolen things but never created anything he cannot actually deal with history because history is a recital of his total failure in his total absence of making any genuine contributions if we define a black psychology of black sociology uh where will we use these where would we we'd use them first to unscramble our own mixed up minds if we could understand that black psychology is is is the psychology that black man has to have if he's going to escape from powerlessness in a white man's world now the struggle is a struggle between black people for power and white people to keep power now we all we're dealing with is a power struggle every institution that the white man has he uses in this power struggle there's nothing wrong with that nothing immoral about any people would do that when we get on top we're gonna do exactly the same thing we're gonna use every institution to perpetuate black power and the white man's gonna have to fight up from the bottom again for another you know 100 million years trying to get back to a position of power there's nothing wrong with fighting for power but the thing that's wrong is for powerless people to accept their powerlessness and to accept the definition by which they are maintained powerless and to accept the institutions which perpetuate their powerlessness so that's why i think the new the black church has to become a power base for black people and changing this total institutional conception uh structure that black people are living in we've got to use it as a base to spin off all the institutions that black people need that come from a black perspective a black orientation and are concerned with black power as opposed to white power let's go back to this value and i think we we i don't think we've gone over it too well um we need to look at what kind of societies did black people come out of what happened before this interference now we came out of basic pluralistic societies but we came out of sharing societies where nobody was very rich and nobody at all was poor now an african-american society would no more kill a deer and say this is mine and he would fly because he didn't think that way he thought of all poverty as belonging to the total community now we were brought into a society as slaves just at the time the concept of private property and capitalism was getting well underway with the backing of the church now there is a clash between the values of the the best values of the society we came out of in the society that enslaved us and too many of us are tied up with these values the sacredness of private property what is so sacred about private property what is so sacred about one man taking upon himself more than he could use in a lifetime while people walking by this mountain of wealth starving nothing particularly sacred about this and these things did not exist in these old societies until these old societies began to have internal differences and the european came in and the african naively permitted him to arbitrate an african family dispute until we understand that up on site the african invited the european for dinner that's the first thing he did the indian invited the european for dinner the polynesians invited the european for dinner now if you invite people for dinner you first place you've got plenty dinner and you have a society that is traditionally hospitable to strangers the indians invited christopher columbus for dinner the first thing they did all right now let's look at what was happening inside of christopher columbus's mind and we can go to his own diary for this he said i wonder why they're so friendly they'll be easier to conquer than i thought they would be i wonder why they're bringing such small amounts of gold i wonder where the minds are his intentions were not good it wasn't good then the intentions are not good now and the black man is still hung up with this dinner invitation this kindness with the thought that if you create a create treat a person humanely then he would accumulate toward you black people have not seen white people at all that is why they can't deal with them i won't say one but i think we have to be careful black people we we're too much tied up in this what's good and what's bad i think what we need to begin to look at is what's real now i don't care whether it's good or bad i just care whether it it works whether it doesn't work whether it helps black people it doesn't help black people white people are individualistic white people are materialistic and i think dyches is absolutely correct in the definition of this of black civilization african civilization communalistic whole concept is different but the white man's individualism and materialism stems from the fact that he comes out of a situation a a place where you could hardly live you know the barren land where you could hardly grow no resources where they had to fight each other just to keep alive and where each person had to try to steal all he could to keep somebody else from getting it so he could stay alive now that builds individualism and materialism now he didn't have much in the way of materialism but he had the need the desire so he built ships he built guns everything in order to take something from somebody else now you got to realize that the black man came up in a different whole different kind of environment where there was everything that a person needed they didn't have to to to cheat and lie and steal to get enough to eat enough to eat was everywhere nobody had to take from somebody else all the resources of the world were right there in the ground and they had everything they didn't need to build ships and go conquer someplace else if if africans build a ship where would they go any place they went was worse than where they were but the white man could build a ship and go any place because any place he went was better than where he was anything that he could take was better than what he already had so we're dealing with the coaches of two people that stem from the kind of situation in which they live black people today are trying to be individualistic and materialistic because we are now in a slave culture the white man has dominated us so completely we try to accept his values what we've got to do is reject his values go back and accept the old values that come from africa our own historic black values and have a black value system that we put in opposition to the white man's materialistic materialism and individualism thank you very much gentlemen uh this week we have presented a black paper on white racism part one we have discussed education history and christianity and how these institutions in a racist pattern affect the lives and mentality of black people next week we'll present part two we will deal next week with values and culture war colonialism and imperialism and personality development or [Music] psychology

Channel: AfroMarxist

Views: 200,089

Rating: 4.8972635 out of 5

Keywords: Socialism, John Henrik Clarke

Id: h6RHbhMiWpU

Length: 28min 12sec (1692 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 28 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/DontBeMeanToRobots]

Oh my God. Viewing Jesus’ story as a fight against white Romans and Black people makes absolute sense!