MIA > Archive > Tim Hector
Fan the Flame, Outlet, 21 February 1997.
Online here https://web.archive.org/web/20120416011318/http://www.candw.ag/~jardinea/fanflame.htm.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
To integrate what and with whom and how? The mark of a great writer is not only how well he expresses truths, old and new, about the human condition. But how concisely and precisely he expresses such matters.
To me one of the finest writers of our time is the writer and novelist, the black American, John Edgar Wideman.
I spent last week-end reading his recent book Father Along with great pleasure. It was my achievement for this 1997 Black History Month.
I found Wideman encapsulating the history of the idea of “race” so well, that I must share it with you. Wideman wrote:
“The discovery of people unlike themselves did not spark in Europeans a doctrine of cultural relativity. It produced the invention of race. Of all the weapons devised to conquer and subjugate the lands beyond Europe, the most effective, pervasive and enduring, the one that served to co-ordinate, harmonise, and intensify the effects of all other weapons is the concept of race. Soldiers who wielded the broadsword, musket the gatling gun, rockets and bombs could slaughter, free of conscience and remorse, when the enemy belonged to a race less than human. Priests could sanction and abet the slaughter, share the booty of empire while they debated in learned councils whether or not the lesser races possessed souls.”
Every young person seeking a new consciousness of themselves should commit it to memory and use it as a guide through the thickets of the closing 20th century and the dawn of the 21st.
So much is said in so little. There are people who do not like to discuss “race”. To them it is the dirtiest four letter word in the vocabulary. They shun it. Hide from it. Pretend to be colour blind, in order to justify their own blindness to what Europeans “invented” and made fundamental to history–the idea of race. Black people did not invent racial oppression. Whites did. They alone practice the racism they invented. Black people oppress no other race. Therefore they did not and do not need race and racism to justify their oppressive power over other peoples. It is European scholarship, in all fields of knowledge, which tried, primarily through theology and history, to prove that black people did not have souls or we were three-fifths of a man or some such gross violation of truth.
Whenever and wherever black repudiate those racists notions, whites of late have developed a new racist term for any such person. He is called “a reverse racist”. Racism by definition is the oppression of one race by another, and includes the justifications of racial oppression, in biology or phrenology, which white power has developed to justify its domination. For example, social Darwinism advocates that the lower class, be it white or black, is lower because of its own fault. The fault is inherent in the lower orders. Logically as social Darwinism postulates, blacks are lower, because it is inherent in the “race”. The truth is the lower orders are lower by class oppression, and blacks are downpressed by class and racial oppression.
And so as Wideman wrote:
“How could a race closer to wild beasts than to man own the land they occupied, govern themselves, or enter the life of European colonies except as slaves. The paradigm of race located within its victims the causes and justification of the victim’s plight. Thus the oppressed, to the degree they internalised the message of race, became active agents of their own oppression.”
The whole passage by Wideman is profound. But none so profound as his last sentence. That, we, the black oppressed “to the degree we internalised the message of race, became active agents in our own oppression.”
Nothing is worth grasping more at this stage of our history than that. It is to the degree that we, as a people, have internalised all the negative gobbledy-gook about the race, that we ourselves have become agents in our own oppression.
Let me be concrete about what I mean. On Valentine’s night, Jennifer and I decided at the last minute, that instead of doing our own thing, we would join and go to dinner somewhere. There we met a very fine young man, who was doing very well and by personal effort trying to lift himself up, by study and commitment to his work. He told us a story of how because he had been made a member of management, his own fellow black workers had turned on him, and one in particular went out of his way to humiliate and demean. He was distraught. He wanted to leave the place he was working at. And like the great French poet, Rimbaud, “go anywhere, anywhere out of this world.” He was experiencing psychological murder. It is at work everyday here, in one form or another. Some more intense than others.
I listened caught up in the young man’s pain. I wanted to tell him that blacks murder blacks, with great ease, for little or nothing because they have internalised the message of their own “nothingness” and have become active agents not only in their own oppression, but in their own elimination.
The staggering murder rate in Jamaica today is but proof of the point. After nearly 35 years of independence, Jamaica has devised no programme, which will allow blacks en masse, to rise above the degraded image of themselves foisted upon them by their colonisers, and enforced for centuries. Jamaica, today, is only an extreme expression of what lies beneath every single Caribbean and African country. The very fine young man here was but proof that internalising our own historical degradation, it yaps at our heels, day in and day out, striving to make us participate as active agents in our own oppression and degradation.
As usual I am going to make a leap into a field I have been following closely, though by no means a scientist. It has become necessary for me to follow it because, however valid its discoveries, I am certain it will be used by the Dominant to continue our oppression. The field of knowledge of which I speak is called neuroscience. Neuroscience is the science of the brain and the central nervous system. It is expected to have an impact on history as earth-shaking as Darwin’s 100 years ago. One of its leading proponents is Edward O. Wilson, a professor of Zoology at prestigious Harvard. He is the author of two very influential books of extraordinary influence in the academic world, The Insect Societies and Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.
Wilson has created and named the new field sociobiology. Its key premise, he has most uniquely compressed into a single sentence. Every human brain, Edward O. Wilson says, is born not as a blank sheet (a tabula rasa) waiting to be filled in by experience but in Edward O. Wilson’s own words as “an exposed negative waiting to be slipped into developer fluid.” You may develop the negative well, or not so well, or swell, but any which way, you are going to get precious little which is not imprinted in the film.
The print is the individual’s genetic history, over thousands of years of evolution and there is not much anybody can do about it. Furthermore, argues Wilson, genetics determine things such as temperament, role performance, emotional responses, and levels of aggression, but also our moral choices. Which, moral choices, are not choices at all proceeding from free-will, but tendencies imprinted in the hypothalamus and limbic regions of the brain.
While Wilson’s work will disturb all the “attributes” attributed to a “race”, and made mincemeat of the idea of racism, I am certain that one of its off shoots will be a new theory that blacks are genetically hard-wired to violence and self-destruction. For it has already been shown, that out in the jungle, among humankind’s closest animal relatives, the chimpanzees, there is proof that a handful of young males committed practically all the wanton murders of other males and the physical abuse of females. Will it not soon be said, that blacks have the preponderance of this toxic DNA, and it would be best, in youth, to treat them therapeutically with drugs, to eliminate their danger to the global village. (Maybe I am being alarmist, but I did not follow the O.J. Simpson trial, but I listened to the recent brouhaha about DNA, and I saw in it a harbinger of things to come.)
It is going to take serious black scholarship allied to mass education and participation, to beat back a lot of the ‘genetic’ nonsense to come in the continuing racial oppression. The black condition of dispossession, the world over, was historically produced, and has to be, and can only be, historically corrected–by liberation. And liberation is not an event–it is a process. It is part, an essential part, of the process of ending “man’s domination by man”.
And now, my last shift. I gather that Lester Bird and others have mooted it abroad that Tim Hector, the Caribbean man, has turned against Caribbean integration. To be sure as it is being practised, I am quite willing to part company with it for a new order of Caribbean integration in unity. That puts it quite clearly I hope. Very clearly.
I am going to be clearer. Those who manage the regional integration process, these past 24 years, have integrated next-to-nothing. They met cricket. They even met U.W.I. All they have “integrated”, minus petroleum and traditional exports, is approximately 4 per-cent of regional trade.
My quarrel with them at the moment is their uncritical acceptance of globalisation and the role of the Caribbean in it. To them all we have to do is jump in the line and shake our body line, to the multinational dominant song. If they provoke me I will quote chapter and verse, and some very eminent persons in the region will stand exposed. But not now.
Black studies, has to pre-occupy itself with globalisation. First of all, it has to be seen not as an economic regime, but as a system of social relations, rooted in the specific form of social power now in control, and designed and executed to extend and deepen those social relations and therefore the existing hegemony.
What globalisation basically means is that the market has become increasingly universal as an economic regulator. It, the new universal, the market, determines the hierarchy or the new division who at the top and who at the bottom. Who will be the corporate managers of the global village, and who will be its menials, in a permanent under-class. And sociobiology despite its best intentions, will be marshalled to reinforce that view of the world, with evangelists by TV or the Internet preaching the new gospel of the old order in new clothes.
These Caribbean integrationists, who have produced more disintegration than integration, do not see, or do not wish to see, that the more universal the Market becomes as an economic regulator, the more democracy is confined to certain formal rights, at best, the right occasionally to vote. And this right becomes less and less important as the domain of political action is taken over by what is called “market imperatives”.
The market determines therefore we obey. We are economically “hard-wired”.
Caribbean integration has to find an alternative to globalisation as it is now. That alternative to globalisation has to be a new form of social organisation, where there is democracy at the work place and in the democratic self-management of communities. It will not come about by Summits or Intersessionals. It will come about by struggle, at once theoretical and practical.
And I shall shock all the economists associated with the official integration movement. The crisis, the stagnation, the universal structural adjustment of the Caribbean, has only one remedy. I make bold to say, that remedy is this. It is to release the productivity of Caribbean labour, from the Order-Giver, Order-Taker syndrome. And this new democratic organisation of production and society, will not make us Asian Tigers, will not only make the productivity of our labour, internationally competitive, it will release us from being “active agents in our own oppression” for the very first time. Mark my word, if it succeeds in one place, island-nation or mainland nation it will spread like wild-fire up and down the Caribbean breaking all language barriers, as in 1938.
Therefore it will create not only a new Caribbean family, going beyond the nation-state, it will create internationally, new passions, out of the genetic mix acquired in our long sojourn of 150 million years from our origin in the Rift Valley till now. These new creative passions have been historically corked down, to allow for the domination of women by men, one race by another, and generally, “the domination of man by man.” With liberation, genetics too, will be liberated from its current fetters. By the way, Michael Jordan and John Wideman, Gary Sobers and Rohan Khanhai, Jamaica Kincaid and Vivi Richards, Sparrow and Arrow, V.S. Naipaul and Wilson Harris, Peter Minshall and Leroy Clarke, Lara and Chanderpaul provide only a hint of the creative new passions which Caribbean labour, in new social relations, will release. After all, the global domination of the world, by fewer and fewer men, in whom capital is concentrated is but West Indian plantation history writ larger. To be integrated into that, is to participate in, even to applaud, one’s own disintegration.
Last updated on 14 February 2022