To defeat racism we must address the disunity amongst us

“So don’t care where you come from As long as you’re a black man, you’re an African

No mind denomination

That is only segregation, you’re an African”

— Peter Tosh 

Over the weekend I had a conversation with my daughter who is in university in London. She made mention of a conversation she had with some fellow students. Two of them were from Africa and they made some comments that she found rather unexpected and unsettling.

One young lady stated she will never date a fellow African. Nor does she wish to date anyone who is black.

Another young man stated that many Africans viewed blacks in the west, who are decendants of slaves, as “tribal rejects” that were gladly sold off to the colonial powers.

Needless to say, this left my daughter in a state of bewilderment. I explained to her that due to colonization, we as blacks suffer from disunity on multiple levels;

• Caribbean Blacks don’t value Africans;

• Africans See Caribbean blacks as rejects;

• African Americans see Caribbean Blacks as lowly immigrants;

• Blacks in and from Latin America consider themselves Spanish not black;

• Each Caribbean island thinks the other is less than them;

• Light skinned blacks are thought better than darker skinned blacks;

• Some blacks reject their own hair type;

• Blacks do not support each other enough, when it comes to business ventures or social events.

The net result is that we are not only divided, but we are conquered. We all have read about the horrors of slavery and we live the repression of colonialism. Yet do we continuously harp on these things or do we look to chart a way forward?

Do we continue to back stab each other? Or do we learn to co-operate and co-exist? There is no time like the present to learn that unity is the only way forward. Neither church nor governments can get us to learn to do what is best for us. This can only come from us realizing what is best for us.

We complain bitterly about our youths fighting each other in gangs. Yet we ourselves fight each other socially, politically, economically, every day. We sit and plot how to outdo each other on the job or in school.

Like a cancer

 When are we going to learn those actions are no different than a cancer eating away our internal organs? You want to defeat racists? Stop falling for their game of disunity.

And at the end of the day we have no one to blame but ourselves by continuing the colonial mindset of internal division amongst ourselves. Stop looking at MTV, VH1 or BET for sub-standard examples of what life should be about. Pick up a book and educate yourselves and others to uplift our status in life.

We have only each other. That is the “True Emancipation” that  Harriett Tubman , Nat Turner , Sally Bassett, Marcus Garvey and Bob Marley taught us about. 

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“How good and how pleasant it would be before God and man, yea-eah! - 

To see the unification of all Africans, yeah! 

As it’s been said a’ready, let it be done, yeah!”

— Bob Marley