by Chinweizu
Negrophobia,
the fear and dislike of blacks, is a great disease. It has killed more blacks in
the last five hundred years than all other diseases combined: more than malaria,
more than epidemics and plagues of all sorts, In the coming years, it could kill
far more than AIDS. It is a psychological disease, a disease of the mind, which
harvests dead black bodies every day.
The blacks who died through slavery were killed by negrophobia. The blacks who
died all over the globe from white colonial aggression were killed by
negrophobia. The blacks who died in our liberation struggles - Bookman,
Toussaint and Dessalines with all their soldiers in Haiti; the Mau Mau warriors
in Kenya; the liberation fighters in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau,
Zimbabwe, Namibia, South Africa, Sudan and elsewhere — were all killed by
negrophobia.
The blacks dying from the structures and policies of neocolonialism are dying
from negrophobia. The blacks killed by AIDS, a disease manufactured by whites in
the biological warfare labs of the USA and deliberately introduced into central
Africa and Haiti to kill off blacks, are dying of negrophobia.
Ah, Negrophobia, I didn't know that hate could kill so many!
Negrophobia is a psychoneurosis, a mental disorder. So too is blancophilia, its
twin. If someone hates everything black, including the black butterfly,
including the most fertile black soil, isn't he mentally disturbed? If someone
loves everything white, including white trash, including white arsenic, isn't he
mentally disturbed? Negrophobia and blancophilia form a syndrome, a
characteristic set of psychoneurotic passions that occur together.
The negrophobia syndrome is characterised by melanotropism. A magnetic movement
away from or toward different intensities of melanin, the skin pigment.
Blancophilia induces a reflex movement toward things white, even toward white
ugliness. The stimulus object is white skin, any skin that is low in melanin.
Negrophobia, for its part, induces a reflex movement away from things black,
even from black beauty. The stimulus object is black skin, any skin blessed with
melanin in high dosage.
Negrophobia and blancophilia are, of course, conditioned responses to white
power and black powerlessness. In a sad case of stimulus substitution, the
responses to superior power have become transferred to white skin, and those to
powerlessness have become transferred to black skin. The negrophobia syndrome is
a chronic disease with the white race, a disease born of pride of power. It is a
disease with which they have infected the whole world, including the black race,
giving rise to negro negrophobia, the disease of black self-hate.
Negro negrophobia is a most absurd disease. Can you imagine some black running
to escape his blackness? To escape from himself? His obsession with fleeing from
himself proves he is unfit to live. His running to embrace his white enemy
proves he is a suicide. The entire affair shows he is mad. Some call it
alienation, a mental disorder. Yet some black sirens now sing in praise of
alienation, beckoning all blacks to acquire the disease.
What are the symptoms of negro negrophobia? Negro negrophobia makes black women
bleach, till some proudly sport yellow monkey faces and ebony-black thighs. (or
‘Fanta Orange face and Coca-cola legs’ as some call it). It makes black
parents prefer their lighter skinned children to the darker skinned. It makes
blacks who marry white or mulatto think they are marrying up and improving the
race. It makes a pitch-black Sudanese proclaim himself Arab, on account of just
one white Arab ancestor ten generations back; it makes him count as nothing,
indeed as a blemish, all his 1,023 black ancestors in that generation, and all
the millions before and since.
Negro negrophobia makes African-Americans, and now black South Africans too,
believe that integrating white neigbourhoods is social advancement. It makes
blacks desperate to integrate white schools, white churches, white communities,
white ideologies, white movements and white organizations. Some would even
gladly die to integrate the Ku Klux Klan.
Negro Negrophobia makes blacks defer to whites. It makes bright black boys, the
thinkers of the race, obey the IMF, the World Bank, GATT and the UN, even when
they know that the orders from such outfits are aimed to destroy their own
people. It makes black intellectuals swallow and spout any silly idea, provided
it is put forth by some guru of the white world, like Marx, like Jesus, like
Mohammed.
Negro negrophobia makes blacks accept leaders of thought and of action that are
chosen for them by whites. It makes blacks revere any third class mind, any
tinpot potentate, that whites anoint to confuse and mislead them. But for negro
negrophobia, we would automatically reject any leader chosen for us by our
historic enemies. But for negro negrophobia, we would thoroughly suspect the
loyalty to the black race of any black Rhodes Scholar, of any black Nobel laureate,
of any black Faisal laureate, of any black Lenin laureate, of any black knight
or peer of England, of any black elect of the French Academy. He would have to
work extra hard to convince us that he is not an agent sent to help hasten our
ruin.
Believing the blancophile dogma that white is right, that white is quick-witted,
that white is beauty and virtue and salvation; believing the negrophobe dogma
that black is wrong, that black is dumb, that black is ugliness and sin and
damnation, the negrophobic black does not feel comfortable in a blacks-only
group. Blacks-only associations give him claustrophobia; he must throw open the
doors to let in some white skin to boss or spy on him; only then can he relax;
only then can he feel that all is well with his world. Negro negrophobia is,
thus, a disease which drives blacks to crave racial integration and to espouse
continentalist Pan-Africanism.
In multi-racial societies, it drives the black elites to flee to white suburbs.
In the name of racial equality, they decapitate their own black communities, rob
the ghetto of black leadership, and abandon it to confusion and predatory gangs,
In the name of black freedom they flee from the black world. Similarly, in
international relations, pulled by the call of the white, blacks are eager to
join a British Commonwealth. They are desperate to join a French Community. They
sell their sanity to join a Russian Collective. And an Arab empire? They disown
their black inheritance to get into its latrine! They will pay any price, suffer
any humiliation, to join any club formed by whites. But a black community, or
commonwealth, or league? They will not only not join, they will oppose its being
formed at all! The idea of blacks getting together, all by themselves,
disorganizes their being. In their blancophilia they are self-made orphans
desperately seeking white foster homes. For all their outcry on behalf of the
black community, all they want is to disappear into the whiteness of the white
world, whether Arab or European. They want to disappear by any means possible or
available — physically, mentally, emotionally.
In such ways, negro negrophobia has affected Pan-Africanism, affected Negritude,
affected even the great leaders of these Black Redemption Movements. Senghor's
Francophilia weakened his Negritude; made him ecstatic to join the
"Universal Civilization" by becoming an elect of the French Academy.
Nkrumah's Arabophilia
subverted the Garveyism of his Black Star symbol; it truncated his Pan-Negro
Pan-Africanism into a continentalist Pan-Africanism which would exclude Garvey
from membership of its organizations, and which distorted Pan-Africanism into an
Arab and Black African tango.
With Du Bois, when the racial
integrationism of his NAACP triumphed, it wrecked the black community in the
USA; it bore the bitter fruit of black ghettos whose absentee black leaders
squat in white suburbia, squawking as hostages to white power.
Cheikh Anta Diop's Marxism, with
its dedication to the primacy of multi-racial class solidarity, made him most
unenthusiastic about a sub-Sahara Federation of Black Africa. He would accept it
only as a very last resort, only if the Arab invader-settlers doggedly excluded
themselves.
Mandela's
liberalism, with its dedication to the primacy of multi-racialism, is allset to
subvert the cardinal goal of returning to the black aborigines of South Africa
all the land stolen from them by the white invader-settlers.
Senghor, Nkrumah, Du Bois, Cheikh Anta Diop and Mandela are proof that not even
the best among us are immune from the negrophobia syndrome. Of the great black
redeemers of the 20th century, only Garvey escaped the syndrome, principally
because he was unequivocal and uncompromising on black solidarity.
Significantly, he did not call his movement Pan-Africanism, with all the
equivocation on race that is harboured by that term; he called it the United
Negro Improvement Association, a name which unequivocally implies a redemption
movement of blacks, by blacks, for blacks.
To call yourself a leader of blacks, one leading them to liberation from the
white world, and yet run off to integrate white suburbia— isn't that absurd?
It can only mean that your Black Consciousness is shallow, or even
opportunistic; that hiding under your black mask is a blancophile heart. To call
yourself a leader of blacks, one leading them out of the prison cell of white
power, and yet insist on bringing whites into every organization for blacks —
isn't that folly of the first order? Those blacks who espouse continentalist
Pan-Africanism, are they not like those Trojans who carried the Greek wooden
horse into their own citadel, and hastened their people's destruction?
If you are such a black leader or intellectual, take a look at Michael Jackson
and see the incarnation of your spirit, see your mind made flesh. Michael
Jackson has most publicly done what black negrophobiacs secretly dream of doing:
act out George Schuyler's great satire Black No More! Michael Jackson is the
supreme, public example of negro negrophobia, which is why he is such a valuable
negative example, which is why I just love Michael Jackson. Every racially
integrating black, every continentalist Pan-Africanist black, is Michael Jackson
minus opportunity. They are the social and political counterparts of Wacko Jacko,
as the white press dubbed him. The only difference is that he has carried his
negro negrophobia to its logical, physical conclusion — turn himself into a
fake white man! Because the others cannot afford the cash or courage for the
skin and bone surgery, they settle for the next best thing: they disappear into
white communities, or integrate into white ideologies and white movements.
Presumably, from seeing so many white faces around them at all times, they will
lose sight of the fact that they themselves are black.
After being created and entrenched by five centuries of white power, Negro
negrophobia has, alas, become a character neurosis. From one generation to
another, black parents pass on to their children the neurotic character
structures which foster negrophobic attitudes and behaviour. The global
mechanisms of white power (religion, media, school, advertising, propaganda)
then reinforce the neurosis.
Blacks,
alas, cannot take control of the Black World until they are cured of this
neurotic syndrome. Until they get rid of this neurotic plague, any white boy or
girl or child can seize control of their affairs by flashing a bit of white
skin. Proof? All you need do is introduce a white face among negrophobic blacks
and they become disorganised, they become disoriented. Just put one ugly blondie
among them, and their eyes will stray and their minds will wander from the
doughnut before them and focus on the white hole. Some will be obsessed with
desire for whitey; some will be obsessed with hate for whitey; either way, they
lose touch with basic reality and ignore what they must do to keep control of
their lives, their situation, their environment. And at that point, any white
waif can take them over.
What then is the cure? That is for our medical and social scientists to
investigate. But from the sidelines, let me observe that it may require
psychotherapy, both individual and group therapy. It may require cultural
therapy, with basic retraining to break the habits of the negrophobic syndrome
and inculcate non-negrophobic habits of thought and valuation. It would be the
job of homes, schools, media, and social organisations to bring up new
generations untainted with Negrophobia and blancophilia. It may require, above
all, environmental therapy of a political sort, through the emergence of at
least one powerful black nation that would destroy the five-century -old
correlation of white skin with power and black skin with powerlessness. That is
probably the strategic cure for the syndrome.
My guess is that until the power therapy for this power neurosis is
accomplished, all other therapies would be only partially effective. Whatever
the case, until the race cures itself of negrophobia, it has no future. Which is
why getting rid of Negro negrophobia is perhaps the cardinal task of internal
reparation.
Copyright
© 1994 by Chinweizu
A Sundoor Publication, P. 0. Box 988, Festac Town, Lagos, Nigeria
All rights reserved.
© Chinweizu 2005