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| Tom Metzger also spoke at the "National Black Power Summit and Youth Rally," hosted by the ]. | Tom Metzger also spoke at the "National Black Power Summit and Youth Rally," hosted by the ]. | ||
| The NOI, however, also has established working relationships with a number of multi-ethnic, multi-racial organizations, including the ]. |
The NOI, however, also has established working relationships with a number of multi-ethnic, multi-faith, multi-racial organizations, including the ]. | ||
| ==Allegedly black supremacist organizations and people of note== | ==Allegedly black supremacist organizations and people of note== | ||
Revision as of 13:38, 27 October 2006
Black supremacy is a racialist ideology which holds that black, African peoples are superior to other peoples and is most often thought of in connection with anti-white racism, anti-Semitism and bigotry towards non-black people.
As with white supremacy, black supremacist dogma is characterized by ethnocentrism and may to varying degrees involve hostility toward other groups or xenophobia.
Its nature
Princeton University professor Cornel West describes black supremacy as a reactionary counter to white supremacy. In his essay "Malcolm X and Black Rage," he comments:
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….
Some explain the phenomenon of black supremacy with Black rage, a term derived from a book by African American psychologists, William Grier and Price Cobbs. In their work, Grier and Cobbs argue that black people living in a racist, white supremacist society are harmed by the effects of racist oppression. As a result, some develop coping strategies that are reactionary in nature.
While black supremacists embrace racialist ideologies and, in some instances, intolerance and even violence towards non-black peoples, it is unlike white supremacy, which historically has been reinforced and sustained worldwide by instruments of Western economic, political and military power. There is, and has never been, a powerful, far-reaching nexus of instruments under black control with a corollary effect on whites or another racial or ethnic group.
In Killing Rage: Ending Racism, author and social activist 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)
Modern manifestations
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, often along with charismatic personalities and stirring oratory, in framing a kind of liberation theology for the societally marginalized and oppressed.
Rastafari
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.
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 pseudo-Hindu name `Gangunguru Maragh' which supposedly means "teacher of famed wisdom", even though Gangunguru Maragh is not a Sanskrit or Hindi language name), 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.
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). 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. 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.
The belief in sacrificial killing and ritualistic murder was part of the early Nation of Islam doctrine. Fard thought explicitly that it was the duty for every muslim to offer as sacrifice four "Caucasian devils". A portion of Fard's lesson reads as follows:
Why does Fard Mohammad and any Moslem murder the devil? What is the duty of each Moslem in regard to four devils? What reward does a Moslem receive by presenting the four devils at one time? -- Because he is one hundred precent wicked and will not keep and obey the laws of Islam. His ways and actions are like a snake of the grafted type. So Mohammad learned that he could not reform the devils, so they had to be murdered. All Moslems will murder the devil because they know he is a snake and also if he be allowed to live, he would sting someone else. Each Moslem is required to bring four devils, and by bringing and presenting four at one time his reward is a button to wear on the laple of his coat, also a free transportation to the Holy City of Mecca. (Master Fard Mohammad, Lesson #1)".
Nation of Islam leaders later argued that the lessons about murdering devils was only a metaphor designed to "rally NOI members to 'slay whites' psychological and social grip on them" but Fard's lessons on the murder of whites was taken literally and verbatim:
One afternoon in the early 1970s, when Ali K. Muslim, then Charles 41x, was guarding the temple, a man carrying a sack asked to meet a temple official. The man, thoroughly confused about Elijah Muhammad's teachings, believed that if he killed four white "devils" he would win a trip to the Holy Land. He had come to redeem his prizes. In the sack, Ali K. Muslim says, were four severed heads.
This ideology also 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. 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 Fard Muhammad and Elijah Muhammad, including the annual "Savior's Day".
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.
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.
Melanin Theory
Several black supremacists justify supremacist assertions with purported qualities of melanin, some accurate, some based on distortions of scientific fact or speculation. This contention is known generally as "Melanin Theory". The central idea of this "Melanin Theory" is that the levels of melanin in dark skin naturally enhance intelligence and emotional, psychic and spiritual sensitivity and physical prowess.
Believers in melanin theory claim that the greater concentration of cutaneous melanin functions as a superconductor of sound and heat energy . Some assert that it can absorb electromagnetic radiation, 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.
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."
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.
Alliances with white supremacist groups
Due to some commonly held racialist and separatist ideologies, some black supremacist organizations have found limited common cause with white supremacist or extremist organizations.
Marcus Garvey invited a Ku Klux Klan spokesman to speak at one of his rallies and, according to Dinesh D'Souza, also arranged "secret meetings with the Grand Cyclops of the Invisible Empire of the Ku Klux Klan" to seek financial aid to transport blacks to Africa.
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 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. In 1965, after breaking with the Nation of Islam and denouncing its separatist doctrine, Malcolm X told his followers that the Nation of Islam under Elijah Muhammad had made agreements with the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan that "were not in the interests of Negros." In 1985, Louis Farrakhan invited white supremacist Tom Metzger, leader of the White Aryan Resistance (a neo-Nazi white power group), to attend a NOI gathering. The Washington Times reports Metzger's words of praise: "They speak out against the Jews and the oppressors in Washington. ... They are the black counterpart to us."
Tom Metzger also spoke at the "National Black Power Summit and Youth Rally," hosted by the New Black Panther Party.
The NOI, however, also has established working relationships with a number of multi-ethnic, multi-faith, multi-racial organizations, including the Unification Church.
Allegedly black supremacist organizations and people of note
- African Hebrew Israelites
- Bobo Ashanti Order of Rastafari
- Robert L. Brock
- Khalid Abdul Muhammad
- The Nation of Gods and Earths
- Nation of Islam (see Nation of Islam and anti-Semitism)
- Nation of Yahweh
- Kamau Kambon
- Original African Hebrew Israelite Nation of Jerusalem
- United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors
- Yahweh ben Yahweh
- Dwight York
- New Black Panther Party
- Frances Cress Welsing
References
- Black Supremacy Cult in the U.S. U.S. News & World Report. 1959.
{{cite book}}:|first=missing|last=(help) - West, Cornel (1993). "Chpt. 8". Race Matters. Beacon Press. pp. 95–105. ISBN 0679749861.
- D'Souza, Dinesh (1995). The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society. New York Free Press. p. 398.
- hooks, bell (1995). Killing Rage: Ending Racism. New York: Henry Holt and Company. ISBN 0805037829.
- Tsoukalas, Steven (2001). The Nation of Islam - Understanding the "Black Muslims". P&R Publishing. pp. 23–24.
- Gardell, Mattias (1996). In the Name of Elijah Muhammad: Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. p. 56.
{{cite book}}: Text "Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press" ignored (help) - Magida, Arthur J. (1996). Prophet of Rage: A Life of Louis Farrakhan and His Nation. p. 52.
{{cite book}}: Text "New York: HarperCollins" ignored (help) - Barbosa, Steven (1993). American Jihad: Islam after Malcolm X. New York: Doubleday. pp. 115–116.
- Frances, Cress Welsing (1990). The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors. Third World Press. ISBN 0-88378-104-2.
- Carol, Barnes (2001). Melanin: The Chemical Key to Black Greatness, Vol. 1. Lushena Books. ISBN 1-930097-35-2.
- D'Souza, Dinesh (1995). The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society. New York Free Press. p. 398.
See also
Compare
- White supremacy and Asian supremacy
- White pride and Black pride
- White Power and Black Power
- White nationalism and Black nationalism
- White separatism and Black separatism
External links
- Scientists Find A DNA Change That Accounts For White Skin (Washington Post Staff Writer - Friday, December 16, 2005; A01) Biotechnology
- Magic Melanin: Spreading Scientific Illiteracy to Minorities (CSICOP article on melanin theory and associated pseudoscience)
- Institute for the Study of Academic Racism (ISAR)
- The Making of Devil, by Elijah Muhammad
- Annual World Melanin Conference
- TIME Magazine Teaching Reverse Racism
- Uncommon Ground: The Black African Holocaust Council and Other Links Between Black and White Extremists