THE NEW HUMANITY (Excerpt dtd 6239)***

[Baba Ahmed]

"If we were to correctly judge a civilization by the quality of its attitudes toward and treatment of oghers, then Europeans, wherever found in the past or present, have no claim to such an honor. And as in the past, the present European claim to civilization or even being civilized is racist.

But not in the way many of us see it. Racism's roots are much more deeply entrenched than surface observations could possibly allow. Today, too many of us only see the evidence of white supremacy in Europeans' grudging admittance to a small number of their past barbaric immoralities against people of color. Often the confusion of surviving leaves us with little time or energy to study the fact that the history of Europeans is a history of lies. The problem with this surface level thinking is that leaves most of us unable to identify racism unless it is made public and/or ersonal. A deeper level of thinking is required to see what is intentionally hidden but which determines what we see.

Evidence of the ongoing arrogance of white supremacy at this deeper level lies in the propaganda that their past barbaric immoralities against others were simply childish devilments in their natural evolutionary progress toward becoming civilized. Since then, the argument goes, social maturation has naturally made them less mean and aggressive. What clearly shows the racist nature of this logic is the assumption that the Afrikans who studied the cosmos and domesticated their spaces on this planet thousands and thousands of years before Europeans had even acquired language could not have been civilized. Here is another European myth with potentially an even greater political impact than the fiction of their discovering philosophy or a new world. Because of the need to sustain these lies, any recognition of preEuropean civilization negates the possibility of moral human civilization originating with Europeans in the last half century....

They must create, discover, originate all of human worth. Therefore, they must continue to generate more and more lies to corroborate the original lies. If the original lies become exposed before they are unquestionably accepted as truth by all, white supremacy crumbles.

The notion of Euroeans as the original civilizers of humanity is an extremely dangerous, racist logic as long as those who have been "hoodwinked, bamboozled, [and] led astray"{1} remain unaware. It is based on the European assumption that the only world that ever existed and is worthy of study in terms of the evolution of moral civilization is theirs. And, therefore, the only society through which we can rightly evaluate the world is theirs....

Marimba Ani reminds us that

• The European mind is a political one and for this reason constantly aware of the political effect of words and images as they are used for the purposes of manipulation. By "political" I mean to indicate an ego that consistently experiences people as others; as representatives of interests defined differently and, therefore, as conflicting with this "ego." The individual is concerned...with the way in which his verbal expression and the image he projects can influence the behavior of those to whom he relates...{3}

Since its genesis, what differentiates European culture from others is the glaring contradictions between its stated belief system and any action that relects it even discounting the selfish motivation of a so-called few bad apples. A few bad apples invariably spoil the lot. Forgiveness is supposed to be a recognition or belief by the forgiver that the perpetrator's action will not occur again, that there will be a conscious attempt to never do whatever was done again.

They have not stopped. Nor do they intend to. Second, forgetfulness downplays, to the oppressor's advantage, the roots of all revolutionary change - someone was wronged, with malice, forethought and beyond reason, and continues to be wronged in the same intolerable way.

And third, remembrance is a necessary and natural cleansing/healing ritual where the Maafa (the attempted destruction of Afrikan civilization and culture through the enslavement, colonization and dehumanization of its people) is transformed into a wisdom that brings us as an Afrikan people back toward our rightful cultural Way. Our self-determined hsitorical memory serves as a constant reminder to never let what happened to us happen again."
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***6239 (Afrikan Calendar) is approximately 1999, Christian calendar date the essay, "The New Humanity" was published in the book, negores and other essays by Larry D. Crawford (Mwalimu A. Bomani Baruti).
1. Malcolm X
3. Marimba Ani, Yurugu: An African Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior, Trenton NJ: Africa World Press, 1994, p.314