6 - Victimhood and the Identity Crisis: Blacks and the Epistemology of Freedom

Summary

Various forms of crises upon crises have partially enveloped and almost sealed the fate of Black people on the continent and in the Diaspora for far too long a period. Never has a human race endured sustained and prolonged trajectories of pain, dejection, and material impoverishment imposed on them as the Black ancestry. This has affected their status vis-a-vis other ancestries on planet Earth. From serfdom to Arab/European slavery to colonization and apartheid on the continent of Africa, the Black person continues to experience these self-imposed ills today. Ali Mazrui has challenged scientists to prove whether, gravitationally speaking, power and decision-making for all other humankind were meant to flow from North to South (Mazrui, 1986). In other words, why would Europe and the United States make decisions that impact life in Africa, the so-called Middle East, Latin America, and Asia? Why the exclusive club of only the G7, World Bank, UN, and all its constituent bodies headquartered in European and American capitals? Like Jose Medina in his book “The Epistemology of Resistance,” (Medina, 2012) we have been numbed and deafened to realities, making us become blind in the process. The epistemic injustices, according to Medina, are to me the multiplier effect of the ship-wrecked mind manipulations carried out on the Black ancestry by the White ancestry, and that has affected our collective inabilities to decipher manipulation of our collective will from sheer communal trusts of the “other.” Perpetual servitude like what the Black people the world over have experienced and are experiencing has deadened our minds to the extent that we tend to unconsciously distrust each other and tear ourselves to pieces while the hegemonic White Europeans and Americans call us, in the words of Donald Trump, children from “shit-hole” continent (see Langmia, 2021). This, they have done with impunity because suffering and pain have become the religion, a way of life, and a value system whose genesis is well known and documented for the Black people. Today, it is the mass immigration of Blacks and other minorities from Africa and Middle East drowning in the Mediterranean Sea, as the African Union, Europe, and the United States are yet to call for an emergency UN summit to solve the problem. This time, the Blacks themselves are seeking to be enslaved.