FROM THE BOUNDARY: Buffalo soldier – Part 4
This we know. We come from east and west to eat in the garden of the Divine. We delight in our oneness with each other and all creation. We know that our love for our neighbour and of life heals our world. We carry forgiveness in our hearts. We’re open to unimaginable visions strengthening the cause of peace. And we too have our dreams.
John Lewis is dead. Bless you for your life and legacy, your way of peace and love, your teaching never to give up, never to hate, never to seek vengeance, ever to beware those who’d take the high moral ground from us. Your spirit will be with us, and those of your mentors, till the end of the age. Don’t worry. With your courage, we’ll cross the bridge with you. Your truth marches on, and with it justice “like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream”.
Yes: in the ‘Spirit if truth’. Well, the truth is that I’m tired of stereotyping – of black and white – as if skin colour, a mystery of birth, is somehow more than skin deep. That can’t be the determinant of our thoughts. So don’t use it to set community against community, to suppress freedom of expression, and ultimately erode democratic norms. And don’t try to instil the pathology of endless remorse into those of us with white skin. You can’t erase the past. Nor can you rewrite it. Must we abolish the history of man? No, but we don’t stand in its concrete either. We must learn from it. And if all our efforts speak of vengeance, then we’ve learned nothing.
Over past weeks we’ve been treated to a surfeit of misrepresentation. We’ve been told that ‘racism’ is (only) a “collection of WHITE actions” (Alleyne, Advocate, 14 June). Isn’t that racist? Black people have been told that because of slavery they remain “subservient”, riddled with “inferiority”, as if to say they have no backbone. Isn’t it time these people stopped projecting their own inadequacies on the postman, the plumber, all my friends? Don’t dare suggest they’re less than they are, that they must be because their forbears were slaves. It took inherent foresight, fortitude, wisdom, guts – greatness – to move from slavery to where we are now in this country. I’m proud of my working class origins. Had my forbears been slaves, I’d have been even prouder of them.
It’s been suggested that “Caucasians” should apologise for their “inhumane, racist, vicious acts” against “other racial groups” (Alleyne, ibid.). But history, including the historical substance of scripture, floods our understandings of man’s inhumanity – so often in the name of the God of Israel. Where do we start? Sure, I’m a member of the human race, as you are, but don’t make me a legatee of any of that because of the colour of my skin. That’s racism too.
To the historians: you know very well that you can’t judge the past with the eyes of the present, that you can’t foist on the past concepts which only now we understand, that ideas like ‘racism’ and ‘discrimination’ are no older than me, that the law doesn’t work retroactively to make unlawful what was lawful when it was done.
And you know too that the half-truth is a lie where there’s a duty to tell the whole truth. So when you call for reparations from white countries, why don’t you also tell our people that it was their African forbears who happily ‘sold’ their ancestors to the white man, that it was the Obas of Lagos, of ife, of Benin, the Olu of Warri, the Sultan of Sokoto and the Caliphates of the North, the Obi of Onitsha in present-day Nigeria, and the Asantehene of the Asanti people in Ghana, who were immediately responsible for their enslavement and sale.
Oh – and to one historian. Do please get your work on Nelson reviewed and published. Until you do, you have an unpublished manuscript not a “book”.
Go safely, then – until the next time.
John Lewis from the boundary: “We’re one people and we all live in the same house…the world house.”