I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. Romans 12: 1
Many and varied have been the comments made after the horrific killing of George Floyd. Pursuant to that lynching, there have been marches and demonstrations throughout the world against white racism, all under the banner of BLACK LIVES MATTER.
But not to overlook the obvious, the antipathy towards Black Lives has been centered on their beatings and dismemberment of black bodies throughout the years. These atrocities have been perpetrated by white citizens .
The liberal calls from white citizens for some form of justice have been quite interesting. It follows the trend to blame the implementors of the will of the white citizenry on the least favored among them. For a long while, the talk was that the hated perpetrators on injustice were the uneducated whites. It was the uneducated southern white racist who were the members of the KKK. But as was seen in Orlando Patterson’s Rituals of Blood, that infamous organization was often headed by individuals who were college educated. There have been frequent calls for better education of white citizens. But I take this opportunity to remind all that the first President of the country with a doctorate was the former president of the historic Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson. He was also the one who segregated federal employees in Washington, D.C., the seat of the federal government. It was he who screened Birth of a Nation in the White House and gave it the imprimatur of a historic film representing the true passions of this country. So will more education make better citizens, if by better citizens one means citizens who are less racist? Today conscious students have successfully led efforts to have his name removed from a building named in his honor. Let us not forget that it was in what was deemed the prestigious halls of the academy that gave birth to such notions of “scientific” racism
I will not give up on more education. However, who will do the educating? What I have noticed, in tertiary education facilities, we have people standing at the gate who themselves were steeped in racist systems by racist teachers and now they are the ones who approve who should teach their students how to become less than how they themselves are. Admittedly there have been some positive recent developments. In some educational circles there now seems to be, in recent decades, a commitment to anti-racist pedagogy. However, many black scholars continue to experience very hostile working environments in many tertiary level institutions. Those experiences may be reviewed at #Blackintheivory. We must find a better way of having those tenured in the ideologies of yesterday being the ones to determine who will be the ones to lead students in a new direction.
The effort at change is that which itself needs changing. Recall that ostensibly a great call for equality which has been repeatedly touted was the GI Bill. But it was managed by the arrant racist Senator Rankin, who ensured that Blacks were systematically denied the best provisions of the Bill. Another instance of Harvey Weinstein managing the girls’ dorm. Or think of the great FDR who agreed to exclude Blacks from his famous efforts to bring the country out of the great depression. Or think of the fact that Senator Strom Thurmond who raped his domestic and had a living black child was still able to run for President of the country, and remained senator from South Carolina until his death. Of course, many critics will say that these examples are dated and that it is not fair to intone such examples from yesterday. However, let me refer to President Clinton’s June 22, 1994 statement: ″Just as D-Day was the greatest military action in our history, so the GI Bill arguably was the greatest investment in our people in American history… It provided the undergirding for what has clearly been the most successful middle class in all of history…That lesson in many respects is one I have tried to make the lesson of our administration: If you give the American people, ordinary Americans, a chance to help themselves, they will do extraordinary things.” Totally forgotten was the fact that policies which were used to transform America, or as some would say to make America great and the age of the great America, was also the time which installed in the American mind the legitimacy of continued oppressive policies towards the bodies and souls of black citizens. Thus, stare decisis is not just limited to strict constructionists; hostile precedents continue to set the tone of current initiatives.
Any Google of “Obama backlash” will reveal quite a litany of virulent comments about both his election and his presidency. Many also noted the dramatic uptick in firearm purchases. One cannot then have too much difficulty in understanding the continued hymn of “taking back our country” or the current theme to “Make America Great Again.”
Or think of the Great Winston Churchill who declared that he was not elected Prime Minister to preside over the dissolution of Her Majesty’s Empire, lamented that Gandhi had not died earlier (see Tharoor’s speech HERE) and was a staunch defender of colonial principles that kept millions living under despicable conditions. Again, one might say the past is prelude.
Consider the experience of the Caribbean people and the Windrush scandal of 2018. There were at least 83 cases where people were wrongly deported from the UK by the Home Office. They were born British subjects and had arrived there before 1973. An unknown number were also detained, lost their jobs, their homes, and were denied benefits or the medical care to which they were entitled.
But do you think this is any different now? Do you see any hope?
There cannot be any hope for change if the basis for hope is that the philosophies and policies which undergird racist positions remain the same. Or to paraphrase James Baldwin should moral monsters continue to chair the debate for change.
The behavior of the monsters was most recently seen exemplified by the behavior of Chauvin. Here the police are being blamed for implementing the will of the populace, just as the KKK was being blamed for implementing the will of the moral monsters, who did not use the lynch-rope but the pens and policies of Congress. And it was the bodies of blacks which felt the wrath of those monsters.
Admittedly, there has been a national outpouring of horror at the sight of Chauvin kneeling on the neck of George Floyd for eight minutes and forty-six seconds. This reminds me of the outpouring of horror when Bull Connor the chief of Police of Birmingham Alabama unleashed dogs and fire hoses on those demonstrating for civil rights.
Now I see so many whites carrying signs for BLM. I see white youth marching and shouting for change. I see white youth putting their bodies on the streets to show the depths of their disgust. Is this evidence that Sam Cooke was a prophet as he sang “A change is gonna come”? Is change finally here? Or is this just like another promise made by dead beat dads, who say they are going to come to see their children and never arrive? Because the necessary change is very expensive. Will the whites be willing to make the sacrifices, both personal and political to implement the change? Many whites sang “we shall overcome” and marched in the Civil Rights Movement. But when the singing stopped, and Rhody McCoy tried to get some meaningful change for the black students in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville district problems erupted. What Mr. McCoy wanted was for the black students to be taught by black teachers. The New York City school board refused. They were simple not willing to pay the price of “overcoming” and his contract was terminated. Will whites now be willing to pay the higher taxes for more social programs, meaningful investments in the inner city and the final elimination of the slums that they created?
Is this the beginning of presenting bodies as living sacrifices? If it is so, then there might be a glimmer of hope indeed. Change will be very expensive. And the expense must be equal to the indignities that were suffered. Thousands of blacks lost their lives to guarantee the perpetuation of white privilege. Do whites have the courage to make changes and save lives? The civil war said that the country was willing to sacrifice thousands of lives to preserve the status quo, to have slavery last forever. The Tilden compromise of 1877 signed the death warrant of the Reconstruction, and heralded decades of Jim Crow as a means of reconciliation of the South. So even after the loss of all those lives, what was revealed was that there was no will in America to demonstrate a sincere commitment to achieve racial equality. If the Mitch McConnells and the Donald Trumps of this country have their way and continue to use their pens and policies while the police use their guns, bodies will be presented as living sacrifices. In all institutions, those who stand at the gates, the gatekeepers of the status quo must be changed if there is a desire to save the bodies of their children.
Black bodies were presented as living sacrifices to build this country and white bodies enjoyed all the privileges of those sacrifices. There is just a glimmer of hope that young white bodies might be spared in an effort at the moral rebuilding of the country. White racism morphed into a set of interlocking structures: economics, education, entertainment, labor, law, religion, health, media, politics, sex and war, all handily served by the media, in a manner designed to marginalize the black body and soul eviscerating the black’s ability to challenge his dominance.
So, let us begin by looking at education. From elementary school to the university, the Mercator projection of the world, done in 1569 is the standard bit of cartography that is presented as the truth of how the world looks. Let us admit that any attempt to present a sphere in two dimensions will lose some truth. However, it is well known that other projections such as the Peters’ projection is a much more accurate depiction of the world. So, the question becomes, if a well-known lie is being proffered as truth, might there be other untruths be also offered in institutions? Or to put it in the words of Charles Mills:
White Ignorance…
It’s a big subject. How much time do you have?
It’s not enough.
Ignorance is usually thought of as the passive obverse to knowledge,
the darkness retreating before the spread of Enlightenment.
But…
Imagine an ignorance that resists.
Imagine an ignorance that fights back.
Imagine an ignorance militant, aggressive, not to be intimidated,
an ignorance that is active, dynamic, that refuses to go quietly—
not at all confined to illiterate and uneducated but propagated
at the highest levels of the land, indeed presenting itself unblushingly
as knowledge.
I will never be the one who will say that only African Americans are able to or should teach courses that address historical inequities to African Americans. However, the problem begins before that. The university needs to make an ontological decision. Should the products of the institution be just a cookie cutter version of their parents and the culture of which they are a part or should it aim at transformational education. Should education be merely additive or transformative? Dreama Moon (see White Enculturation and Bourgeois Ideology) has aptly described how “good white girls” are made. Should such ones leave the university as Amy Cooper, or should their education be a transformational experience? If the choice is the latter, then how will one steeped in the ideology of white supremacy be able to hire someone to work against the principles that helped to get him/her the job? The short answer is that no one gets ophthalmological treatment from a blind person. On the other hand, if there is no angst felt about presenting ignorance unblushingly as knowledge, current approaches will remain intact. It is not that whites cannot be excellent teachers of the evils of oppression and domination, but isn’t it better to hear of the travails of labor and delivery from a woman who has had such an experience than from a man?
Why is it generally known that six million Jews were killed in the second world war, and no one knows that about fifteen million Native Americans were slaughtered to establish these United States? Why is it that no one knows that ten million were slaughtered in the Congo before World War 2? You see only information that is important to the supremacists is readily disseminated. So, ignorance is not just what is not known, it is also the presence of misinformation under the name of education. Additionally, the suppression of known information, the deliberately ignoring of other knowledges, is part of what Bonaventura de Sousa Santos terms epistemicide. But this will continue if the only ones who set the curriculum are those who benefit from the status quo. To effect real change, we must change the philosophy and methodology of those who are the gatekeepers.
Dreama Moon has pointed out that it is in the home where the seduction of loyalty to oppression is taught. Bree Picower, in The Unexamined Whiteness of Teaching has taught us the truth of hegemonic understandings, the ”internalized ways of making meaning about how society is organized”. She points out inter alia that whites have developed “ways in which they themselves, rather than people of color, were the real victims of racism.” Whites, she says call “upon a variety of ‘tools of Whiteness’ in an effort to maintain their prior hegemonic understandings”. Tools allow a job to be done more effectively or efficiently; tools of Whiteness facilitate in the job of maintaining and supporting hegemonic stories and dominant ideologies of race, which in turn, uphold structures of White supremacy.
So, the very concept of tertiary level education needs to be revisited if the bodies of the youth are not to be offered as living sacrifices. Concepts which drive much of the current discourse are bound up in ways of thinking that benefits the dominant culture. Sometime ago a sage asked, “if an elephant steps on a rat, is the rat being violent to bite the foot of the elephant”? Galtung points out that people who suffer because of the lack of access to available resources suffer from violence. What then must one conclude about the structure of the elephant called America made up of the of the interlocking cogs of economics, education, entertainment, labor, law, religion, health, media, politics, sex and war, which deprive citizens of access to needed resources?
So, let us revisit the concept of presenting bodies as living sacrifices. The sacrifices of bodies in the civil war, led to the deaths of thousands. We are currently faced with two versions of what sacrificing the bodies of white youth might look like. How will these protests end, the vast majority of which have been non-violent? Will it be that of the Phoenix who became transformed from the ashes of injustice and rise to join the rest of the two-thirds world in a new quest for a common humanity, or will they be like Icarus who being so enamored with the privileges of excess, forgot that their wings of privilege fashioned by their fathers were made of wax, and in their attempt to get too close to the top, actually lose everything including their lives. The very concept of tertiary level education needs to be revisited if the bodies of the youth are not to become modern versions of Icarus.
TANO UNIVERSITY 