Kwame Ture/Stokely Carmichael Speeches ...

Kwame Ture/Stokely Carmichael Speeches

This gem includes Ture’s Black Power Speech given in 1966 UC Berkley, which he calls ‘the white intellectual ghetto of the West’. Nearing the middle, Ture asks what I think remains a salient question, (depending on your humanist/anti-/post-humanist leanings): “How can we begin, to build institutions that will allow people to relate with each other as human beings?” adding “this country has never done that”.

I listened to these speeches in March, thinking about Trayvon Martin’s murder, and about the fact that law - no matter how many civil rights bills are passed or how many lawsuits are brought before the courts - does not equal justice. So that while Zimmerman might have been charged, the understanding of blackness as suspicious, criminal, as of less value than property (your microwave, your laptop) is endemic. How can we approach/embrace the justice for which we’ve been crying out? Part of it at least seems to me to rest in this assertion:

The question then is how can white people move to start making the major institutions that they have in this country function the way it is supposed to function. That is the real question. And can white people move inside their own communities to start tearing down racism where in fact it does exist, where it does exist … It is white people who make sure we live in the ghettoes of this country, it is white institutions that do that. They must change. In order for America to really live on a basic principle of human relationships, a new society must be born, racism must die and the economic exploitation by this country of non-white people around the world must also die, must also die.

And let’s not get Atticus Finch about it, this stuff is not heroic: it is not heroic for white people to do anti-racism work in daily life and concertedly in institutions and communities. It’s a basic requirement if you believe in justice and democracy and freedom and all those other wonderful abstracts, to do that work without self-congratulation. I love Ture’s thoughts on this because he makes clear that the alternative is not ‘neutrality’ but hypocrisy. Like Toni Morrison says, ‘if you can only be tall because somebody’s on their knees then you have a serious problem. White people have a very very serious problem, and they should start thinking about what they can do about it’

[via noire1968: This just made my day.]

(Source: shlamille, via blaquezami)

1 year ago