Freedom

When contemplating the question of segregation in American, so that the African Americans could live their life fully, something did not seem to settle. Why should the black man leave the country that was built on the sweat and blood of his ancestors? Or why should it only have some part of it and give the rest to the white man. This reminded me of when Fanon said that the only “common denominator” in the problems of Africans and African-Americans is their relation to men. Otherwise, both of them are vastly different societies with different issues. And so it made sense. While Africa needed to drive out the white man to succeed, I think the African American does not. My point is that segregation and hating the white man is probably not the solution in America.

From what I can make of this weeks topic from my understanding (and I don’t claim that I have understood it completely), is that for a black man to live freely in America there needs to be two things. First and foremost, I think the black man needs to fight for his place on the table rather than creating a replica of the American society it is trying to escape. Secondly, as Ella Baker put is very uniquely, we don’t just need freedom for the black man, but all of humanity, which includes the white man too.

While thinking about Malcolm X’s advocacy for segregation for the black man to succeed, I was reminded of another instance when Fanons in The Wretched of the Earth writes, “If we want to transform Africa into a new Europe, America into a new Europe, then let us entrust the destinies of our countries to the Europeans. They will do a better job than the best of us.” The idea of segregation, to me, seems like a reverse racial practice. Forget racism, who is to say that segregation would benefit all black men? Who is to say it wont just produce another classist society where the rich black man will replace the white master and the plight of the poor black man will remain the same? Take the subcontinent for instance. By trying to travel the European path of success, all we have succeeded in is creating a clone of the colonial world that we fought so hard to escape. Moreover, why should the black man leave any part of the country that his ancestors have built? I think America belongs as much to the black man, if not more, as to the white man inhabiting it.

Secondly, this freedom that the black man is fighting for, shouldn’t just be freedom for the black man but freedom for all humanity. I did initially feel Ella Baker maybe went too far by saying “the very white brothers in Hattiesburg and in other parts of Mississippi who have kept us in bondage, that they did it because they did not know any better” but come to think of it, this idea that the white man is superior to black has been as systematically embedded in the white mans head as the idea of inferiority in the black mans. I don’t think all white men were or are ignorant. Some of them just chose to be that because they didn’t want to give up on the profits of slavery. This is where capitalism probably comes in which is a whole other debate. So to satisfy their guilty conscious these men of power preached to the rest of the white population that black men were naturally sub-humans and thus unfit to be treated equally. And so generations of white men that followed were brainwashed into following suit. I do understand that this claim is going way too far. But to some extent, however minute, this does seems to be at the base of the problem.

To sum it all up, segregation and freedom don't really go hand in hand. For there to be freedom, you need the entire mankind to understand the evils of slavery. You can’t have black men live freely and peacefully if the white man is constantly coming up with tactics to contain that freedom because he thinks he is better. Even if you segregate the two, who is to say that white nation wont try to exploit and cause trouble with the black nation? We live in a very globally connected world, and so did Malcolm X and Ella Baker. We can’t have complete segregation of economics and politics. So for freedom to really work, the white population needs to be taught that the black man is as human as him. The lesson of humanity, which is the lesson of freedom, is what can curtail the racial discrimination, not segregation