Of Black Servitude Without Slavery: The Unspoken Politics of the English Language

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PREFACE

he importance and influence of the English language in modern life cannot be gainsaid. Not only is there a large and growing number of people who communicate in it - about one quarter of the world’s population by some estimates - but it is, most importantly, by far and away the world’s favourite second language. By this one means that it is the language more people are likely to speak than any other in addition to their own native tongues. Indeed, one of the enduring realities of modern life is the dominance of English as the language of communication across cultures, such that even native speakers of other major languages such as Chinese, Spanish or French, now find it advisable, if not actually necessary, to also be able to communicate in English.

Many explanations have been advanced for this situation. Some see it as the natural legacy of two successive and massively powerful Anglophone phenomena - Pax Britannica followed by Pax Americana. Others cite the political, economic and technological dominance of the United States of America, coupled with the inability, or reluctance, of its people to speak any other language, thereby effectively forcing those who will deal with them – basically everyone else – to take up English. A third factor, acting independently or in combination with the foregoing, is, of course, the spread of information technology (the main features of which were developed in English) coupled with globalization which has made the adoption of a single common language almost imperative – if only for the sake of efficiency.

Regardless of how this has come about, however, the reality now is that English has emerged as a truly global language, if not in fact the only global language. As noted in an article not too long ago in the authoritative New York Times newspaper, It (English) is the common language in almost every endeavour, from science to air traffic control to the global jihad, where it is apparently the means of communication between speakers of Arabic and other languages… It has consolidated its dominance as the language of the Internet, where 80 per cent of the world’s electronically stored information is in English… (Seth Mydans, Across Cultures, English is the word, New York Times 9 April 2007).

If one adds to this mix the cultural dimension - the ubiquitous and rapidly expanding influence, especially among the young, of pop music, pop dance, pop dressing, in fact, pop culture - carried to every corner of the globe on the wings of radio, television and the Internet - it becomes clear that it may not be too much of an exaggeration to say that As goes Anglophone culture, so goes the world. Of the utmost significance to the subject matter of concern in this book is the fact that with the acquisition of English, one also acquires not just the words and expressions of that language, but, most critically, the system of thought and mindset associated with the language. Therein lies the crux of the matter in this case: the unfortunate implications of this global dominance of the English language for the black race, and which implications form the subject matter of this book. What are these implications? Well, everyone knows that in English bad things are black and black things are not good (e.g. black spot, black day and blackmail). By the same token, everyone knows that good things are white and white things are not bad (white knight, white magic, white lie). The unfortunate, and dangerous, thing, of course, is that this categorization is not only widespread throughout the language, but is systemic and systematically applied.

It is this blackness of bad/badness of black concept, together with its accompanying mindset, and the consequences which flow from it for both black and white people and for humanity at large, that are the subject matter of this book. Simply put, the book avers that this blackness of bad/badness of black mindset, unavoidably imported into the realm of race relations, creates a situation in which black people effectively are held in perpetual psychological servitude, and the white person, independent of himself, is, quite possibly, imbued from childhood with a mindset of negativity towards black things, and with it, of racial superiority, which he has to work hard to overcome. In substantiation of this averment, the book undertakes an exposition of the role and impact of the blackness of bad mindset in the daily lives of both black and white people and ultimately of society at large.

Among the contexts in which the subject is analyzed are those of race relations, the black image and black self-esteem, Western aesthetics, including the idea of beauty, and the administration of criminal justice. Obviously, the wider and more pervasive the spread of the English language globally, the wider and more pervasive will be the propagation of the blackness of bad terminology and accompanying mindset - to the detriment, inevitably, of the black race. If English is thus to become the global language, as appears almost inevitable, then it is only fair, surely, that it not be allowed to continue to propagate, however unwittingly, what is in effect a racist mindset, if not ideology. A campaign to remedy this situation becomes, therefore, not only imperative, but also especially urgent. This book takes up the challenge of initiating such a campaign.

In terms strictly of accomplishing the book’s ultimate objective of eliminating the blackness of bad idea and mindset, attention may be drawn to CHAPTERS SIX and SEVEN, which contain, respectively, an outline and analysis of proposed solutions to the blackness of bad problem and a plan of action for practical implementation of those solutions. The key to successful implementation of these solutions lies, however, it may be suggested, in proper utilization of the lessons derived from the expositions contained in CHAPTERS THREE and FOUR, the one dealing with the impact of the blackness of bad idea on black people, and the other with the challenges faced by white people in overcoming the effect of the idea on their own mind and attitude to black people. As the book is not intended as a mere intellectual exercise, but rather as a call to action, the success of its ultimate objective depends very much on its success in creating a bridge of understanding of the problem at hand from both sides of the race divide, and the material in these two Chapters are aimed at that. Understanding each other’s predicament in this matter is the key to creating the desire and the will on both sides to jointly confront the challenge posed by this problem and to implement the necessary solution to it.

A note of caution is in order, though. As argued in this book, ending the anti-black bias of language will undoubtedly have a major favourable impact on race relations - if only by removing a veritable source of irritation and humiliation for black people and of negative influences and awkwardness for the white person of goodwill (the good white man, as he is, for convenience, characterized in the book). Nevertheless, Of Black Servitude Without Slavery is not about race relations, or, more accurately, not only about race relations. Rather, it is more about human rights and liberation - the right of black people to be free of the constant and daily defamation inherent in the blackness of bad terminology and supporting mindset, as well as the psychological and social burden of coping with the same. As such, it is a cause separate from, and independent of, improved race relations, though success will benefit both. It is in that context, incidentally, that the question is posed in the book - somewhat tongue-in-cheek, of course, but only somewhat - Is the English language ‘unconstitutional’?

An intriguing aspect of the analysis pursued in the book, co-incidentally, is the light which it sheds on some of the more puzzling and often-debated issues about the black (especially African-American) experience. One such issue analyzed is the real meaning of the classic black doll/white doll experiment among black children first carried out in the 1940s by African-American child psychologists, Kenneth and Mamie Clark, and since repeated several times by others, with essentially similar (need one say, awkward?) results; another equally significant, and no-less-illuminating, analysis emerging in this context is a hypothesis about the real reason why such venerable black institutions as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the United Negro College Fund still retain these seemingly politically incorrect names even as of today.

CHAPTER ONE

LIBERATION STRUGGLE:

The Importance of Obama and of Being Obama

n Tuesday, the 4th of November, in the Year 2008, the people of America stunned - and largely delighted - the whole world. It was Election Day and in a step of unprecedented boldness - no, audacity, they elected as their 44th President, Barack Obama, a man whose father was a black African, born in Kenya, and whose grandfather, from the village of K’Ogelo, had indeed been a Muslim. In so doing, the good people of America more than elected a President, they dealt a body blow to many of the myths that underpin the ideology, culture and practice of racism, including, most significantly, the myth of the black man as somehow, and by nature, incapable of the highest achievements and functions, only the physical and the menial. A particular brand of this idea, which has proved to die hard, is the one that refuses to contemplate the possibility of a black man in any position of real authority - let alone authority over white people. It was nothing short of a devastating blow, therefore, to that mindset that in America a black man, and one of quite recent vintage, both in terms of age and historical connection to America, was elected by a resounding affirmative vote to the highest office in the land. And, as if to underscore the significance of the event - and to say, Hey, we know exactly what we are doing! - the black candidate was chosen over a white candidate who could not be any more blue-blooded American if he tried - a war hero prisoner-of-war whose father and grandfather had both been Admirals of the U.S. Navy!

There are those, therefore, who see, and have hailed, the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States as signaling the birth of the post-racial era of American society. There is some justification for this. After all, how much further away can one turn from the racismera in American life than voting to install a black man as the country’s First Citizen and his wife and children as First Family! This in the land of slavery! This, in the land of lynching, Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan! It beggars belief, and to suggest it only a few years ago would have seemed cruelly fanciful, a dreamer’s fairy tale! Yet, here we are: Obama is President and his wife, Michelle, an even more black person (the sort who would have been called a Negress not too long ago) is on the cover of Vogue magazine as not only a fashion, but also a high society icon!

More seriously, though, on the question whether the election of President Obama marks the beginning of the post-racism era of American life, common sense alone tells us that an ideology, mindset and attitude that has been with people, and was indeed for centuries institutionalized, even if now outlawed, can hardly disappear overnight or be ended by one event, no matter how monumental. As the English saying goes, One swallow does not a summer make! Yet, the very fact that the question is raised underscores the magnitude and significance of this event in the eyes of most people. Interestingly, and equally telling, too, is the fact that when the question was put to such civil rights icons as The Reverend Jesse Jackson and Congressman John Lewis immediately after Obama’s election, they did not, as one might have expected, give the straight and obvious response of No. They paused a while and then came back with a qualified response that neither said Oh, yes nor Definitely not, all of which suggests that there is something to the idea implicit in the question, that the question is not totally way out, as the Americans would say.

All of this is perfectly understandable. Although no one knows better than these civil rights heavy-weights who have spent a life time in the struggle against racism, that its pernicious tentacles cannot easily be unhooked, let alone be eliminated, by one electoral event, they are equally alive to the import of this event in the context of the struggle for racial equality, and would not want to be understood as underestimating, or worse still, belittling its significance. After all, it had been barely forty-five years since Martin Luther King delivered his iconic I have a dream speech on the steps of the Washington Monument in the American capital - a speech the substance of which must have sounded both prophetic and distant at the same time, and, if the truth must be told, a trifle unachievable at the time, even to the most enthusiastic of his listeners. The speech, after all, was about a dream — a characterization that carries within it the very notion of possibly unrealizable or, at least, not easily or necessarily realizable. And yet, here we are, with the first African-American President of the United States, elected, not by fluke or accident, but by a decisive electoral mandate! No wonder then that the question of whether the election of Obama marked the birth of a new post-racial era in American public life was not easily or adequately answered by a simple Yes or No.

While being careful not to go too far in the other direction and engage in hyperbole, there is nevertheless room, it is suggested, for a meaningful comparison between Obama’s election in 2008 as President of the United States of America, in terms of its significance and impact on the fortunes of black people in the United States, and that other transformational event in their lives, namely, the abolition of slavery. Now, this may at first blush seem like comparing events of different orders of magnitude and significance. After all, there is no comparison when it comes to the legal, political and socio-economic consequences on American society of the freeing of black slaves. All of a sudden a locus standi was created, which did not previously exist in law, for demanding and obtaining enforcement of other rights, such as, most significantly, equal protection of the law, and the anti-discrimination rights flowing therefrom. Thus, to illustrate, the Supreme Court decision in Brown v Board of Education,¹ which basically outlawed segregation in schools and, by implication, in other public facilities, was based essentially on the reasoning that running separate school systems for whites and blacks (in which, invariably, the black schools were financially and otherwise short-changed by the State or local government) violated the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution.

Now, the Equal Protection Clause, contained in the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, guarantees that "no person or class of persons shall be denied the same protection of the laws which is enjoyed by other persons or classes (of persons) in like circumstances in their lives, liberty, property, and in their pursuit of happiness (emphasis supplied). The point here is that it was the abolition of slavery which put the ex-slave in like circumstances as the ordinary white citizen and hence able to claim the equal protection of the law. As a slave, he would, of course, have been unable to argue that discriminatory laws were treating him differently from others (i.e. whites) in like circumstances".

One must obviously admit, in comparison, that there are, in fact, no consequences of Obama’s election as President on the legal situation of the black person in America, there being no legal handicaps remaining to the black person’s aspirations. The same, too, can be said when it comes to the matter of economic impact. One, of course, may expect the very fact of a black presence in the White House and in the corridors of power to have some deterrent effect on the use and invocation of the well-known non-legal and unspoken barriers to black economic advancement, manifested in hidden discrimination. This same factor should at the same time boost the self-confidence and assertiveness of black-owned enterprises, while exerting positive pressure on the white-controlled business establishment to engage with such black businesses.

As to the political impact of Obama’s election, this obviously would be expected to be huge, at least potentially. Not only would black, Hispanic or other non-whites feel confident enough to put themselves forward for public office, the established political parties, whose candidates generally stand the best chance of winning, can begin to look at such minority candidates not as side-shows good only for making a certain point, but as credible and legitimate (and in some cases, preferred) contenders capable of actually winning the election for the party, which ultimately is the consuming objective of such parties. But significant as such impact of Obama’s election might be in the political arena, it is, of course, nothing compared to the socio-political earthquake produced in American society by the end of slavery and the consequent and eventual enfranchisement of millions of people previously totally excluded from the political process. So again, one can conclude that even this latest major breakthrough in black American political history is nevertheless still far overshadowed in importance by the political significance of the abolition of slavery, and the civil emancipation of the black man in the United States.

There is one area, however, in which the election of President Obama has the potential to create a greater impact in the lives of black Americans than even the abolition of slavery did. This is in the area of black self-esteem, for the abolition of slavery per se did not confer on the average black person the feeling that he or she was now, or even could be, at the same level as the white man in all things, or in all things that mattered. Indeed, the history of the black American in the century-and-a-half, or so, from the Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln in January 1863 to the inauguration of Obama as the 44th President in January 2009, can be viewed as the struggle of the black man to establish himself, both within his own consciousness and that of society at large, as being on the same level with the white man - and in all things.

In this connection may be noted the two main schools of thought underpinning the drive for upliftment of the black man in America in the post-slavery era. The first and older of these was that represented by Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) of the Tuskegee Institute fame. Booker T. (as he is sometimes referred to), a Southern freed slave turned author and educationist, was a pragmatic leader who preached gradualism and acceptance of their lot by black people. He emphasized practical and skill-acquisition-type training for black people with an eye to their economic empowerment through jobs – a strategy which, for him, meant accommodation with the white establishment, and with it the status quo, in return for economic support and sponsorship, but which earned him, perhaps a little harshly, the epithet of an Uncle Tom among many of today’s blacks. In contrast was the school of thought best represented by the Harvard-educated Dr. W. E. B. Dubois (1868– 1963), who emphasized education (liberal arts rather than vocational) and intellectual excellence as the key to the upliftment of the black person. For Dr. Dubois, whose chief constituency was in reality the black elite – educated, urbanized, articulate and relatively better off – the operative slogan could be said to be equal rights now!, thus firmly rejecting Booker T. Washington’s gradualism and accommodationism.

The important thing here, however, is that, despite the well-documented and, frankly, not-surprising, antipathy between these two schools of thought, they, in fact, shared one common aspiration. Each had as a desired objective of its approach enhancement of the self-image and self-confidence of the black man. Washington, in his case, was aware of the self-confidence and sense of responsibility that comes from having and holding down a paying job, while Dubois aimed at the self-confidence and assertiveness that comes from educational and intellectual accomplishment and a more direct confrontation of the white man’s claim to precedence.

Now, of all the things capable of enhancing the self-image of the black person, few, if any, can rival the impact of a black man campaigning for and winning the battle, first, to become the official Presidential candidate of a major party in the United States and, not just that, to then go on and actually win the election – and win it handily - against an outstanding white candidate of the opposing party, and thereby becoming the most powerful man in the world! As the old adage goes, seeing is believing and the sight on a daily basis for the past four, and now, since Obama’s re-election on November 6, 2012 for a second term, for the next four, years of a black President of the United States and a black First Family in the White House going about the normal business of running the country is, especially for the young black person, surely worth more than a thousand other motivational devices combined! No longer need the black man, especially the black child, engage in the self-censoring of his own ambitions, to pare it down to what is realistic. Nothing, from this perspective, could have seemed more unrealistic than an ambition by a young black child to one day become President of the United States and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces! Yet, it has happened and the message could not be any clearer to the American child, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American or other, You can be whatever you want to be!

Incidentally, it may not be entirely whimsical to add the following observation to this comparison between these two great transforming events of African-American life. It can be argued, in support of a special significance to Obama’s achievement, that, according to most informed opinion, slavery, as an economic and social system, was, for a variety of reasons (dwindling economic importance, evolving ethos of a Western democracy, etc.) doomed to inevitable collapse, sooner or later. No one, on the other hand, could say with absolute certainty that there would ever be a black President of the United States - though, of course, the possibility always did exist!

Obama’s ascension (for that is what it is, in a way) to the highest office in the land can, therefore, be viewed as the high point, if not the culmination - seeing as one cannot get higher than that - of the long and tribulation-laden march of the black man in America from slavery to freedom, to equality. But the transformational impact of this event transcends America to reach the farthest corners of the world and, if such a thing exists, well beyond! No clearer evidence of this is required than to perceive the keen, almost obsessive, interest that year of people everywhere in the unfolding drama of the United States electoral process, all the way from the party primaries to Election Day itself, and, of course, the simultaneous celebration that broke out all across the globe on the announcement of Obama’s election victory on November 4, 2008.

Obama’s election as President of the United States of America had, of course, been hailed and celebrated throughout the world, but, one suspects, for a variety of reasons. For some, it was because it was a change from the Bush policies and, for others, from Bush himself; for many, it was because of its significance for the struggle for racial equality, while for others, it was itself the ultimate triumph of that struggle. And then, of course, there were those who rooted for Obama simply on account of the man’s youthful good looks and charisma (the so-called rock star effect). For two groups of black people outside of the United States, however, the development carries a very potent and special significance. These are the black people of sub-Saharan Africa and the black communities of the European continent, such as those in Britain and France.

For people of sub-Saharan Africa, Obama is one of us in a very direct sense. Not only is he of direct African descent through his father, but that father was not an expatriated African personality living in the American Diaspora, like many parents of young black people born in America or Europe, but remained and died as an African living in Africa. Nor is Obama’s situation like that of the hero of Alex Hailey’s classic, ROOTS, who needed an intricate genealogical chart to successfully trace his roots through centuries and many generations of ancestors to a village in Gambia, where, of course, no one alive could possibly remember his original African ancestor, let alone claim to be that ancestor’s contemporary. Everything in Obama’s case is all within living memory, his father having only traveled to the United States for the first time in the post-independence era of the 1960’s and having himself died only in 1982 after retiring from working in the Kenya Civil Service.

It is also to be noted that, apart from what his father did, Obama had himself even as a boy maintained and nurtured his African roots and connection. Thus, the situation he once experienced of helping his grandmother, Mama Sarah Obama - who, significantly, is herself still very much around – carry produce to the village market for sale is quite typical of the life of an African boy in his ancestral Kenyan village of K’Ogelo. His book, Dreams From My Father, A Story of Race and Inheritance, is, of course, very much about this black African connection. This connection is, in fact, never far from, and is like a constant thread running through, Obama’s own consciousness of self. It is no wonder, then, that the black