324 – 341 Feminism to Brother what a price (old book 204-213)
Vincents text
Norsk Ny dansk bog
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324 While master-slave society has done its utmost to nurture a
threatening sexual image of the black man, we’ve also spared no effort in
continuing the devaluation of the black woman, which started in chattel
slavery. Probably no other nation has let a whole race of women go through
centuries of systematic rape, sometimes daily, and later been so successful
in putting the blame on the victim herself. A puritan society did everything
to dehumanize and “break” the black woman by flogging her and selling her
naked. When black women in Harvard Law School objected to my nude photos,
they held a meeting to decide whether I should use these photos in an
American context. Unlike whites, they didn’t think I’d been sexually
exploiting the poor black women who, despite intense peer pressure, had had
the courage to shelter me as a vagabond. They knew very well that American
black women, contrary to what I later saw in Africa, have developed powerful defense
mechanisms against white men in response to centuries of abuse. It was
decided that I could use the pictures if I made this clear to whites. The
uneasiness of these women, who later became successful lawyers and
politicians, was a direct result of their having internalized ideals of white
beauty to such a degree that they associated everything negative and ugly
with black nakedness or, like white racists, reduced them to sexual images. A sexist society has always told black women to deny their feminine
side. A black woman had to slave in the house for a white woman, who, for her
part, was cultivated as something sublime. The black woman’s main task was
often to raise white children. There was no time for her own children, whom
she had to harshly discipline to enable them to survive a racist society. Out
of our guilt over separating black children from their mothers on the auction
block and coercing self-effacing nannies to be devoted to white children, we
stereotype the black woman as excessively strong, able to endure pain to the
point of being inhuman (an image enhanced by watching the victim raise her
own children harshly). Yet I don’t find the upbringing any harsher than among
ghettoized people in other countries, e.g., Denmark. The centuries-old cult of so-called pure white womanhood continues in
white advertising’s propaganda, which has a tremendous negative impact on the
colored woman (not to mention the religiously covered woman). She’s always
been told that white skin and straight hair are beautiful. Violence against women is appallingly high all over the world. That it
is only 35% higher in the US for black than for white women sadly may reflect
the greater absence of black employed men. In Denmark violence against
immigrant women is growing explosively and now accounts for 42% of the women
in shelters. Here too we shift responsibility away from ourselves,
attributing the numbers to the misogynistic cultures they came from rather
than our marginalization of them. We forget that by distancing or ostracizing
them from our social lives, we behave as do American whites toward
blacks—with the same result: Our victims close in on themselves and are kept
in cultures they’d hoped to escape. The violence we commit against young
people by not making them feel at home in either culture eventually returns
to us. The only time I managed to talk somebody out of a robbery was through
a strange combination of circumstances in Greensboro, North Carolina. I was
living with a black social worker, Tony, whose father owned one of the worst
bars in the black ghetto. I used to hang out at the bar at night. One night I
met two young black women of the criminal type there and we decided that I
should go home with them. First we stole some wine
in a store and dashed right out into a waiting taxi. When we were in the back
seat and had started off, I asked them how they in-tended to pay the cab, as
I knew they had no money. “Don’t worry,” they said, “just wait. Let us take
care of it. When we get there, we’ll just knock him down and take all his
money.” This took me a bit by surprise since I had never tried mugging a taxi
driver before, but I kept quiet, which is one of the first things I learned
to do in America. Then suddenly the black driver turned around to ask something, and I
realized that I knew him. He was the social worker’s grandfather, who owned
the biggest black taxi company in town. I very rarely take matters into my own
hands in America, but I certainly did then. I shouted “Stop!” to the driver
and said that he could get the fare the next day through his grandson. Then I
tore the purse with the gun in it from the one woman’s hands and pushed them
both out the car door, while they gaped at me just like the taxi driver. Out
on the street I shouted at them “That was Tony’s grandfather, you idiots!”
Though they knew Tony, this fact would naturally not have stopped them, but
when they were out of the car and the taxi had driven off, they had at least
no chance of hurting him. Often the brutality of such women shocked me. I saw them time and
again do the most revolting things to both men and women. For that very
reason it was such an overwhelming experience when a relationship could arise
between us, and I had an opportunity to get a glimpse of the warm humanity
under the hard shell of viciousness and backstabbing which this violent
system had given them. Human beings who are enslaved to such a degree by
violence cherish a deep longing for freedom and a more human way of dealing
with each other. But this yearning is never able to bloom as it is constantly
stifled by the violent responses it encounters from the other prisoners of
the ghetto. This yearning never makes contact with
the whites or the better-off blacks with their “culture,” since these
“cultured” types have only contempt for the ghetto culture - a contempt which
is constantly felt and perceived in the ghetto, and which seems to me to be
directly responsible for the ghetto becoming more and more violent. That
tenderness I so often found in our relation-ships,
which could so easily have taken root under a more humane social system, had
such an inexpressibly strong and painful effect on me precisely because I saw
again and again how the system made it more natural for these women to behave
in a pattern of viciousness rather than tenderness. Another night in Jacksonville, Florida, I had met a nice black woman
who promised to find me a place to stay. We went to see her friend who was a
prostitute, but she was having problems with her boyfriend, so we couldn’t
stay there. We walked around all evening trying this possibility and that.
The prostitute got more and more interested in trying to get us a place to
stay. The two of them then agreed that she should “turn a trick” with a white
taxi driver while I sat waiting in a cafe. After a while they came running hack, looking very upset, and said
that I should come quick. We got a room in a motel
and I discovered that they had far more than the ten dollars you usually get
for a “blow job” on the street. I asked them how they got it, but they
wouldn’t say. Only later did they tell me about it. It turned out that one of
them had lured the white man into a dark alley, where she did the “job.” But
then she had suddenly grabbed a big brick at her side and hit the man over
the head. As he didn’t fall down unconscious
immediately, she had taken a steel pipe and hit him in the head again and
again until apparently, he was dead. Then she took his wallet and ran back to
the other woman, who had stood in the background watching the whole thing.
The thing was that she had felt she might as well take a hit more than the
ten dollars so she could enjoy the night with a shot of heroin. But as we all
three lay there in a double bed in the motel, they were obviously in anguish;
it turned out they were both very religious. For several hours they prayed,
“Oh God, God, please don’t let him die!” It was a nervous, stammering prayer,
in between attempts to find a vein to shoot up in. By the next morning they had already forgotten the whole thing. They
worried more about having overslept so that they were late for church, where
they should have been singing in the choir. Letter to a friend So we cripple the underclass,
exclude it, stereotype it, degrade it—all to avoid the pain of confronting
our own Cain-creation and the tears it’s opened in the delicate fabric of our
middleclass power and security. Even though the barriers of discrimination we’ve built, out of fear of
our outcasts, can be maintained only because these pariahs rarely have the
power to threaten anyone except each other, the ghetto still makes us
uncomfortable and anxious. And so we prefer to look down on the beggar
from above, paying off our conscience in coin. Most of us have become so
crippled by the pattern of oppression we’ve created that we’re unable to sit
down with him in the street and listen to how we in the West once used him to
build our affluence, and listen to him about how we
later needed him when we sent him to Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan to
fight for what we called freedom. Dare we look him in the eye while he explains what he lost in this
struggle for our freedom? The freedom to make people of color overseas as
dependent as himself … the freedom to give us the intoxication of power and
self-satisfaction arising from our foreign aid or federal poverty programs …
the paternalistic freedom he’ll suffer for the rest of his life … the freedom
with which we daily bombard the world’s poor people without letting them
enjoy its goods … the freedom to forget our fellow man while tyrannizing him. You can get it if you really want! But you must try, try
and try. You’ll succeed at last. Persecution you must bear, win or lose you got to get your share but your mind set on a dream the harder it seems now. You can get it if’ you really want. Rome was not built in a day, opposition will come your way, but the harder the battle seems, the sweeter the victory. You can get it if you really want, but you must try, try
and try, you’ll succeed at last..
When I traveled in Florida’s slave camps, I discovered a great
difference in the degree to which this psychological terror has oppressed the
mind in different countries. One of the camps contained only blacks from
Jamaica, who astonished me by, for instance, keeping their camps neat, while
the Americans would throw trash all over in their camps. Liberal scholars explain these differences in character by going back
to chattel slavery. Blacks in Latin America and the West Indies are more
integrated in society today because the Latin form of slavery was feudalistic
and, in its nature, open. The church protected slave families from being
separated and there was upward mobility and freedom. In America, on the other
hand, slavery was capitalistic: Even the church defined the slave as a sales
item, and there was no possibility of psychological escape. The capitalist
type of slavery was a closed system, while the feudal kind was an open system
and therefore not as destructive to the mind. Slavery in the US has been
compared with German concentration camps, where it was possible to study the
effect of a totally closed system on human beings. Diaries written in concentration
camps by intellectuals show how, in a short time, they were degraded to
subhuman status and began to develop a psyche much like the average slave in
the States, including an almost loving attitude toward the camp guards (or,
in any case, not direct hatred), which led to total resignation and a sense
of irresponsibility and infantilism in many prisoners. No matter how tempting such theories are for liberals trying to
explain the separate character of the American ghetto, they once again shift
the blame onto something that happened more than a hundred years ago.
Indirectly, they’re saying that the character blacks received “back in
slavery” makes it impossible “for us” to integrate them into white (or
mainstream) society. The victim is again being blamed for not being
integrated. Such distinct characteristics show, on the contrary, that slavery
is alive and well today. For character traits are not inherited through
generations, as we can see in black West Indian immigrants who also lived in
slavery but whom we usually have no problems integrating with. So if “our homegrown” blacks in America seem to have a
different character, it’s shocking proof that we are still confining and
shaping our unwanted citizens in a closed system. The crippling of underclass children’s minds always astonished me
until I became aware of the closed ghetto system. Most young black children I
meet are filled with a zest for life. But later they become easily depressed
and withdraw into a shell as if to protect themselves from our all-pervading
oppressive thinking about them. Very early on they acquire our negative
expectations of them, and, beginning around fourth grade, they begin to lose
faith in themselves, their abilities and future. They become so aware of the
closed system they lose motivation and fall behind whites in the school
(exactly as we see with our unloved brown children in Denmark). But the strongest indication of our oppression is without doubt
self-hatred, the self-hatred that makes ghetto children tear the hair out of
their black dolls or draw themselves in the corner of the paper while white
kids usually place themselves in the middle. That self-hatred which makes
people react violently against their surroundings, throwing trash everywhere,
for example, or “backstabbing,” both verbally and literally. All people
suffer from a little self-loathing, but the self-disdain in the American
underclass is so severe that it helps confer on the ghetto one of the world’s
highest rates of crime and family disintegration as well as perhaps the
smallest degree of mutual trust. When we see how aggression more often turns
against fellow victims rather than against the oppressor, as is always true
with oppression, when we experience the uncontrollable anger in American blacks,
we begin to understand the effect of the closed system we’ve confined them
to: the ghetto, or slavery here and now! Malcolm X: “The worst crime the white has ever committed was to teach us to hate ourselves.” Tacitus: “It is human nature to hate the one whom you have hurt.” Brother, what a price I paid! You stole my history, destroyed my culture, Cut off my tonque so I can’t communicate. Then you humiliate, then you separate, hide my whole way of life so myself I should hate! Brother, what a price I paid! You took away my name, put me to shame, made me a disgrace the world’s laughing stock. Made of me a show, to jeer and to mock, but your time is at hand so you better watch the
clock! From the shores of Africa, mainland of Asia, The caribbean and Mississippi Central and South America. First you humiliate, then you separate, you hide my whole way of life so myself I should hate. Brother, what a price I paid! Sister, what a price I paid! Mother, what a price I paid! |
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324
Den
århundredgamle dyrkelse af den såkaldte rene hvide kvindelighed fortsætter i
den hvide reklames propaganda, som har en enorm negativ indvirkning på den
farvede kvinde (for ikke at tale om den religiøst tildækkede kvinde). Hun har
altid fået at vide, at hvid hud og løst glat hår er det eneste
rigtige. Den
eneste gang, hvor det lykkedes mig at tale nogen fra at foretage et overfald,
var ved et mærkeligt sammentræf af omstændigheder i Greensboro, North
Carolina. Jeg boede hos en sort socialrådgiver, Tony, hvis far ejede en af de
værste barer i den sorte ghetto. Jeg hang altid i baren om aftenen. En aften
mødte jeg to sorte piger af den kriminelle type derinde, og vi besluttede, at
jeg skulle tage med dem hjem. Først stjal vi noget vin i en forretning og
strøg så lige ud i den ventende taxa. Da vi sad på bagsædet og var kommet i
gang, spurgte jeg pigerne, hvordan de havde i sinde at betale, eftersom jeg
vidste, at de ikke havde penge. Pyt, sagde de, bare vent. Lad os ordne det.
Når vi kommer til stedet vil vi bare slå ham ned og
tage alle hans penge. Dette kom lidt bag på mig, da jeg ikke havde prøvet at
slå en taxachauffør ned før, men jeg sagde alligevel ikke noget. Så pludselig vendte den sorte chauffør sig om for at spørge om
noget, og jeg opdagede, at jeg kendte ham. Det var jo socialrådgiverens
bedstefar, som ejede byens største sorte taxaselskab. Da kan det nok være, at
jeg tog sagen i mine egne hænder. Jeg råbte stands til chaufføren, og sagde
han kunne få betaling næste dag gennem sønnesønnen. Derefter rev jeg
håndtasken med pistolen ud af den ene piges hånd og skubbede dem ud af døren, mens de måbede ligeså meget som taxachaufføren.
Ude på gaden råbte jeg til dem: ”Det er jo Tonys bedstefader,
I fjolser”. Skønt de kendte Tony, ville denne kendsgerning naturligvis ikke
have standset dem, men da de var ude af bilen og taxaen kørt, havde de i
hvert fald ingen mulighed for at skade ham. Tit chokerede sådanne pigers råhed mig. Jeg så dem bestandig
gøre de mest modbydelige ting mod både mænd og kvinder. Netop derfor var det
så overvældende en oplevelse, når et forhold kunne opstå imellem os, og jeg
fik lejlighed til at få et glimt af den varme menneskelighed neden under den
hårde skal af ondskab og tvetungethed (backstabbing), som dette voldelige system havde givet
dem. Mennesker, som i den grad er slavebundne af en voldelig måde at omgås,
nærer en dyb længsel efter frihed og en mere menneskelig måde at omgås
hinanden på. Alligevel kan denne længsel ikke komme til at blomstre, da den
konstant kvæles af de voldelige vibrationer, den modtager fra ghettoens andre
fanger. De hvide og bedrestillede sorte kommer denne længsel ikke i kontakt
med, da disse ”finkulturelle” kun har foragt tilovers for ghettokulturen – en
foragt der konstant føles og fornemmes i ghettoen, og som er den direkte
årsag til, at ghettoen bliver mere og mere voldelig. Den ømhed, jeg så ofte
fandt i vore forhold, og som så let kunne have fået lov at slå rod i mere
menneskelige samfundssystemer, virkede så usigelig stærk og smertende på mig,
netop fordi jeg igen og igen så, hvordan systemet gjorde det mere naturligt
for disse piger at handle i et mønster af råhed fremfor ømhed. En anden aften i Jacksonville, Florida, havde jeg truffet en
sød, sort pige, som lovede mig at finde et sted, hvor jeg kunne bo. Vi gik
hen til hendes veninde, som var prostitueret, men hun havde haft problemer
med sin fyr, så der kunne vi ikke bo. Vi vandrede rundt hele aftenen og
prøvede både den ene og den anden mulighed. Den prostituerede blev stadig
mere interesseret i at skaffe os et sted at være. Pigerne aftalte så, at hun
skulle ”turn a trick” på en hvid taxachauffør, mens
jeg sad og ventede i en kaffebar. Nogen tid senere kom de helt oprevne
løbende tilbage og sagde, at jeg skulle komme hurtigt. Vi fik et værelse på
et motel og jeg opdagede, at de havde langt mere end de 10 dollars, man
normalt får for et ”blow job” på gaden. Jeg spurgte dem, hvorledes det kunne
gå til, men de ville ikke sige hvordan. Først senere fortalte de om det. Det
viste sig, at den ene havde fået lokket den hvide mand ind i en mørk gyde,
hvor hun så havde foretaget ”jobbet”. Men så havde hun pludselig grebet en
stor mursten ved siden af og slået manden oveni hovedet. Da han ikke faldt
omkuld øjeblikkeligt, havde hun taget en jernstang og slået ham oveni, igen
og igen, indtil han øjensynlig var død. Derefter tog hun hans pung op og løb
tilbage til den anden pige, som havde stået i baggrunden og overværet det
hele. Sagen var, at hun havde følt, hun lige så godt kunne tage lidt mere end
de 10 dollars, så hun også kunne nyde natten med et skud heroin. Men da vi
alle tre lå der på motellet i en dobbeltseng, fik de åbenbart sjælekvaler, og
det viste sig, at de begge var stærkt religiøse. I flere timer bad de: ”Åh,
Gud, Gud, gør dog noget så han ikke dør”. Det var en nervøst stammende bøn
ind imellem forsøgene på at finde en vene, de kunne sprøjte i. Allerede næste
morgen havde de glemt det hele igen. De var mest bekymrede over at have sovet
over sig, så de nu kom for sent til søndagsgudstjenesten, hvor de skulle
synge i kirkekoret. Brev
til amerikansk ven Og
derfor foretrækker vi at se på den hjemløse ovenfra, så vi kan købe os fri
med en skilling. De fleste af os er nemlig selv blevet så forkrøblede af det
undertrykkelsesmønster, vi har skabt, at vi ikke er i stand til at sætte os
ned med ham på gaden og lytte til, hvordan vi i Vesten engang brugte ham til at opbygge vores velstand,
og lytte til ham om, hvordan vi senere havde brug for ham, da vi sendte ham
til Korea, Vietnam, Irak og Afghanistan for at kæmpe for det, vi kaldte
frihed.
But you must try, try
and try. You’ll succeed at last. Persecution you must bear, win or lose you got to get your share but your mind set on a dream the harder it seems now. You can get it if’ you really want. Rome was not built in a day, opposition will come your way, but the harder the battle seems, the sweeter the victory. You can get it if you really want, but you must try, try
and try, you’ll succeed at last.. 334
Brother, what a price I paid! You stole my history, destroyed my culture, Cut off my tonque so I can’t communicate. Then you humiliate, then you separate, hide my whole way of life so myself I should hate! Brother, what a price I paid! You took away my name, put me to shame, made me a disgrace the world’s laughing stock. Made of me a show, to jeer and to mock, but your time is at hand so you better watch the
clock! From the shores of Africa, mainland of Asia, The caribbean and Mississippi Central and South America. First you humiliate, then you separate, you hide my whole way of life so myself I should hate. Brother, what a price I paid! Sister, what a price I paid! Mother, what a price I paid! |