A Plea to Blacks on the Issue of Self-Defense
/“Some blacks would rather be shot by their enemies than shoot their enemies.”
Sometimes, the relationship between the old and the new is like a bad marriage. The old inside the marriage want to get out; the new outside the marriage want to get in. Yet, the new may not grasp that the marriage is bad for them too.
Such an understanding also applies to the struggle to end racial injustice. New methods of fighting racism must either replace the tired, weary and aging traditional civil rights methods or assist them as a nurse would aid a senior citizen in a wheelchair.
A method, a strategy or plan, is useful when it builds the bold, daring character necessary to defeat an enemy. But how can we say traditional civil rights methods are truly useful, if blacks are only a little less passive, a little less docile and only an inch less slave-like today than their grandparents and great, great grandparents were forced to be during slavery and the Jim Crow era?
To fight your enemy, you must know how your enemy fights. To slay your enemy, you must abandon that which does not work and employ that which does work. Even a great white shark knows that if it is unsuccessful at catching one plump, delicious adult seal, perhaps it’s easier to dine on ten helpless and equally delicious baby seals.
What if some enterprising blacks, for example, imitated multi-division world boxing champion Roy Jones, Jr. and ditched sit-ins and became a Russian citizen, not just to extend their personal and business interests, but also to indict America as a racist society, to refute the propaganda that America is free and open to all?
“But he has deserted America?” you might counter. Really? The U.S. government and white supremacists branded Paul Robeson a traitor when he traveled to Russia, England and other European countries to condemn segregation. And because they fled to France, the U.S. government deemed Josephine Baker and James Baldwin turncoats.
What if some patriotic black American, instead of marches and protests, escaped to South Africa or Ethiopia with highly-classified national security information similar to what Edward Snowden did when he escaped to China and Russia?
The European Parliament has voted to call on European Union member states “to drop any criminal charges against Edward Snowden, grant him protection and consequently prevent extradition or rendition by third parties, in recognition of his status as whistle-blower and international human rights defender.”
They voted this way because human rights is more important than state secrets; because honor is more precious than spying on tens of millions of American citizens; because truth and freedom are more humane than the inhumane torture of innocent Americans and foreigners by sticking needles in their eyeballs; because racial justice is worth much more than a hundred pounds of gold, worth much more than a klan of white cops murdering blacks in the back and strangling them to death.
What if more blacks became, as opposed to participating in boycotts, secret members of the cyber hacking group Anonymous? Anonymous hacked into a KKK database in 2014, stealing personal information on more than a thousand KKK members, releasing information on 12 of them on October 30, 2015, and revealing information on the rest as time passed.
Thus, Anonymous has given us a modern way to attack evil: Stick with the old ways that are legal but fruitless or consider new ways that are illegal yet fruitful. But, then, didn’t Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights activists of his day face the same dilemma?
Moreover, if passive resistance still works, if nonviolent protest is still that massive cannon which fires deadly artillery at racism, then why are more angry and despairing blacks forming gun clubs and joining, of all things, the National Rifle Association?
On the other hand, now that black America has experienced a relapse in her battle with racial injustice, if every black in America agreed that black America should be destroyed, mass suicide is a satchel of pearls compared to the shame and humiliation of living with the stigma that you’re sheep and mice.
It’s a shame, but it’s true: Some blacks would rather be shot by their enemies than shoot their enemies. Tell that to the Kurds.
Indeed, the angels and the ancestors cry floods of tears at the sight of their descendants so docile, so submissive, acquiescing as if thriving in a coma. Yet, unsurprisingly, the passive nature of the American black wipes away those floods with one swipe of a dry mop.
You should not fly past the galaxy of change and courage without first surveying its planets. You can’t keep surviving on victories of the past. And you shouldn’t fight racial injustice as if numbed by heroin.