Blacks Don’t Need White People To Solve Racism
Marcus Garvey taught that “a race without authority and power is a race without respect.” However, due to the degrading experience of chattel slavery, Blacks have developed a crippling desire to prove their respectability to whites, hoping that once convinced, whites will have a moral epiphany that leads to the dismantling of white supremacy. This obsession with white acceptance prevents the race as a whole from doing what is necessary to completely free themselves from oppression. To this point, Dr. Amos Wilson said the white man’s “so called power is based on the nature of the relationship he has with the black man.”
“We empower him,” he said. “He cannot be what he is unless we are what we are. To a good extent the European is our creation. They cannot have what they have unless we are what we are. We can better appeal to our own sense of selves… through transforming ourselves, they will be transformed automatically.”
There Were Second Thoughts After the First Attempt at Dismantling White Supremacy
Even if whites decide to implement equitable policies, they can just as easily make them go away. During Reconstruction, for a brief period following the the Civil War, the U.S government passed several laws aimed at protecting the enfranchisement of the formerly enslaved Blacks. African-Americans were legally granted freedom from servitude, full citizen status, the right to vote, and many Blacks were voted into political office. Nonetheless, the political revolution of Reconstruction spawned increasingly violent actions from the racist element withing the U.S. Eventually, public support for the policies faded in the North, as voters decided the Civil War was over and slavery was dead, leading to the complete reversal of legal protection under the law for Blacks in America.
