Cultural Identity of People

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

COLOR-IDENTITY: A MERE DESCRIPTION OF HUMAN SKIN PIGMENTATION OR A NON- SUBJECTIVE ONTOLOGICAL BEING AND CULTURAL IDENTITY OF PEOPLE

KUIR GARANG

Integrated Studies Project

submitted to Dr. Lisa Micheelsen

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

Athabasca, Alberta

April, 2016 Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ...... 3 Abstract...... 4 Introduction ...... 5 The Project Scope ...... 7 Importance Of This Research ...... 10 “Blackness” In A Phenomenological Sense ...... 14 Cultural Identity (CI) ...... 17 Blackness And Enlightenment ...... 23 Power And The Impositions...... 29 Blackness As Societally Imposed Consciousness ...... 33 Moral Implications Of Color-Identity ...... 34 Conclusion ...... 38 References ...... 39

Acknowledgements

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Athabasca University, especially the Centre for Integrated Studies, for their support and co-operation during my MA studies, and in their assistance in the completion of this project. The timely responses to my questions helped make researching and writing of this project seemingly effortless.

My gratitude also goes to Dr. Wendell Kisner for his comments on the learning contract regarding the philosophical texts and theoretical elements I used. His comments helped me think critically about how to integrate various philosophical theories into the project.

And above all, I would like to convey my utmost gratitude to my supervisor, Dr. Lisa Micheelsen, for her comments, advice, diligence, timely responses and in helping me make this research project clearer and as meaningful as possible. This project would not be possible without her professionalism, commitment and supervisory expertise.

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

Abstract

Given the importance of cultural identity in human sociopolitical existence and discourses, I argue in this paper that color, as used to describe people’s skin pigmentations, is a superficial reality which oversimplifies and, in some cases, denigrates the identity of people. While the paper touches on whiteness as applied to Europeans and people of European descent, the paper focuses on blackness as a legitimized universal identity of Africans and people of African descent. Since color-identity realities such as black, brown, yellow, and white among others, were invented at a time when inter-racial relations were driven by slavery, colonialism and European socio-intellectual, socioeconomic and sociopolitical conquest of the world, I revisit an identity that was meant to denigrate subjugated racial groups such as colonized Africans and enslaved Africans. Black, as used to describe their skin pigmentation and, now, their universal cultural identity, wasn’t invented as a respectful, glorifying cultural identity, but as a debasing parameter meant to inferiorize Africans in order to make them easy to subjugate and objectify economically. So color-identities, such as blackness and whiteness, were imposed by Europeans in a Hegelian master- bondsman-like relationship militarily, politically, economically, and through European intellectual power at a time when the rest of the world had no formidable recourse to any form of appreciable resistance. So colors, as used to describe people’s skin pigmentations, aren’t objective cultural identities but superficial, Hegelian self-conscious perceptual and consequent descriptions of people’s skin pigmentations and identities. These descriptions have now been legitimized in European and American scholarship and pedagogy to oversimplify the complex, rich and respectful identity of people, especially Africans. This denigrating identity oversimplification had—during slavery and colonization—moral implications which the paper explores.

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

Introduction

Africans and people of African descent1 have never had any potent historical opportunity to be “self-determinant” (Durkheim, 2011) in a globally appreciable sense. They’ve always been subjugated, patronized, and conditioned to accept external enforcements with or without their consent owing to their political impotence. Africa, to the 16th century Europeans, was a place of strangeness, exotica (Achebe, 1977), the Dark Continent: dark virtually and dark morally.

Consequently, explorers’ stories about Africa and Africans became wildly exaggerated and fancifully fictionalized to overshadow the truth about the

African people (Walvin, 1973, p.28). While Arabs, who’d traded with Africans, were used to the darkness of Africans (Snowden, 1984), the striking difference had a strong impact on the ‘fairer’ Englishmen. “For the Englishman,” writes

Winthrop Jordan (1974, p.4), “the most arresting characteristic of the newly discovered African was his color” (italics mine). Jordan acknowledged that the description of Africans as ‘Black’ was an exaggeration owing to “the powerful impact which the Negro’s color had upon the Englishmen” as a result of

“suddenness of contact” (p.5). This initially innocent description of the African appearance, which in John Searle’s (2015) phenomenology would take the African as the “intentional object” of “direct perception,” produced a consciousness on the European mind; a consciousness which would maintain temporal endurance.

1 I will collectively refer to Africans and people of African descent in this research project as the ‘African Person” for simplicity. 5

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

This consciousness, which perceived the African as an ‘object’ of both virtual play, fascination and fiction, would be a valuable tool for the modernist writers during the eras of slavery and colonization. The fascination, fanciful and scholarly, branded (inferiorized) and excluded the African Person from any meaningful humanity. Unfortunately, this “inferiorization” of the African

Person, as Joseph R. Gibson (2012) would say, is still manifest in European and

American negative media portrayals of Africa as the abode of all that’s bad

(Gibson, 2012). In Sartre’s existential critique, the African became an object denied his subjectivity so she couldn’t perceive the Other objectively in order to self-define. “A radical conversion of the Other” Sartre (1965) writes,” is necessary if he is to escape objectivity” (p.194). In the haunting words of Fountain Hughes, a former slave, “You’re nothing but a dog” (www.pbs.org).

Unfortunately, the African Person is still unable to escape this objectification.

As Griffin (1960, p.45), Gates (1997) and Touré (2015) found out among African-

Americans, the African Person self-objectifies and sees herself through the

Other’s objectifying lenses (Sartre, 1965). This self-perception through the Other’s eyes engenders self-hate. Politically, economically, culturally, and intellectually, consequently, she lives as a dependent consciousness (the bondman) who owes her existence to the ontologically subjective consciousness (Searle, 1995) of the

Master (Hegel, 1977, pp.111-118).

Armed with intellectual freedom furnished by enlightenment, capitalist wealth from slavery and colonization, and political power owing to the decline

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

of Islamic empires (Armstrong, 1993), Europe set out to conquer the world.

Africans, outside and inside the continent, became the canonical victims of this transition. The existential reality of the African in the European consciousness remained, from the 16th century, a phenomenally objectified colored entity emptied of any sense of subjectivity or agency: political, cultural, social or economic. The African remained in ‘perceptual constancy” (Madary, 2010) in the world consciousness, objectified in negative perpetuity. As everything else changed, the African remained as that ‘black’ thing (an object) first experienced in the 16th century by European explorers. This false (and falsifiable) initial appearance, which required falsification through verification (Sartre, 1995; Evans,

1982), is now a universalized fact about the African Person, having not been subjected to scholarly scrutiny. This unfortunate equation of blackness with the essence of the African Person was started at a time when no normative care was necessary in regard to her identity. It’s high time a respectful, 21st century reconfiguration is embraced through a conscionable visit to her ancestral past

(Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002; Fanon, 1963). Cheik A. Diop (1974), George James

(1954), and Yosef Ben-Jochannan ([1974] 2002), attempted this historical reconfiguration in the face of scholarly ridicule (Lefkowitz, 1996; Haley, 1996).

The Project Scope

To support the view that people should be identified by their self-generated cultural realities rather than the denigrating simplicity of physical appearances, I

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

maintain in this paper that colors2 as used to describe people’s skin pigmentations aren’t objective cultural identities but superficial, Hegelian self- conscious perceptual and consequent descriptions of people’s skin pigmentations.

These descriptions have been legitimized in European and American scholarship and pedagogy to over-simplify the complex, rich and respectful identity of people, especially Africans. This interdisciplinary research, while it will touch on whiteness, will focus on blackness as a cultural identity; as an institutionally imposed collective consciousness through power relation in the media, in academia, and in popular culture. Whiteness, which is a description of the

European skin pigmentation, is as superficial and arbitrary as blackness. The difference lies in the fact that ‘whiteness’ has a positive overtone and blackness a negative one; something that has moral implications, as we’ll see in this work. In essence, I’m rejecting any abstraction of cultural identities from appearances as such abstractions utilize just one element of identity-determining parameters. In other words, I postulate the following:

Blackness ≠ Africanness

Whiteness ≠ Europeanness

I contend that color-identity is a function of appearance difference, an “index of differentiation” (Gilroy, 1993), a subjective relational concept (Gordon, 2013;

Glenn, 2009; Greene & Slotkin, 1998) used by 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries’

Europeans for self-glorification and dismissive othering of a different Other (Isaac,

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

2004; Frederickson, 2002). With no doubt, a 21st century critical interdisciplinary study of blackness, from an African perspective, is therefore necessary.

So the historical representation of the African Person, which is negative

(Conrad, [1990] 1899; Achebe, 1977) and largely reduced to the superficiality and caricaturing of his skin pigmentation in total disregard of all the substrate of her humanity, is a morally questionable description that denigrated her humanity. In essence, the description of the African Person as ‘black’ will be dismissed as an externally imposed consciousness that has now been transmuted into a cultural identity. The accompanying question then becomes:

When has the African Person ever been self-determinant to chart her own course without the paternalism of Europe and Euro-America?

The answer, sadly, is never owing to her ‘appearance.’

Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk ([1903] 1965), thought that color-line would be the 20th century problem. Unfortunately, it’s a timeless problem. In many ways, the African Person is a global problem. In fact, Europeans and European-

Americans inadvertently suggest this being-a-problem (Du Bois, [1903] 1965)—her- being-in-the-world—in their economic writings on Africa (Collier, 2008; Easterly,

2006). Additionally, in America, she’s a canonical or statutory problem in the way she’s treated by the police and the American justice system.

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

Importance of This Research

When the euphoric wind of independence across Africa soon faded, people fell back into misery, poverty, political strife, and economic uncertainty (Stigtliz,

2002). As a result, the road to African dependency on Europe and America started immediately. These regions became the indifferent patrons of the African people; leading to her underdevepment (Gibson, 2010; Rodney [1972] 2012,

Stiglitz, 2002; Bawa & Andrews, 2014). This sense of excitement followed by helplessness and despair, was echoed by Fountain Hughes: “When we were slaves, we couldn’t do nothing…After we got free we didn’t know nothing [sic] to do.” The freed slaves, as Du Bois illustriously portrays (1903] 1965) soon found themsleves deprived of the Freedman’s Bureau promises. Their hopes and potential for socioeconomic and sociocultural contribution to America, were dashed. James Balwdin (1961) has shown this deprivation and the satisfied-with- misery kind of ‘Negro’ America wanted (p.96) to maintain. So cultural expression under such circumstances is compromised and “falls apart” (Achebe, 2010); a fact which makes Walter Rodney‘s ([1972] 2012) statement that “culture is a total way of life” (34) very painful. I say painful because Europe and America undermined any cultural expression among slaves and the colonized.

Europeans, American slave merchants, slave owners in the Americas, and

European colonizers, unleashed a grand scheme to obliterate self-generated

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

cultural identities among slaves and colonial subjects. They therefore made sure that African slaves not only lost their cultures but also everything that connected them with Africa: names, religions, cultures, traditions, family and languages as key as bonds. To help this grand scheme, William Lynch (1712) devised the dehumanization of the African slaves and treated them like ‘horses” or ‘dogs’ as

Fountain Hughes said. This 18th century dehumanization was revisited during

Hurricane Katrina when African-Americans were portrayed as cockroaches, vermin, animals and even cannibals (Wise, 2011, p.218).

Tribal existential tropes, signifiers, symbolisms and cultural realities were disregarded or transmuted into a single, denigrating color: black. This ‘blackness,’ the assumed appearance, became her identity and at the same time, a universal crime (Baldwin, 1961, p.60). The rich cultural complexity of African way of life, which Walter Rodney explains in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (2012), was

Lynch’s object of intentionality (Searle, 2015). He destroyed family structure and communal bonds as Europeans did the same with African cultures (Fanon, 1963;

Rodney, [1972] 2012). While scholars focus on the experiences of the African

Person as a subaltern (Spivak, 1988), they have taken for granted the moral2 implications and logical contradictions of ‘black’ as a universal racial identity.

West and Gates, in The Future of Race (1996), emphasized this required focus on

2 Moral because belittling attitudes (of which construction of ‘black’ is one) toward any human population is the cause of historical crimes. 11

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

real experiences by criticizing Du Bois on what they called Du Bois’ “inadequate interpretation of human condition.”

Yet sociologists and anthropologists have shown that crimes against the excluded ‘Other’ is always preceded by dehumanizing descriptions (Perry, 2003;

Sarat & Husain, 2007). A positive perception of an out-group (like Africans) is imperative to its sociopolitical treatment. Violence against (or mistreatment of) out-groups is minimized or eliminated if the acting group has a positive outlook of out-groups. This was clearly shown by European-Americans who joined the

Civil Rights Movement’s ‘Freedom Riders’ in the 1960s.

So Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ (2002) emphasis on the importance of character over color of the skin asks for positive valuation. John Griffin, in Black Like

Me ([1962] 1996), aptly described skin color as “the popular image of a thing” as opposed to the “thing itself” (character) (p.95). While the world agrees with Dr.

King, we still fancy a relic of a painful past—color-identity with all its moral problems—as a cultural identity. If color isn’t good enough for character judgement, then why is it good enough as a cultural identity?

The origin of this problematic goes back to European explorers and enlightenment writers, who normalized the distortion of African cultures and humanity into a socio-intellectual, normative truth. This wretchedness, this almost divine damnation, inculcated into the European and European-American consciousness and nurtured by power and knowledge (Hall, 1996), comes to live

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

in Baldwin’s Notes of the Native Son ([1955] 2012) and Fanon’s Black Skin, White

Mask (1967).

Admittedly, I should add that blackness is a metaphor, a symbolism, a trope or a signifier; or more importantly, a political configuration that helps solidarity in the fight for inclusion (Julien & Mercer, 1996, pp.452, 454). It is, however, not an objective cultural identity but an externally imposed subjective ontological consciousness in the Foucauldian power relation. Lawrence Hill, in Black Berry,

Sweet Juice (2001), embraces ‘blackness’ because ‘whiteness’ has been denied him by society and the knowledge disseminators. Even scholars such as Gates and

West (1996), like Hill, find themselves powerless in the face of systemic and restrictive conditions wherein intellectuals act as ‘functionaries’ of societal complex superstructures (Gramsci, [1930] 2004, p.674). They determine what should be prioritized (Julien & Mercer, 1996) in a Gramscian hegemonic power matrix.

Unfortunately, the mentioned metaphorical nature of color-identity (because no one is exactly black or white) is at times problematic. When Margaret Cannon

(1995) is advised by her friend not to say ‘Black Monday’ because associating

‘black’ with bad things is ‘offensive’ to the African Person, then it becomes necessary to question the difference between black as a natural color and black as a metaphorical description of the African skin pigmentation. This is why one can’t blame young Tim Wise (2011, p.28), who found no logical sense in calling an African-American ‘black’, for the man looked actually ‘brown’ to him. This

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

topic is therefore necessary because the identity of the African Person is still universally distorted and oversimplified, purposefully or subconsciously.

“Blackness” in a Phenomenological Sense

Whiteness and blackness are descriptions at the most superficial level. They don’t even capture the natural appearances of human beings. Blackness, for instance, is what Gareth Evans (1982) would call “demonstrative identification” of an object (p.141). It “has no meaning outside of a system of race-conscious people and practices” (West, 2001, p.25); in other words, it’s “a political and ethical construct” (p.26). Essentially, blackness is a function of appearance differential (Snowden, 1970; Gordon, 2013, Glenn, 2009). I can therefore say that it’s not controversial to say that no human being should have their identities, personal and cultural, reduced to a single color. There’s no question that colors as used to describe people’s skin pigmentations were socially constructed (Hall,

1996; Gilroy, 1993; Fanon, [1963] 2008; Sartre, 1965; Morrison, [1992] 2004, p.1008). However, these colors, which are now used to describe people culturally, don’t mean exactly what they initially meant. They have undergone sociocultural, socioeconomic and sociopolitical currency in the interest of the powerful; becoming “the criterion by which men are judged” (Burns qtd in

Fanon 1967). Descriptive sentences like “He’s black’” or “He’s white’” became both descriptions of appearances, and also, personal identities, cultural identities, and humanities. “And, consequently,” Hegel (1931) writes, “the sensible world is

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

regarded by self-consciousness as having a subsistence which is, only appearance, or forms a distinction which is from self-consciousness per se has no being” (p.99). The African Person was a part of this ‘sensible world’ denied any self-consciousness. Her Being-in-the-world as Martin Heidegger would say, was a mere objective appearance not as a self-conscious subject.

As indicated above, skin colors were initially used as an innocent “index of differentiation” owing to the striking physical differences. However, as time progressed and Europe became the world power, the ones who controlled “the reality of the world” (Baldwin, 1976, p.78), and who saw themselves as a predestined master of the world (Fanon, 1967), appearance became instrumental economically, socially and politically. Until the middle of the 17th century,

European indentured servants and African slaves were treated almost equally, but after the Bacon’s rebellion (Wise, 2011) Europeans were elevated over

Africans because of their appearance, their color. To position Africans in a manner that would make them controllable, useable economic tools and political subjects, the European had to present a formidable scheme that would bring

Africans into European patronage. This scheme was a personal (Baldwin, 1961) and cultural immobilization (Fanon, 1963, p.51), which enabled the control of the

African Person. In Baldwin’s words, this immobilization assumed “a kind of watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is” (p.219).

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

The initial appearance of the African to the Englishman, that innocent, simple shock at the striking physical difference, became the African-ness, her humanity.

The being, that human-like entity that appeared ‘black’ to the European in the early 17th century, has had that ‘black’ fixed on her as the cultural identity. Her music isn’t Igbo or Yoruba, but ‘black music.” Her literature isn’t Zambian or

Ghanaian but “black” or “Negro.” If she’s called African, then that African-ness has to be qualified as “Black African” or even simply a ‘Negro” (Fanon, 1963, pp.211,212). People became nothing but the then perceived blackness, the phenomenon. To look beyond the appearance of the African and gauge the true nature of the people became either irrelevant, or inconveniencing. People’s existential essence became their appearance, the phenomenon. Europeans and

European-Americans never wondered “about the life, the aspirations, the universal humanity hidden behind the dark skin” (Baldwin, 1961, p.95). They were stuck by what Baldwin called “one’s image of oneself” (p.153); something

Griffin ([1960] 1996) calls the “popular image of a thing” (p.95).

That these varied people had cultures, traditions, values, religions, political systems (however primitive and rudimentary3) was completely ignored, distorted or made the object of mockery as in African minstrel shows with

‘white’ performers in ‘black’ faces. Africans become objects to be described in any manner the Europeans chose. “I am given no chance. I am determined from

3 This should be understood as a state of people at a basic level of modernization or development. Modernization is usually understood as ‘Europeanization’ but it’s rather a fact in human evolutionary development. 16

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

without,” Fanon (1967, p.118) wrote. In the poignant words of Time Wise (2011),

“white Americans have always felt the right to define black and brown folks’ realities for them” (p.29). While Europeans described Africans in unpalatable terms, they described themselves in the most beautiful of colors and terms (Isaac,

2004). Because the political destiny of the African Person wasn’t in her hands

(Baldwin, 1961, p.15), she couldn’t reject what was decided for her. She was helplessly showed her denigration as John Griffin (1960) found out in Jim Crow

South. So what was addressed as the African Person, what Europe and America talked to, wasn’t what Sartre (1943) would call her being-for-itself but her image, her appearance as a mere object, a being-in-itself (p.xxii). This sociocultural, socioeconomic, sociopolitical determinism enforced blackness, a supposed appearance, the enduring being of the African Person as an object always to be picked out by color4 as if it’s a mere in-itself, or an animal with no cultural identification. This phenomenological ontology has replaced the African cultural identity globally. So we turn to cultural identity in the next section.

Cultural Identity (CI)

The power of cultural identity is something that cannot be overstated. In Walter

Rodney’s ([1972] 2012) words, “It’s a total way of life” (p.34). By ‘cultural identity’ I mean the way a given human population self-identifies as an internally generated normative and value system (for example, Zulu, Luo,

4 Europeans are also picked out using color but this is rather an internal choice whose moral implications are glorifying rather than denigrating. See Is ‘Black’ Really Beautiful?” (Garang, 2013) 17

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

German, Nuer); or as an external imposition (black, colored, visible minority, third world). ‘Culture’ here means a compound collective of what people eat, what they wear, how they talk, how they walk, their taboos, their customs, their traditions, how they marry, how they bury their dead, how they treat newborns etc. (Rodney, p.34; Fanon, 1963, p.244). Without doubt, CI has an anchoring effect which gives people concerned a sense of pride, belonging and purpose (Fanon, p.217). This anchoring power of CI was noted very well by European colonizers in Africa and slave owners in the Americas. Unfortunately, this realization bred a damning assault on the African cultures, traditions and religion on the pretext of a civilizing mission; the emptying of the African mind of its cultural contents

Fanon talked about in the Wretched of the Earth (1963, p.210). Fanon puts it bluntly but in a very revealing manner:

Colonial domination, because it is total and tends to oversimplify, very soon manages to disrupt in spectacular fashion the cultural life of a conquered people. This cultural obliteration is made possible by the negation of occupying power, by the banishment of the natives and their customs to outlying districts by colonial society, by expropriation, and by the systemic enslaving of men and woman. (p.236)

Rodney ([1972] 2012) would agree with Fanon’s assessment of the colonial effect on African cultures (p.232). He argued that economic interest of the colonizers used labor demands, mining and administrative realities to disrupt established ways of life. Gerard Prunier (2009) put it in even harsher terms, saying that the

European colonizers simply made African cultures ‘obsolete’ by rationalizing them to death (p.xxix). The way in which things African were portrayed as evil,

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

outdated and primitive, convinced Africans—and descendants of African slaves

(Charles, 2009, p.162)—that their cultural base was better abandoned for the

European cultures, the supposedly ‘civilized’ humanity. Once the African Person abandoned the greater part of her cultural realities, it became easy to convince her that what is European was the best, the sublime, the desired. This African image distortion (Achebe, 1977), to help effect psychological control, was operationalized in Africa (Fanon, 1963), in South America and the Caribbean

(Charles, 2009; Fanon, 1967) and in North America (Griffin, p.80). Undoubtedly, this mental weakening of the African Person was, sadly, the very tactic William

Lynch, in his December 5, 1712 letter—The Making of a Slave

(https://archive.org)—told slave holders in Virginia. “Keep the body take the mind! In other words, break the will to resist.” Steve Biko, in I Write What I like

(2002), echoed this sentiment when he argued that “the most potent weapon in the hand of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed” (p.29). This weapon, in

Lynch’s words, was used “so as to do a complete reversal of the mind.” Fanon

(1963) reveals this reversal phenomenon among the African intellectuals trained by the Europeans colonialists for the benefit of the colonial empire (p.46).

The unfortunate war against the African Person, culture-wise, was even more culturally destructive to the African slaves in the Americas. These unfortunate souls were denied everything African and human, starting with their names, language and a sense of proud self. “Losing one’s name,” Horkheimer and

Adorno (2002) said, is the “oldest fear” (p.24). Dreadfully, as Lynch

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

recommended to slave owners, “we must completely annihilate the mother tongue of both the new nigger and the new mule and institute a new language that involves the new life's work of both.” They were practically ‘emptied’ of any cultural atom and fashioned into anything slave owners wanted. Slaves were convinced that anything African was evil and primitive and anything European was good and ‘civilized.’ However, this scheme was the realization by slave traders and slave owners that cultures are a powerful tool in resistance and struggle for personal dignity. This makes Equiano’s exhortation of Igbo cultural practices very significant. Even when he was indoctrinated during slavery that his African cultures were barbarous and uncivilized, he still embraced his ancestral cultures and found dignified anchorage in them (Fanon, 1963, p.217).

This ruthless cultural assault on the African mind—through colonialism and slavery—was all effected through the complexity of terroristic power exertion

(Du Bois [1903]1965; Gilroy 1993 Douglas [1845] 2002; Equiano [1814] (2002). And this power exercise was implemented through the threat or imposition of physical violence, or psychological facets of influence (Patterson, 1982) as Lynch advised in 1712. Patrollers controlled the movement of slaves between plantations by checking ‘passes’ (Washington, [1900] 2000, p.45). Passes were required for slaves’ inter-plantation travels and meetings. Essentially, the slave was desocialized and depersonalized by being uprooted from his/her natal milieu and then re-introduced into the master’s cultural community as something akin to an animal. Slaves’ ‘overseers’ were usually more savage in

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

slave treatment and instilled fear in slaves as Aaron Charlie, a former slave, said.

Overseers’ cruelty comes to live in the Solomon Northup biopic, 12 Years a Slave.

This psycho-cultural displacement of the slaves, a long-term process, led to their social death (Patterson, 1982). This social death was, in Lynch’s words,

“principles for long range comprehensive economic planning.”

The relationship between the Africans and the Europeans, settler and native, slave and master, colonizer and the colonized, were all characterized and given efficacy by Marx’s property position and its attendant socioeconomic and sociocultural conditions on the poletarianized parties. The European, who was the economic and social power, became a deterministic force for the African

Person. ‘Blackness,’ which was initially conceptualized simply as a physical appearance of the African— and which “in itself neutral and meaningless”

(Snowden, 1984, p.65)—became the sociocultural reality through which her very existence would be defined. The African at home and abroad became nothing but a phenomenological entity, an object of mockery and curiosity even as her economic instruments were hailed. As Marx’s binarism exemplified, the poletarianized colonized African and the Bourgieousified colonizing European lived in a structurally designed environment “which determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general” (1984, p.160). The African was not culturally conceptualized as a Nigerian, a Senegalese, a Zambia, but a black subject with a one-way economic utility to the colonizer. Any attachment to culture was interpreted by colonial powers as a form of resistance. A campaign

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

for total cultural obliteration became an official policy (Fanon ,1968, p.236).

Cultural expression was considered a form of resistance, bar none. Marx’s and

Engel’s critique of industrial revolution and the rise of the exploitative capitalist class that would alienate the working class, would be mirrored by the reality of the colonized African Person as subjugated political and economic subjects.

While African slaves in the Americas were socially dead (Patterson 1982) or colonized Africa culturally obliterated (Fanon 1963), it was the revival of the internalized African cultures that fueled anticolonial resistances and slave revolts. Olaudah Equiano ([1814] 2002), in his autobiography, illustrated the organized nature of the pre-slavery social and the eventful nature of Africanness which slave owners ripped out of them as Lynch advised. Equiano boasted that the kind of musical talents, variety and spirit was something he’d “scarcely seen elsewhere” (p.33). Manuel Barcia (2012) corroborated this proud nostalgia in explaining the 1825 great Cuba slave revolt, which found motivation in the re- creation of African ceremonies involving elements such as dancing, singing and drumming. The power to look back to one’s ancestral past has an empowering edge as Tim Wise finds out in White Like Me (2011, p.7). European-Americans, he notes, can trace their lineage back for generations in a manner African-Americans simply can’t. The ancestral past became a “useable knowledge” which the

African Person appropriated to escape what Fanon (1963) called the “supremacy of the white man’s culture” (p.217). Given that the rich complexity of African

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

cultures has been reduced to a single, oversimplifying color—black—it’s crucial to understand that CI is a set of many, defining factors:

X5 = {a, b, c, x, y, x....n}

So CI should have, among other things, the following sample characteristics:

1. It should originate from the people it represents (Zulu, Kikuyu, Igbo, Nuer, African-American, Lakota etc.). 2. It should be the totality of what constitute the nature of the people in a more comprehensive sense: X = {a, b, c, x, y, x....n}. Using ‘White’ to refer to ‘Europeans’ is superficial and oversimplifying. We require sufficient conditions for discriminating objects epistemically (Evans, 1982, p.89). 3. It should be freely chosen rather than societally conditioned or determined politically, socially and intellectually. 4. It should respect the people it represents (Twi as opposed to ‘Black’, ‘Negro’, ‘Nigger…) 5. It should not be easily misappropriated or be easily associated with socially undesirable things: black market, black sheep, black-hearted, black soul, black man, black literature, black magic etc. 6. It should not be a function of people’s attitude, or a consciousness of a given zeitgeist: (NiggerColoredNegroBlackAfrican-America n) 7. It should be an original object of pride not simply a reactive adoption instrumentalized as a function of victimhood solidarity. (As in ‘Black Power’ or ‘Black is Beautiful’ during the ‘Civil Rights Movement’)

Blackness and Enlightenment

Having explained above the deculturalization of the African Person, the sociocultural institutionalization of his outward appearance as his identity, and

5 X is a Cultural Identity 23

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

what cultural identity should actually be, it is crucial to turn to ‘blackness’ during the enlightenment and what makes it intellectually and morally suspect.

Admittedly, enlightenment (carried down into modernism) afforded Europeans and Europeans-Americans a formidable socio-intellectual tool that would help them abandon dogmatic traditionalism and the rigidity of scholastic schools. For

Immanuel Kant ([1784]1983, p.33), “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.” This was of course Europe emerging from the painful, oppressive yoke of religious dogmatism and internal wars. As Europe moved away from ‘self-imposed immaturity’ and exploited important socio-intellectual changes engendered by enlightenment, the rest of the world bore the brunt of what would be an exclusionary, totalitarian modernism. European intellectuals and scholars, instead of using enlightenment to benefit humanity inclusively, instrumentalized it for imperial purposes. As they left Kantian immaturity, they placed the rest of the world into it. So slavery and colonialism would epitomize the unbridled moral indifference premised on the pretext of a ‘civilizing mission’

(Fanon, 1963), or good deeds for the savages: Mussolini for Ethiopia and King

Leopold for Congo. As a result, the subjugated ‘rest’ in slavery and colonialism would be subject to powerful denigration they couldn’t falsify because of their existential reality as conquered and subjugated savage tribes. Europeans therefore started to elevate themselves and everything about them. To make this self-elevation very effective, the portrayal of the rest of the world as primitive, ugly and intellectually challenged, became a mainstream reality in institutions of

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

learning, in churches and in the political system. With alienation of the rest of the world as economic tools and political subjects of the bourgeoisie colonizer, the

European conquered the world (Marx & Engels, [1846] 1986). With that conquest,

Europe could then exalt her intelligence and physical beauty, unchallenged. The subjugated rest could just consume that determinism as an epistemic truth.

Judgement, contrary to Russell’s Principle, was passed without the need to know the African Person (Evans, 1982, p.89).

In that vein—in total intellectual freedom without moral restrictions—

Christoph Meiners could distinguish “black and ugly people” from “white and beautiful people” (Isaac, 2004, p.105;). George Curvier, who divided humanity into “white, black and yellow,” concurred with Meiniers; arguing that the

Caucasian skull was the most beautiful (Isaac, 2004, p.105). Johan Blumenbach

(1865, 108) joined Meiners and Blumenbach in exalting the beauty and intellectual superiority of the Europeans and the ugliness of the Africans (blacks).

Other imminent writers and philosophers like Hume, Kant, Hegel, Jefferson,

Bauer, Heidegger, Voltaire and others, promoted the superiority of the

Europeans (Kelley, 2002, pp.1-4; Forbes, p.2002). In a sense, Europeans and

European-Americans had nothing positive to say about the rest of the world; however, they presented themselves in the most sublime and beautiful of terms as the logical continuation (or the improvement of) the Greco-Roman civilization

(Kelley, 2002). Fundamentally, enlightenment scholars harmfully instrumentalized extreme self-love (Nietzsche, p.1989; Plato, 1997, p.1414) to the

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

detriment of the African Person. Enlightenment, intellectually, therefore spelled the advent of the era of the worst image distortion and misuse of scientific facts against the Africans on the continent and in the Americas. When imminent philosophers like Hegel, who had a marked disdain for Africa (Bernal, 1987) denigrated the African Person, the impact was wide and enduring. In a literary sense, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, portrayed Africans in a manner which, I guess, would have delighted William Lynch and the slave holders.

So the first “striking contrast” which motivated Europeans to physically describe Africans as ‘black’ and which Jordan (1974) and Snowden (1984) have eloquently described, became the reality of the African identity, a false reality which enlightenment writers, philosophers and scientists authenticated in

European public consciousness. The war on African culture and image and the institutionalization of this image became an intellectual duty. That there was a rational, sound human being behind the facet of color was ignored. The African became ‘black’ not only in appearance, but also in morals and virtues (Fanon,

1967, 1963). The cultural bases were destroyed, his spirituality replaced by

Christianity. “Everything will be done” wrote Sartre in the preface to The

Wretched of the Earth (1963) by Frantz Fanon, “to wipe out their traditions, to substitute our language for theirs and to destroy their culture without giving them ours” (p.15). Enlightenment’s intellectual community was an effective and powerful conduit of the politicized African image distortion and the deculturalization of the African Person. This is the linguistic concern, a

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

displacing reality, which Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, laments in

Decolonizing the Mind ([1986]2011), writing that “Language…has a dual character: it is both a means of communication and a carrier of culture” (p.1132). This reminds us of William Lynch’s brutal scheme in The Making of a Slave. Lloyd

Garrison ([1845] 2002) in his preface to Frederick Douglas narrative, emphasized this reality: “Nothing has been left undone to cripple their intellects, darken their minds, debase their moral nature, obliterate all traces of their relationships with mankind (p.328). For Aimé Césaire, “Any political and social regime which destroys the self-determination of a people also destroys the creative power of the people” (qtd in Baldwin, 1961, p.33). As the existential reality of the African

Person as a cultured human being was erased, Europeans replaced her with a

‘virtualizeable’ character that’d become the fancy of literature and scholarly works. Whether in slavery or as subjects of Europeans colonization in Africa, the

African Person had no power to repudiate whatever was dictated. Intellectually, she didn’t exist and politically she could only receiver orders, and economically she was merely a tool, ready-to-hand as Heidegger (1962) would say. So the status of the natives as inferiors was maintained with their coerced consent (Sartre,

1963, p.20). This is equally true of Africans in the Americas as Du Bois tells us in

The Souls of Black Folk ([1903]1965), emphasizing how the African Person in

America takes prejudice with obedience and resignation (p.219). Basically, the

African Person lost any capacity for self-determination (Thiong’o, 2011; Baldwin,

1961).

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

So the colonizers and slave holders gave the African a created culture

(Baldwin 1961), a distorted impression of the Africans as ‘savages’ (Fanon, 1963, p.211; Conrad, 1990). In this context, the African is no longer a Nigerian, a

Sudanese, and an Angolan, or a Ghanaian. Globally, she’s simply a ‘Negro’ or

‘Black.’ Most if not all African scholars ascribe to this created image. As slaves used ‘Nigger’ to reference themselves, the African Person, as a scholar, refers to herself as “Black.” In essence, the brain of the native African is emptied of cultural contents and his image distorted (Fanon, p.212; Griffin, 1960;

Frederickson, 2002). Given the powerlessness imposed by brute force, the created image of the African became her reality. She’s simply an object that shows herself through appearance (Heidegger, 1962, p.51). She became an object to be made fun of in American classic films as Bill Cosby6 explained in Black History, Lost Stolen or Strayed. This, as Cosby explained, was to imprint on the American public consciousness the distorted image of the African Person as some sort of a savage beast not fit for American civilization. Africans were also displayed for amusement in ‘zoos’ in Europe and North America (Samaan, 2012, p.626). That’s why 6-year old Ruby Nell Bridges had to be guarded by US. marshals to go to an integrated school in 1960. That’s why 18-year old Michael Brown scared the policeman in 2014. The enlightenment image of the African Person in the

6 Since I’m referencing a historical documentary and not Cosby’s professional opinion, I will for now ignore his legal troubles and their moral implications. He just happened to be a voice of an important documentary. 28

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

American consciousness affected her (Baldwin,1984, p.121), producing what

Evans (1982) would call “recognition-based Identification” (pp.267-273).

So not only did European create a caricatured image of Africans, they used their power, which was bolstered by the enlightenment and the capitalist economy, to make sure whatever they created became the reality. Blackness, which was equated with darkness and evil (Snowden, 1984; Frederickson, 2002;

Fanon, 1963, 1967; Baldwin, 1984), became a mainstream, official image of the

African Person. Since blackness was a social construct intended to denigrate the

African Person at a time when she couldn’t defend her interests, it becomes very disconcerting that the very same ‘blackness,’ which was meant to denigrate her humanity, is now her universal cultural identity. In 1600s, the African was a

“black savage.” In 2016, he’s still called a ‘black African’ even when he’s simply a

Namibian.

Power and the Impositions

Even when the African Person started to challenge the caricatures of her objectified and degraded humanity, she’s still, to the present day, under the haunting specter of European and European-American past historical dehumanizing power and conquest. Because the African Person understood that the caricatures made out of her existential reality were mere distortions to keep her subjugated, she started to show her humanity. Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion in

Virginia was an expression of self-worth under an oppressive power; to say that

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

‘I am not what you say and what you see: an object, a phenomenon that just appears.” As Fanon (1967) wrote, “I wanted to be a man, nothing but a man”

(p.113). However, the political reality was oppressive as he notes:

In America, Negroes are segregated. In South America, Negroes are whipped in the streets, and Negro strikers are cut down by machine guns. In West Africa, the Negro is an animal. (p.113)

And what divides the ‘Negro’ from the rest is simply the color (Baldwin, 1961, p.149). And this vile treatment would shock John Griffin as he narrated his experiences in his book, Black Like Me ([1962] 1996). Having changed his color,

Griffin entered the world the African Person in America lived in, a completely different world. A bookstore that’d cashed his check a day earlier as a

‘Whiteman” refused to cash his check when he’d changed into a ‘Blackman”; because “my color offended her” (p.53). So the clerk was talking to the” image”

(p.162) in front of her, not Griffin. Like the rest of the ‘Black’ humanity, Griffin wasn’t judged by the qualities by which he was judged on the previous day as a

‘Whiteman,” a human being (content of Character in Kingian sense), but as a mere appearance. “I realized within very few hours that no one was judging me by my qualities as a human individual and everyone was judging me by my pigment” (p.162). As one of the people Griffin talked to explained, European-

Americans were “not talking with us but with” their “image of us” (p.162). “The color of my skin” wrote Baldwin, “stood between myself and me” (p.xi). This is why ‘shiny,’ in Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man ([1912] 1965),

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

despite being the smartest in the school, was still looked down upon. This rationalization of the being of the African Person as nothing more than his appearance, was something that would be institutionalized by what National

Center for Constitution Studies (NCCS 2006) would call “centers of opinion molding influence” (p.169), into “social facts” as John Searle (1995) would say.

However, the African Person has always tried, despite her powerlessness, to resist the simplicity with which she’s portrayed: dehumanization and oversimplification of her personal and socio-cultural identity as a color (black).

Essentially, the successful Haitian revolution of 1891 by slaves was another fight against the distorting reality of European power. In Africa, native people resisted various colonial powers until their struggle against colonialism culminated in waves of independence in late 1950s and early 1960s.

But soon the African would realize that the oppressive arm of the European is timeless. Colonialism would continue as neocolonialism through World Bank and IMF as Dambiso Moyo in Dead Aid (2009), William Easterly in The White

Man’s Burden (2006), and Paul Collier in The Bottom Billion (2008) show. The capacity to develop political and economic independence became constrained by

World Bank loan conditions. Political leaders, (through structural adjustment program) were conditioned to usher in unbridled privations in order to help pay loans rather than develop national economies (Andrews & Bawa, 2014). African nations, while independent on paper, had no economic and political power on the international scene. This helped foreign governments and western capitalists

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

to influence African countries in a manner detrimental to Africa. In such a situation, the ability to be self-determinant was compromised and people remained at the mercy of western cultural, political and economic influence and subjugation. This had a profound impact on African cultures and socio- intellectual independence. The dissemination of African cultural thoughts became crippled because of lack of funding to universities. However, as the

African Person tried to join humanity in self-expression, the odds were still stacked against her.

In America, Jim Crow and racial segregation keep her poor and her school substandard. Any expression of self-worth was seen as a threat to European-

America so it was met with brutal terror. This terror was both legal and illegal.

The Ku Klux Klan resisted any expression of African self-worth. Government enacted laws that protected the interest of European-America and impoverished

African-America. It was obvious Africans and Europeans in America couldn’t compete on equal footing. The law was against the Africans and they couldn’t compete economically. Without any political and economic power, African-

Americans simply became, in large part, what Europeans-Americans decided:

Niggers, Colored, Negroes, Colored, Blacks, Coons and other negative appearance-based descriptive identities. Because of the American cultural influence in the world, the identity of the African Person in America greatly impacts Africans in Africa. Universally, what the African-American becomes affects the continental African.

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

Blackness as Societally Imposed Consciousness

Children with African and European parents are forced to identify with their

African side of the family as they are not racially accepted (or acceptable) to the

European side of the family. This was true during slavery as it is now (in 2016).

This owes its origin to the one drop rule and racial purity. Sadly, racial purity is as true now as it was during slavery. In Black Berry, Sweet Juice (2001), Lawrence

Hill shows us a sad but revealing reality of what it means to be ‘black.’ Humans’ focus on superficial things, which Sartre (1995) and Darwin (1996) have noted, played heavily on Hill’s family as it did on all the participants in his study. The participants chose to identify as ‘black’ not because they wanted to but because they had no choice. Even when these children could “pass” for ‘white,’ society still holds on to the ideas of past segregation laws and social prejudice. When

Hill wanted to express his ‘blackness’ because ‘blackness’ is no longer what you see but what you express and own, he decided to get an Afro. His classmate was surprised: “Black! Larry, you’re not black. Look at your skin” (p.92). For members of Hill’s study, it was painful to realize that acceptability of their

“Blackness” wasn’t easy either. Being referred to as “white” in total negation of the “Blackness” they wanted to express put them out of place. As one participant told Hill: “to define blackness by the color of skin is not to the benefit of the community” (p.108). In this case, blackness is no longer what one actually looks like as conceptualized in Europeans’ first encounter with Africans (Snowden,

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

1984; Jordan, 1974). It’s simply what Eurocentric society decides. As Fanon (1967) eloquently put it: “I am given no chance. I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the “idea” that others have of me but of my own appearance”

(p.116): “moral patient” (Regan, 2004).

Moral Implications of Color-Identity

The easiest indication that one respects a given entity—what betrays the intentional attitude a person adopts towards a given entity—lies in how one describes it. Undoubtedly, that description depends on whether one wants to exclude or include it. Since the African Person has always faced exclusion of the deadly type, her description as ‘black’ was designed for emotional and social justification of exclusion. While the initial description of the African Person was merely an innocent shock at the contrast in appearance, the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries’ contextualization was purposed for exclusionary purposes. Social conditions were built into the idea of the African Person being an object of disgust to be avoided. Blackness wasn’t an attempt to praise and glorify the skin of the African Person. Even fascination of the ancients with the blackness of

‘Ethiopians’ as illustrated by Frank Snowden (1984, 1970) was an initial wonder that’d later lead to the equation of the ‘black skin’ with evil and portrayal of devil

(Satan) as looking like Ethiopians. With no doubt, this negative description of the

African Person produced in the European and European-American consciousness the perception of ‘disgust.’ Joseph Conrad’s ‘old nigger’ being

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

wacked by a European sailor in Heart of Darkness because of a mere hen reminds one of the caricatured portrayal of African-Americans in The Birth of Nation

(1915). It fashions the African Person into a child-like human. This portrayal was meant to imprint on the European mind a lowly beast. The self-consciousness elicited by the sight of the African Person became socially inculcated in the public consciousness and became politicized and institutionalized. The distorted image of the African Person was not only an index of differentiation but an object of negative intentionality (Searle, 2015) that would be used for in-group bias, exclusion (Otten et al, 23). Anthropologists and sociologists have shown that persecution was preceded by dehumanization of the targeted groups (Hyatt-

William, 1998, p.146). This dehumanization removed the guilt that’d have been a problem for the persecutors (Regan, 2004; Singer, 2010).). In Cuteness and Disgust

(2011), Sherman and Haidt write that

To be deemed “disgusting” and the object of revulsion, therefore, is to be imbued with negative social value, to be denied full mental life, and in extreme cases to be pushed beyond the protection of the moral circle. (p.247)

This imbuing of the object with the negative social value, something the African

Person has endured over many centuries, is mostly in the mind of the perceiving subject. As Tim Wise illustrates in White Like Me (2011), the attitude adopted by teachers toward African-Americans as opposed to European-Americans was based on perception rather than reality. Wise enjoyed privileges his African-

American colleges couldn’t. This perception devoid of reality is similar to John

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

Griffin’s experiences as a ‘black’ man in America of 1960s. “It is the subject’s conception of the object, rather than the sensory properties of the object, that primarily determines the hedonic value’ (Rozin & Fallon, 1987). As Wise explained, the treatment of African-American students was determined through color-based perception, not the reality of who they were. And this, Wise argues, was due to the power of his white skin (p.63). It’s the same color differential and expropriation that kept the African in slavery. It’s the same color differential that makes the West ignore thousands being slaughtered in Nigeria by Boko Haram while the West demonstrates in solidarity when 12 journalists are killed by the

Islamic extremists just like Boko Harm. It’s the same color differential that was used by apartheid South Africa to treat Africans as inferiors with whom they didn’t want to associate, giving them restrictive passes (like slave Fountain

Hughes) in their own country. It’s the same color differential which necessitated

Jim Crow and help enact Plessy vs. Ferguson to maintain “separate but equal.” In

Africa, the colonized and the colonizer were kept separated by a purposely designed urban plan as Luce Beeckmans explains:

With Europeans always being in the minority in Dakar, Dar es Salaam and Kinshasa, a physical distance between colonizer and colonized allowed Europeans to create a comfortable home in the African city, a chez-soi in the colony, as well as materialize the colonial dominance into urban space. (p.617)

As Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth (1963) and Aimé Césaire in Discourse on Colonialism ([1955] 2000) explained, the African had his cultures destroyed,

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

treated with brutal terror unless he complied with what the colonizers wanted, and was still expected to economically enrich the master and fight on his behalf.

Resistance in this case was met with brutal violence, which Césaire (p.33) believes dehumanizes the colonizers. Frederick Douglas, Olaudah Equiano, Mary

Prince and Linda Brent in their slave narratives, support this account of the dehumanizing effect of beastly brutality on the Europeans. As a colonizer and as a slave holder, the European Person assumed a beastly nature devoid of human compassion towards the African Person. And this brutality comes down to that superficial entity called skin color; even a drop, 1/8 in the case of Homer Plessy in Plessy vs. Ferguson. To make this brutality more authoritative to many people,

Jesus was portrayed pictorially as a Nordic man in Blum’s and Harvey’s The

Color of Christ (2012). This ensured that the oppressors looked exactly like the divine son of God and that made sure the oppressors’ brutality during slavery appeared divinely justified (Fredrickson, 2002; Russell, 1957).

The description of the African Person as “Black”, “Colored”, “Nigger” or

“Negro” resulted from a past many among us would want to forget. Now, this same description has been used as a universal cultural identity of a human population 150 years after slavery ended. No responsible scholar and individual would say that using ‘black’ to describe socially undesirable realities such as

“black market” or “Black Monday”, “black sheep”—and using the same black to describe the African Person—is a morally sound thing to do. However, we still compound the complexity of African cultures into a negative singularity:

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

“blackness.” While it’s true to acknowledge that contemporary application of

‘black’ to refer to Africans wherever they are is not meant in a morally unbecoming sense, it’s crucial to put its past history in a respectful context.

Conclusion

My aim in this undertaking was to show that the African Person’s description as

‘black’ was operationalized at time when Africans lacked agency (Regan, 2004). It was also a time when she wasn’t portrayed in a positive light. As a result—I have argued, owing to her political, economic, cultural and intellectual dependence at the time—it’s now crucial to revisit our usage of slavery and colonial period, appearance-based identities. The African Person can longer blame the European given the fact that she now has some form of agency (Sartre, 2007; Kant, 1983;

Nietzsche, 1989) to self-determine instead of embracing slave-time and colonial- time identities. The use of African-American to describe the African Person in

America is internally generated, cultural and respectful. That’s what scholars should embrace. Calling Nigerian, a ‘black’ African is an unnecessary going- back-to the past. Black, a socially and morally suspect phenomenal description, has a past we would want to forget.

~ End ~

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

References

Achebe, C. ([1958]1977). “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness.” Massachusetts Review. Retrieved on February 6, 2016. http://kirbyk.net/hod/image.of.africa.html Achebe, C. (2010). Things Fall Apart. New York. Penguins. Andrews, N. & Bawa, S. (2014). A Post-development Hoax? (Re)-examining the Past, Present and Future of Development Studies. Third World Quarterly. 35 (6), 922-938. Baldwin, J. (1963). No Body Knows My Name. New York: Vintage International. Baldwin, J. (1984). Notes of the Native Son. Boston: Beacon Press. Barcia, M. (2012). The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825: Cuba and the Fight for Freedom in Matanzas. Lafayette: University of Louisiana Press. Ben-Jochannan, Y. ([1974] 2002). The Black Man's Religion: The myth of Genesis and Exodus, and the exclusion of their African Origins. Baltimore: Black Classic Press. Bernal, M. (2003). Black Athena: Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Bhattacharyya, G., Gabriel, J. and Small, S. (2002). Race and Power: Global Racism in the Twenty-first Century. New York: Routledge. Biko, S. & Stubbs, A. (2002). I Like What I Write: Selected Writings. Chicago. Chicago University Press. Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich. 1865.The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and Hunter. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green. Blum, J. Edwards, Harvey, Paul. 2012. The Color of Christ: The Son of God & the Saga of Race in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

Blumer, H. (2011). Society as Symbolic Interaction. In P. Krivisto (Ed.). Social Theory: Roots and Branches. Oxford: University Press. Cannon, M. (1995). The Invisible Empire: Racism in Canada. Toronto: Random House Canada. Césaire, A. (1972). Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press. Charles, C.A.D. (2009). “Skin Bleachers’ Representations of Skin Color in Jamaica.” Journal of Black Studies. 40 (2): 153 -170. Chomsky, N. (2004). Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance. Crow Nest: Allen & Unwin Collins, C. & Yeskel, F (2013). Economic Apartheid in America: A Primer On Economic Inequality & Insecurity. New York: The New Press. Collins, R. (2011). Basics of Conflict Theory. In P. Krivisto (Ed.), Social Theory: Roots and Branches. Oxford: University Press Collier, P. (2008). The Bottom Billion: Why Poor Countries Are Failing and what Can Be Done About It. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Collier, P. and Jan Willem Gunning. (1999). Why Has Africa Grown Slowly? Journal of Economic Perspectives, 12 (3), 3-22. Conrad, J. ([1902] 1990). Heard of Darkness. Mineola: Dover Publication, Inc. Cornileus, T. H. (2013) “I’m a Black Man and I’m Doing this Job Very Well”: How African American Professional Men Negotiate the Impact of Racism on Their Career Development. Journal of African American Studies, 17, 444– 460. Diop, C. A. (1974). African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, Chicago: Lawrence Hill books. Douglas, Frederick. ([1841] 2002. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, An American Slave: Written by Himself. New York. Signet Classics. Du Bois, W.E. B. ([1903]1965). The Souls of Black Folk. In J. H. Franklin (Ed.), Three Negro Classics. New York: Avon Books. DuBois, W.E. B. (2013). Black Reconstruction in America: Toward a History of the Part

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860 – 1880. Piscataway: Transaction Publishers. Durkheim, E. (2011). What Is a Social Fact? In P. Krivisto (Ed.), Social Theory: Roots and Branches. Oxford: University Press. Easterly, W. (2006). The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. New York: Penguin Books. Equiano, Olaudah. ([1814] 2002). The Life of Olaudah Equiano. In The Classic Slave Narratives, Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Signet Classics. Evans, G. (1982). The Varieties of Reference. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fanon, F. (1967). Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press Fredrickson, G. M. (2002). Racism: A Short History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gates, H. L. & West, C. (1996). The Future of Race. New York: Vintage Books. Garang, K. (2013). Is ‘Black’ Really Beautiful?: Dehumanizing and Intentional Ethics of Descriptions and Vilifying Philosophies of Naming. Calgary: The Nile Press. Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge (MA): Cambridge University Press. Glenn, E. (2009). Shades of Difference: Why skin color Matters. Sanford: University Press. Gordon, L. R. (2013). Race, Theodicy, and the Normative Emancipatory Challenges of Blackness. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 112 (4). Gramsci, A. ([1940] 2004). Hegemony. In Literary Theory: An Anthology, Ed. Julie Rivlin & Michael Ryan. Malden: Blackwell Publishing Greene, E. (1998). *Planet of the Apes* as American Myth: Race, Politics, and Popular Culture. Middletown: Mesleyan University Press. Griffin, H. G. (1996). Black Like Me. New York: Signet Books. Haley, S. P. (1993). “Black Feminist Thought and Classics.” In Feminist Theory and

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

the Classics, Ed. Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and Amy Richlin. New York: Routledge. Hall, S. (1996). ‘New Ethnicities.’ In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-hsing Chen. New York: Routledge. Hegel, G. W. F (1931). The Phenomenology of Mind. London: Macmillan. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. San Francisco: HarperSanfranciso. Heidegger, M. (1[1807] 1977). Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. New York: Oxford University Press. Horkheimer, M. & Adorno, T. (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments: Stanford: Stanford University Press. Husserl, E. (1980). Phenomenology and the Foundations of the Sciences. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Isaac, B. (2006). The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity. Princeton: University Press. Isajiw, W. (1999). Understanding Diversity: Ethnicity and Race in the Canadian Context. Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishers. Johnson, J. W. (1965). The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. In J. H. Franklin (Ed), Three Negro Classics. New York: Avon Books Jordan, W. D. (1974). The White Man's Burden: Historical Origins of Racism in the United States. London: Oxford University Press. Kant, Immanuel. (1983). Perpetual Peace and Other Essays. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Kant, Immanuel. (2001). Fundamental Principle of the Metaphysics of Morals. In Basic Writings of Kant, Ed. A. W. Wood. New York: The Modern Library. Kelley, S. (2002). Racializing Jesus: Race, Ideology and the Formation of Modern Biblical Scholarship. New York: Routledge. King, M. L. (1992). I Have a Dream: 40th Anniversary Edition. New York: HarperCollins. Klein, N. (2007). The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Alfred

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

A. Knopf Canada. Lawrence, H. (2001). Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada. Toronto: Harper Perennial. Leiman, M. (1993). The Political Economy of Racism. London: Pluto Press. Livingstone, D. (1961). Livingstone's Missionary Correspondence, 1841-1856. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lofkowitz, M. R. & Rogers, G. M. (1996). Black Athena Revisited. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Madary, M. (2010). Husserl on Perceptual Constancy. Europeans Journal of Philosophy. 20 (1), 145 -165. Marx, K. (1976). Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, Ed. B. T. Bottomore and Maximilien Rubel. New York: Penguin Books. Mercer, K & Julien, I.1996. “De Margin and De Centre.” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, Ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen. New York: Routledge Morrison, Toni. ([1992] 2004.) “Playing in the Dark.” In Literary Theory: An Anthology, Ed. Julia Rivlin and Michael Ryan. Malden (MA): Blackwell Publishing. Moyo, D. (2009). Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is A Better Way for Africa. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Neitzsche, F. (1989). Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. New York: Vintage Books. Patterson, O. (1982). Slavery and Social Death. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press. Prince, M. (2002). The History of Mary Prince. In H. L. Gates (Ed), The Classic Slave Narratives.New York: Signet Classics. Prunier, G. (2009). Africas World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe. New York: Oxford University Press. Regan, T. (2004). The Case for Animal Rights. Berkeley: University of California

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

Press. Rodney, W. ([1972] 2012). How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Cape Town: Pambazuka Press. Rozin, P. & Fallon, A (1987). “A Perspective on Disgust.” Psychological Review. 94(1): 23-41. Samaan, A. E .2012. From a Race of Masters to a Master Race: 1948 To 1848. Seattle: Create Space. Sartre, J.P. ([1943] 1984). Being and Nothingness: The Principal Text of Modern Existentialism. New York: Washington Square Press. Sartre, J. P & Macombie, J. (1964/1965). Black Orpheus. The Massachusetts Review, 6 (1): 13-52. Sartre, J. P. (1995). Truth and Existence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Searle, J. R. (1995). The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Free Press. Searle, J. R. (2015). Seeing Things as They Are: A Theory of Perception. New York: Oxford University Press. Searle, J. R. (2002). Consciousness and Language. Cambridge: Oxford University Press. Shelby, T. (2005). We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press. Singer, P. (2010). Practical Ethics. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Skousen, W. C. (2008). A Miracle That Changed the Word: The 5000 Year Leap. Malta (ID): National Center for Constitutional Studies Snowden, F. M. (1984). Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Snowden, F. M. (1970). Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press. Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the Subalteran Speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and Interpretation of Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education

Master of Arts – Integrated Studies

Stiglitz, E. S. (2010). Free Fall: America, Free Market, and the Sinking of the World Economy. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Stiglitz, E. S. (2002). Globalization and Its Discontent. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Thiong’o, N. ([1986] 2004). Decolonizing the Mind. In J. Rivlin and M. Ryan (Ed.), Literary Theory: An Anthology. Malden (MA): Blackwell Publishing. Walvin, J. (11973). Black and white: the Negro and English society, 1555-1945. Allen Lane the Penguin Press. London: Allen Land. Washington, B. T. ([1900] 200). Up from Slavery. New York: Oxford University Press. Weber, M. (2011). ‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy. In P. Krivisto (Ed.), Social Theory: Roots and Branches. Oxford: University Press. West, C. (2001). Race Matters. New York: Beacon Press. William, Raymond. (1991). Base Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory. In C. Mukerji &M. Schudson (Ed.), Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspective in Cultural Studies. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Wise, T. (2011) White Like Me. Berkeley: Soft Skull Press.