Whither Racial Card, Black Lives Matter
NEWS DIGEST – Certainly black lives matter and so do white lives. When will racism cease to be an all-day long gist amongst black people? I have long held an unorthodox point of view as against what I feel is the uniformed bandwagon notion of the BLM movement.
May Jacob Blake, Breonna Taylor, Elijah Mcclain, and George Floyd rest in perfect peace. That is not the only prayer that I have to say here though. I pray we heal from the hurt and the nolstagic wounds of the slave trade era.
I pray we heal completely, cause I feel that is the biggest problem today. It’s not institutional racism. I apologize but I feel we’re way so paranoid as a result of history that we have failed to live for the present day and instead any wrong done to a man of colour is perceived as a wrong done because of his skin colour.
You might find what I have to say ill conceived but maybe if you stop yourself for two (2) seconds and think about it properly you’d catch my drift.
Some weeks ago in the wake of the George Floyd protests, during a premier league game in England, a plane flew with a banner that said “White lives matter” and it sparked an outrage, an outrage I well understand but one I believe should trigger a change in the way we see things regardless of the intention of the one or entity behind that banner. In isolation there is nothing wrong with the banner right?
Yet in context everything is wrong with it. It is wrong because it’s a direct confrontation, it affronts the BLM movement and this is where the question becomes germane. Why are we all about BLM? Doesn’t that ordinarily provoke a White Lives Matter (WLM) counter movement? Why are we not propagating a message that says All Lives Matter (ALM)?
Oh I get it, we are the ones on the receiving end. Action and reaction are equal though and maybe once upon a time they acted and we reacted, but perhaps now we’re reacting and they’re acting. We feel the world already belongs to whites and blacks are the ones in danger, they’re the ones that need a fight and a revolutionary movement to save their dignity, that’s what everyone thinks but maybe that is the problem and we have to find a panacea to that and tackle the problem from the root source.
Maybe it’s simply a question of paranoia. Trauma from yesterday’s wars. In our minds is where the wound festers. We have to think differently and only then will we achieve what we want to achieve. It’s obvious that the way we’re doing it now isn’t working. Infact, when the George Floyd protests erupted and the black lives matter protests erupted I said to myself that the protests wouldn’t prevent a recurrence and I told the few friends that I could dare say such to.
I said another unfortunate Cop would kill a black man in the not so distant future and we’ll be right back where we started again.
Perhaps I am dithering, I sincerely do not know from what angle I should try and drive my point home because I know that the issue is sensitive and that it is in-fact a difficult quest I have chosen to embark on to make you see this the way I see it, yet I’ll try anyway.
We are far from the days of the Civil rights movement, far from the days of Marthin Luther King and Malcolm X. May their souls rest in perfect peace. Yet we still live in the insidious cycle that led to the revolutions of the past being televised. If a problem that ensued for years centuries ago is still plaguing us then in order not to be like the insane man whom refuses to change his tactics and yet expects a different result every time, we should switch how we approach things.
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We should fight for humanity as one and become blind to skin colour entirely. Let us believe that a wrong done to a black man is simply done to a human being. The nature of the world is built on a competition for survival. A food chain with humans at the very top. Yet as humans and being the privileged custodians of the earth we are different from other animals even if we are largely one.
We do not always have to compete amongst ourselves and be at odds with one another, because we are all Human beings. I am not saying that racism is a lie, indeed there are pockets of people that are still unapologetically racist and there will always be. But if we react everytime, which in itself as I have posited above is also an action, then we will get a reaction.
I believe that if a black man is pulled over by a white cop today the black individual without a shred of doubt or benefit of same simply believes at the word go that the cop is racist and is ready to fight. He does not immediately think about the reality that he indeed might be running foul of the law, he totally disregards that and subjects the situation to a scrutiny of racial profiling. This is not even fair or good for the world because just as there were white cops taking the knee during the protests, there are whites, cops and others who are not infact slightly racist and this generalised fight only accuses them wrongly which is entirely unfair.
Times have changed. Black people are successful now. The Jay-Zs and Beyonces, the 50 Cents and Kanye Wests. Not just the ones involved in what you might term social or entertaining endeavors, there is now a history of a black president. Barrack Obama was there for two full terms, come on, times have changed. As alluded to above there will always be a couple of people who are staunch racists yet we do not have to pay them in their own coin.
How about completely annihilating the idea of skin colour and reveling in the uniting factor of the homo sapiens race? It is doable in your mind and that is where the correction needs doing. We deal with racists by not even giving them voice cause no one even cares about the other colour for which the racist believes he’s superior. Colour is not a yardstick or prerequisite for peaceful coexistence amongst Men. It is in no way a characteristic that defines any individual.
I am sure that we can tackle this problem in this manner and I long for the days when no one will remind me that my forefather was a slave and rather I’d be told that someone like me was once the number one citizen of the world.
I mean the fact speaks for itself. If there is not infact anything to gain from a pity party or an agenda that only seems to blackmail then we can definitely view this much differently and rightly. Who are we even deceiving? Here in Nigeria the tribes are still at odds with one another. Hausa will not marry Igbo. Perhaps that explains the reality that there will always be factors that differentiate us for moral motives of classification and identification, for grouping.
However, there is that one indivisible factor and it is that we are all human beings. It houses the differences, it swallows them up. The discrepancies are not as meaningful as we make them unless you can show me some black man that was hatched from an egg while the white one was given birth to after nine (9) months of pregnancy.
I strongly think that things need to be seen in this manner and ultimately, may the world heal from the historic traumas plaguing our minds akin to some Post traumatic stress disorder. We can heal. I leave all with these words of Lucky Dube as he sang in his song Together As One. “The cats and the dogs have forgiven each other, what is wrong with us?”
Muhammed Belgore Esq is a legal counsel with Mahmud Magaji & co. He can be reached on Moh4gunners@yahoo.com
