Black Culture | The Obstacle to Development

Cultivating what?

“Black culture” in a sentence is never followed by anything positive. “Black Culture” or the lifestyle standard of assumptions about black identity, portrayed by entertainment, fashion, music, marketing, and news media for huge profits. It is the lens Europeans want to comfortably see us through. Moreover, we have become so comfortable that we celebrate the bigotry of low self-expectations presented in our monolithic caricature.  ¹. Failing to meet the challenges of decency and the intellectual greatness of other groups, we celebrate the bottom. I honestly cannot think of a better way to destroy a people than with the very culture they seek security and comfort in to deal with the living world. The destruction/corruption of culture is a major feature of the African Holocaust. The exploitation and poisoning of the very thing that nurtures our development.

The boundaries are blurred between a culture and its sub-culture, but one informs the other for its aesthetic and ethics.

Nicki Minaj addresses UN.

But being transparent about the problems that hold Africans globally back is very challenging: It demands some maturity on our part. Being sensitive and easily offended is not how any people grow. Because the minute you start a deep analysis of our failure to meet the same standards as others, we start to invoke a lot of racist tropes created by racists to demonize us and justify racism. They said we were primitive, and by exposing some of the backwardnesses in our culture(s)— which are clear as day from night- we run the risk of validating these racist views of the greatest modern philosophers, who held racist views. John Locke, Kant, Hume, Voltaire, Assagies, Nott, Gobineau, Hegel, and the lot. This is the background to this unfortunate discussion. ² Some of the observations give us a window into a historical problem.  They could not say these things if we were flying spaceships when they arrived or if we had conquered them.  And we’d better thicken our skin because this medicine is good for us. We will not develop if we ignore these cultural problems. TINA— There is no alternative. The praxis of our African global communities must stop being reactionary and pick the best of our traditions that facilitate our development, as defined by African agency. And in our maturity have the good judgment to reject those that hold us back.

Someone took Grandmaster flash and replaced them with Tupac, and then replaced Tupac With Rich Gang and NWA

Shallow Culture: Blackist, Mixish, The Help? Hair Types?

Every Generation must from relative obscurity find its path, furfil it or betray it— Fanon

READ Culture Beyond the Visual Spectrum and African Cultural Complex. This article has to be reductive to cover key points. ³

Black culture wastes wealth needed for education and food on superficial hairstyles and religion.

After billions of dollars of White investment in media, the stereotype has become the source of our culture.

Arab culture responds economically to Gaza crisis

Our African culture is not complete. How does African culture help you with AI? How does African culture help us on social media? If it is not developed then how would it magically appear to assist us in economics? (for example). Suppose you are from an ethnic group in Africa that has no culture that fosters intellectual growth. Or have new habits stopped the development of #BUYBLACK or the family? Because we forget what holds us back is culture!  The culture of non-support, the culture of devaluing things Africans make, and the culture of supporting White brand names. The culture of clicking like on garbage and not buying serious books. It is all CULTURE. What else do you think it is? As much as it can take us forward in many areas, it is the main reason we cannot do what others have done. Because like it or not, if your culture is a non-literate culture it is not going to push literacy. You need to get out of that aspect of your culture and adopt something new.

The place for news on black people in mainstream media is in the entertainment section

Rapper Trick Daddy said, “He is not of African descent, he is American.”

In our article “Culture beyond the visual spectrum,” we intersected a large area of culture that informed our social habits. What can be described as the cultural iceberg model, where there is what is seen from the surface and then the hidden megastructure supporting the visual aspect of culture.  Now for Black culture, we have all these positive things inverted. The picture of failure is supported by a lack of a culture of reading or engaging in family-building activities. And while these are generalizations, they are accurate generalizations. ⁴ When BDS deals with Zionism, it is not only boycotting, it is economic, but unlike our culture of boycotting whites to support whites the next week when our supplies run out, they boycott and empower their own brands. They have Inayah and Gaza Cola to wear and drink, respectively. If we are producing no brands, due to our lack of business culture, can you see how this makes us disadvantaged? So when H&M ran the advert below, the superficial ones amongst us got offended and made a lot of noise. But dissent via noise-making did what?

Did this black culture of protesting and noisemaking redirect business to Ocacia?

So all of this

TOPSHOT – Protesters jump on a street sign near a burning barricade during a demonstration against the death of George Floyd

Lead us to what exactly? What socioeconomic change has come out of this black cultural response to oppression? Only a marketing opportunity for big White capitalism to enhance its brand dominance in African American communities with empty non-economic promises. And still doing:

I can show you African culture, but then this is BLACK culture. And it is reacting to something placed in front of it. And there is a difference and a connection. Everything you see here can be explained through the lens of broken identity, pseudo-masculinity, anti-intellectualism, slavery, poverty, and oppression. Notice the ultimate message of this video is about “success” but success cheating the system. By outsmarting the “European” value system on education and traditional hard work. He is ignorant and still able to gain the same prizes as the White world they reject. Yet, the video reinforces the very same stereotypes he is glorifying. And whites love it because he is no direct economic threat since all of his wealth funds White capitalism. It is ironic.

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OUR GREATEST DESTINY IS TO BE WHITE

Meshell Ndegeocello

Our greatest destiny is to become white
But white is not pure
And hate is not pride

You sell your soul

Like you sell a piece of ass

Slave to the dead white leaders on paper

And welfare cases

Rapists and hoes

All reinforced by your TV show

Exotic and beautiful videos

A jail’s a sanctuary for the walking dead
It fucks with your head
When every black leader ends up dead

You see brown folks are the
Keepers of the earth
Unifiers of the soul and mind
Not these wannabe gaudy pimps and thugs
Wearing diamond watches
From African slave mines

What does the Black Cosby-type bourgeois have in common with the gangsta thug? They both crave White approval. They just are going about it in different ways. One ape the White man’s definition of success and enters into White acceptance that way (Thomas Sowell, Candace). The other rejects whiteness, failing to meet its high demanding standards, and becomes the very savage conjured up in the White man’s fantasies. Having satisfied the low expectations, he then goes woke and asks to be accepted by White society as he is. He competes, like the Black conservative, for the same exact targets (car, house, beauty), albeit through non-intellectual means. He is rejecting his inclusion in whiteness by seeking white cargo and white inclusion all the same. And in America, both are rewarded while being pitted against each other.

POVERTY CULTURE

“The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.”
― Aristotle

While not the focus of this article, race-based or ethnic culture is not the only factor we need to look at. Another source of “culture” is socio-economic culture. If for example, most people of African heritage are also from the lower class, we would see similar patterns. How do poor whites behave in South Africa and the Appalachian regions in America? What are their crime stats like, what are their broken home stats like? Having not experienced race-based discrimination, they are our control. If they also have low IQ scores, which are averaged out because they are classified as white, then clearly IQ is more socio-economic than biological. ⁵ What about poor Whites in Australia and the UK? This proves that some of these traits under discussion are not attached to ethnicity but to social class. So in the back of our minds, we must always ask are some of these problems not class issues? And indeed some are, but when we see them across the class line, across the educational line, then Nairobi, we have a “racial” problem.

It is hard to trust anything from the Apartheid era but we do have some stats that shed some shocking light on the disparity between Zulus, Whites, Coloreds⁶ and Indians. ⁷

BLACK GLOBAL CULTURE

So let us go to the culture. Real living culture in Africa beyond the memes and assumptions. They speak English, they wear designer labels, they take selfies all day long, they are all single mommas, they have identical entitlement mindsets, they are not married, they all wear wigs and burn their hair, and they all have a black culture, what is the actual difference? The reason you don’t get this is that you lack critical thinking and a true understanding of culture. So reality keeps showing us one thing, but our mental conditioning and stereotypes are louder.

But we get this persistent idea that culture in Africa is like the above photo. But you could not come to South Africa and go to a mall and know that you are not in America. Even when they open their mouths the middle class usually speak English. They walk the same, the think the same, they are part of the same global commercialized consumer black culture. It is not African one bit. None of that means they are not African. They are Africans inside of the black culture created by Western hegemony.

MODERN CLASH

This video by Sowell is only a reference; the content is at times, ridiculously false. I do not think Sowell understands oppression. He is comparing the mass slaughter of a united group of ethnic Chinese with a culture, history, and language to the mass slaughter of people who were chattel. Honestly. Why are you comparing disparate groups? Compare like and like. Compare African Americans to Native Americans or Native Australians.

You honestly cannot expect to compete in modernity with a culture that was last working in the 17th century. You will hear people like Thomas Sowell talk about culture. Now his intentions are very nefarious but he is correct. He doesn’t go into the specifics but I have sat down and looked at some of the cultures in Africa and had to be honest with myself, how does someone behaving and thinking like that get to here? And clearly that is a desired destination b/c you are on Wifi or 4G and enjoying it. What I found is that when we do “achieve” it is by discarding our “cultures”. You cannot code HTML or PHP in Zulu— you have to leave it behind. You cannot run a banking system on anything the Hadza left behind. You just cannot be competitive in the fashion world with the culture of the Ewe. What others have been doing is modifying their cultures for 100s of years. or abandoning them altogether and adopting someone else’s, OR mixing their culture with better ways of doing things. Right now most problems in modernity cannot have African solutions if African culture has not engaged with modernity to have solutions.

But here is the irony, angry “black” folks want to be owners of things they refused to develop. How then can you complain about education in South Africa when, prior to the Europeans, you had none? I understand racists use these talking points but they are very real arguments. You protest something, but what alternatives have your cultures created? You cannot interface with modernity and enjoy all the mod-cons and then also bemoan English over Zulu and Xhosa.

If you cannot point to one product, including the electricity and the fridge that your culture created where does it leave you? After 200,000 years on Earth, ahead of everyone else, what do we have to show for it? Memes and name-calling? I bet pointing this out makes me a white man, but then the solution would be to counter it. Where Japan was on July 8, 1853, when  Matthew Perry (USA) led his four ships into the harbor at Tokyo Bay, seeking to re-establish for the first time in over 200 years regular trade is not where Japanese culture is today,⁸ and neither is India. Yet unlike India, a country, we cannot make anything of our own anyone wants.

If we look at education in South Africa, for example, with a pass rate of 30% and some of the lowest scores in science and maths, what kind of technological innovations can come out of South Africa to challenge China and Japan? See our article on Education. That is a cultural problem.⁹ So the question how can a problem solve a problem? How can a social worker who is partaking in the very same culture that she is trying to fix, bring solutions? The social workers of South Africa are the same as the problem people they are assigned to fix. The same dragging their feet, tongue outside their mouth, Aiboo culture. Education or no education, the same culture. And every exception that one finds in the new generation of progressive South Africans is when they step away from their “African” culture. So much so that success could almost be measured by distance from “black” culture. If it is hard to hear, trust me, It is harder to see. It is pervasive and destructive at every level. The Youth are all by the shop smoking drugs, blaming apartheid for their poor work ethic. Education is a means to acquire a new BMW, not advance oneself.

The “educators” of South Africa, have more investment in Chinese hair than in education.

The most popular parent-school dispute is not over education in South Africa, but the battle of the hairstyles. Parents are complaining that the school does not want kids coming to school with weaves and wigs.

GHETTO CULTURE

There is a dark side to every cultural group. Yet no one can redirect me to the Jewish thug culture or gang culture in any entertainment format. Without the agency of the dominant race-class or some dominant force to market it, it would be a subculture not affect African Americans negatively. Someone took Grandmaster Flash and replaced them with Tupac, and then replaced Tupac with Rich Gang and NWA.

[Verse 1: Young Thug]
Million five on the Visa card (Woo)
Hundred bands stacked, look like some fuckin’ Titans (Football player)
Nigga servin’ great white like I’m feedin’ sharks (Sheesh)
I won’t do nothin’ with the bitch, she can’t even get me hard (Woo)
Somethin’ wrong with the pussy (What?)
Even though I ain’t gon’ hit it, I’ma still make sure that she douche it (‘Cause what?)
Me and my woadie don’t get caught up like that, no way (No way)
We ain’t got time to go see doctors, J, hey (Woo)
Who said money? (Money, nigga)
Hop up out my bed, pull up on the bitches, I’m yawnin’ (And why?)
Hey, think this a show, bitch, I’m performin’
I do this shit for my daughters and all my sons, bitch (Woo)
I’m gonna run up them bands up, take care of their funds, bitch (Are you in?)
I got a moms, bitch (What?), she got a moms, bitch (She do)
I got sisters and brothers to feed (Woo)
I ain’t goin’ out like no idiot, I’m an OG

My grandmother was a servant of whites; she and my grandpa also had a reaction to a racist society. And their reaction as our entire Diaspora group was a deeper investment in education. She did not take her savings and buy hair extensions; she bought books so that my uncles would grow up to be bankers, accountants, doctors, and my mom would get a Master’s in psychology and finally work at the UN. That is a reaction to a racist society, American or other. My parents inturn, being middle class, carried on that tradition so I could go to university. I grew up with books and library cards; that is how we escaped racism.

British Thug culture, rejected as representative as what it means to be British

Jasmine dons a Ghetto persona

There is no cultural group that doesn’t have a ghetto class. For all that is said about Jews, you can do as I did, and visit the lower-class slums in Israel and see their “Ghetto Class”. All Ethiopian totally disconnected from their Ethiopian identity. You can also do as I have done and visit Ghetto Whites in the UK. Nobody does ghetto like poor Whites in the UK and South Africa. So Ghetto is not a “black” thing. Just visit some of those Appalachian communities in the USA. Proper Hick culture. All were rejected by their mainstream cultures.

But what is different is that no cultural group takes its ghetto class and makes it the authentic culture of the group! When the British represent British culture, they pick the best of what it means to be British, all polished in a Savile Row suit and a pipe. When Jews present Jewish culture to the world, it is Einstein and Oppenhimier.
But it was not always so. Return to the era of Booker T, Du Bois, and Malcolm X, name one of them who behaved ghetto? You can go and listen to Black Panthers speaking and ask where is the ghetto! Now we’ve got Jasmine Crocket and a bunch of them coming out. Since when has the African American intellectual class been represented by ghetto? I promise you it was in the last 20 years! And someone not African has selected for it. The entire Hotept Brother Umar Johnson is a mirror of this selection process, where they are running on a ghetto version of Afrocentrism; scholarship of memes, no books required.

From Ali Mazrui and Hilary Beckles to Umar Johnson

It was engineered. So much so that today me loving Jazz and speak out against this thug life culture, I am the one who is called self-hating and Anti-Black! Can you dig it? While wearing a Dashiki and a natural Afro.

But let us take a look at the real Tupac Shakur, it was all an act! A role being played.

When we were making 500 Years Later, I suspected all eyes were on the talented young team we had. First, they tempted them with vanity (you can have your own project and do your own thing), then once they got them away from us, the next project was to coerce them to do LGBTQ+ projects or Gangsta. All of a sudden a kid I knew growing up in Upper class society, going to the best of the best schools, was now writing about his Thug Life. I not only saw that process, I also understood how it was done and by whom.

Most of our people only know the circus, the acts, the performances, very few have ever been backstage and seen the props and the strings and the mechanism that create the illusions that they digest as reality. They are shown the surface of the iceberg and only interact with that.

Nicki Minaj addresses UN.

Whites are 100% comfortable with this image of a Black Rude Ghetto woman impregnated by two white males.

TERMINOLOGY

New Ghetto Scholars for Geopolitics

Some take issue with the term “black” culture. There is no such thing as black culture is true. But since blackness is defined by our oppressors, the culture of those they label as black is naturally defined by them also— that makes sense, and you cannot accept one without embracing the other. I would be one of them because cultures have language, art, music etc. Western Classical music is tied to European culture, not some White culture. People speak of Japanese culture and African culture. Some people challenge the grouping by citing “everyone is unique, and there is no ethnic culture.”  Then there would be no Arab culture, no Japanese culture, on account of micro-diversity. Regardless of if based on media or not, there is a tangible and intangible culture of different ethnic groups. I would put my foot down at the notion of racial culture since Ethiopia is not Barbados by any stretch of the imagination. Somalia is not South Africa.

But Black culture is always going to be negative because it was constructed by whites and reinforced by “blacks” lacking agency. I never seen anything following the term black culture that I want to identify with. I cannot stand it when I see it on TV. I don’t want my kids near it. Not in UK, not in America and certainly not in South Africa. I think the term black + culture is fitting to describe what holds us black. The more of it we have, the less development we see. So it is within that framework we can discuss this “black culture”.

And we must take this time out to remember White ghetto culture is not much different and I could be talking about a council estate in London or a poor white township in South Africa. But no one uses that to represent an entire culture of a people. Nor should we reference their lower-class culture as a defense, because for every Japanese freak or White Skin head they at least have Sony and Bosch as cultural properties.

A certain way of talking, ignorant, using the N-word, walking, rolling your eyes, being loud, obnoxious, lazy, rude, sold to us in films and TV shows. Almost like saying guys, this is the culture that we prepared for you come and get some. We created racial blackness and the culture that works with it. BOTH keep you outside of power, and cultural and economic development.

Now Thomas Sowell is an inauthentic pundit; he speaks outside of his expertise and is co-opted by White supremacy to be the black voice saying what would be racist if said by a White person. But that does not mean everything he says is wrong, even if his intentions are nefarious.  So he is the bat to beat Blacks with because he is black. There is a new generation of people like this selling out for clicks. They, unlike Sowell, have no credentials to even put on the table. They might be correctly critical of so-called Black culture but they are selling out their own to fit into White supremacy. That is why when you find them critical of black culture (rightly so) you have to follow them further along to see if they are sincere or part of a package. That is why when you find them critical of black culture (rightly so) you have to follow them further along to see if they are sincere or part of a GOP racist package. Aka the wolf in sheep’s clothing.  Aka the Candace Owens ¹¹

But there is no point getting into that for this post because we ALL know what they mean by black culture, which is really ghetto or the culture found with “lower-class African Americans. Does it exist? Hell Yes. If it didn’t exist in 188,4 it does now. And it had A LOT Of help from Whites in creating it.

Which is a story in and of itself. Funny how when you keep showing people stereotypes on TV they eventually become those stereotypes.

So, wording aside, black culture is everything white culture is not, deliberately so. Black culture is not African culture; it is a reaction to White culture’s low expectations of it. It is the culture created by the process of enslavement. African culture is the natural organic cultural originated from 200,000 years of living in Africa.

SOUTH AFRICA

It is telling how a totally different population of Africans has so much negative in common with the African Diaspora. Despite having their own African language. How did these cultures go from this:

to

This lady has two kids, two different fathers yet at 40 years old never raised one ¹²

We all know the history of Apartheid South Africa and how that had an impact on the culture of the place. But prior to the arrival of the Europeans, the culture of the Ngoni people was never going to produce spaceships and microchips. It was never going to become a seafaring trade post like Cairo, or New York. The material culture was never going to compete with Araia or China. Yet prior to the European that culture found solutions like rites of passage which enshrined responsibility in youth. They had rituals to protect against promiscuity and debauchery. But what happened? The answer is the exact same thing that happened when Hip Hop went from the modern Griot to a bastion of vile violence and immorality. The African church which shunned materialism now in South Africa and Ghana is a bastion of greed, corruption, and excess. The very same people who had the Umhalanga (Virginity ceremony) are now the ones with 4 kids all over creation from 4 useless men who rather wear G-Star jeans than wear a condom and pay for their child’s upkeep.  And this is what the women select in a breeding partner—That is the culture. They will lament “Oh, I didn’t know, it was a mistake, I was only 16” but the truth is it is their culture; learned behavior from their family and peer groups. There are barely any father figures around, so how can these women even create strong families when they have never seen them? They have a culture of getting pregnant, dropping the child with the Gogo¹³ collecting the social grant, and returning to the breeding pool in the city where they live to excess on a small salary until they find the next male to repeat the cycle with. The sameness across a cultural group is SHOCKING, because we are trained in nuance. But it is what it is. The exact same cultural mindset shared by millions of people. To the point where I had to ask where do they all learn to talk the same way and behave in the same and share the same responses to social challenges?  Most of them are into selfie culture and putting photos of kids they do not support on their profiles.

A trip to Facebook showcases how immoral the culture of the born-free generation is. But on Sunday they are in church. So what went wrong? This is not how they were in 1754, so what happened on a cultural level to create and exacerbate these behaviors?

This is what a woman wrote, Boasting about sleeping around

Black culture in South Africa is a massive problem. We have covered it in other articles. A sense of entitlement, of loose morals. And we must remind people every culture has these issues; slack women, cheating, whatever. But who is the one with the stats? So those stats mean it is not a fringe outlier issue, it is part and parcel of the “black” culture. I am sure whites and Indians have kids from many partners and avoid marriage, but it is not reflected as a cultural trend in the stats. Where over 80% of Africans have these problems and they are not found within other ethnic groups. groups. So there is no point saying “Whites also…” But this post is not about stats, because it would be impossible to discuss culture and be burdened with proving every single point with stats.

So-called coloreds and Blacks make up the majority.

So African culture is also problematic because what even I used to do is package all the cool fun stuff into a box called African culture leave off all the bad destructive stuff, and label it as “what Whites did to Africa”. But we know it is not true. In every community in Africa, like everywhere else on Earth, you will find traits that stop development. In Africa, we have way more than the guys in Asia. You only need to live in The Gambia and you see it, you spend 2 months in South Africa amongst the Zulu it is screaming at you. From the lobola set up in 2024 to the culture of ‘damages,” to the lack of work ethic, none creates a competitive African in a globalized world.

in the Caribbean, there has been an ongoing debate about “Is this our culture”, with sexual displays on the streets of Kaddoment all in the name of “our culture”. What kind of culture is that? Because it has gone from its African roots to something dominated by grinding in public like wild animals and alcohol. The same way African American music of resistance aka hip hop has gone from “The Message” and Afrika Bambaataa to Biggie rapping about having a-sex with African American kids and throwing them off bridges.

That’ll be our little secret, (shhh)
See me, B that is, I that is, G whiz
Motherfuckers still in my biz (c’mon)
Fuck ’em in the ass, throw ’em over the bridge (aaah)
That’s how it is, my shit is laid out (laid out)
Fuck that beef shit, that shit is played out (played out)
Y’all got to go, all I make is one phone call
All y’all dissapear by tomorrow (tomorrow)
All your guns is borrowed, I don’t feel sorrow (no sorrow)
Actually, your man passed the gat to me, now check this (talk to em)

Every other word is nigga and every word in between celebrates Gucci, or some White materialistic brand-name. And we wonder where this brand-name culture became part of black culture. So much so that G-Star in South Africa has armed guards surrounding it because they will be robeded more than a grocery store by starving Black youth looking for status? What is the name of this culture?

So with a new understanding of culture and religion, we had to go back to our earlier work and then all kinds of flaws started to emerge. The work had to be rebuilt and then we recognized new solutions. The problem of “culture” became more obvious. And the solutions are radically different. We are right back when Europe clashed with Africa and asking are some cultural traits were compatible with modernity.

Ethiopian cuisine lends itself more to globalization than native South African dishes. Why? Why isn’t food from Angola seen all around the world? Why is Indian and Asian food so dominant? Do they have cultural advantages?

Let us look into it: Ethiopian culture places an aesthetic value on their food. Zulu culture doesn’t give a toss about presentation, food is only for survival. While in every dominant food culture— from Japan to India to Ethiopia to France they do. Who has the cultural advantage when food requires an aesthetic aspect?

Tongue extended outside the mouth is part of global Black culture

But before we get to modernity, do we want to be part of this modernity because there is an impasse? Not all of our cultures are capable of creating a New modern world of smartphones, universities, satellites, chipsets, HTML, etc. Now what? There is NO WAY a culture of anti-intellectualism will invent geostationary navigation if that thing is desirable in the first place. I say it is, so now what does it say about the culture that stops us from creating it? Now we have to issue a value judgment about the written word vs oral tradition. Oral tradition, as a culture, cannot build the modern world. Oral culture cannot code HTML, so without ever getting to Africa vs something else, we know no oral culture can create the world of computers. And this is just one example.

So how do we have this discussion without a value judgment or applying the racism used to justify our oppression? Racist thoughts made it clear.

Tongue outside the mouth

Hegel wrote that Africans are a ‘race of children that remain immersed in a state of naiveté’. He further wrote that Indigenous peoples lived in ‘a condition of savagery and unfreedom’. And in The Philosophy of Right (1821)

Did he see something to come to this conclusion? Yes. He saw his culture as going forward,

Transmission to the next generation as a culture

producing the Age of Enlightenment and he saw the non-White cultures as stagnating for eternity. Now he attributes this to their innate nature, a victim of their biology. Like all these racists, they are racists not only for their statements but also for their belief that change is impossible for some groups. But Europeans were in a state of stagnation also. The sensitive question is still with us. If modernity is valuable, are our cultures capable of assisting us (on their own) with modern advancements? (medicines, universities, technology, cars, bikes, etc)? Now, what happens when they do not assist us? Does that make them backward? Or should we be woke and ignore the problem and just call the discourse racist?

AFRICAN POLITY CULTURE

Some political systems are better able to defend their sovereignty. Some political-religious setups are objectively better at creating vast empires

With the ethnic tribal identity, it is impossible to conquer and sustain such a vast empire. But we have to ask the question, is this desirable? I think this one goes beyond like it vs do not like it. It is how the world works. These polities ultimately conquer those who fail to form nations and caliphates. Just like the guy who invents the gun probably will eventually beat you in a war. We can take issue with nationalism, which is only 300 years old, but without it you don’t stand a chance.

So the identities that can create large caliphates or empires will win out. The Serer vs the Islamic identity means Islam wins. Serer requires an ethnoreligious membership, Islam requires only a religious membership and that means it is open to all.
The Jews today have solidified their identity and in some way shape or form have Israel as their center. Jews globally have an opinion— either way on what they want Israel to be. Jewish identity beats African identity sense most of us do not have any centralized values. So how can we use identity to create a block to serve our interests? Where in our diverse culture can we find common ground? We cannot.

There are cultures in Africa that have never promoted scholarship or critical thinking, how can they compete? The only way Native South Africans are competitive is by some degree of cultural abandonment and being absorbed into Western culture. There is no path to modernity without doing so. You cannot go to Zululand to learn how to fly a plane— You need English and Western institutions. In short, that means, unfortunately, that your culture on its own cannot assist you in modernity. Because everything that represents you culturally (language, etc) is at natural odds with your goals in modernity. And I am making it very simple to illustrate a point. Adapting means modifying or neutralizing our culture.

The culture of non-support which is a culture, means we cannot do what Arabs or Jews can do. At the Palestinian rally what you never thought of is who is making those Palestinian flags, who is printing the banners, and who owns Gaza Cola? There is resistance, ours is not. Because we lack a culture of supporting our own businesses and creating our own media.

Again this is a simplification to illustrate the role of culture in development.

We had a strong culture of church-going which was used to organize us economically and politically around certain causes. But that is useless today. Or was made useless?

What within our cultures can we bring forth to help our development? That is how I am looking at this question. What in our cultures is stopping us from development? What cultural attitudes and behaviors stop us from creating the modern technological world?

THE GAP COULD NOT BE BRIDGED

While Africa evolved its own wonderful solutions to surviving Africa at some point the world went industrial and the Africans got left out. But so did India and so did Asia. Think of Japan or Indonesia in the 18th century not significantly more advanced than the kingdom of Benin.

African Iron smelting

I read somewhere that Angola had a GBP greater than Singapore.¹⁴. When and why did Angola fall behind? In part, it was because the traditional culture of Angola could not compete. It failed to integrate, like the Japanese, and create cultural capital at the rate of the Japanese. The Japanese had a more technologically curious culture and wanted to make their own guns, like Ethiopia. Angola didn’t have that culture. The gap grew. While Ethiopia and Japan had a script, Angola didn’t. Having to integrate from scratch the Latin alphabet. 100,000 years of illiteracy adding on literacy in the blink of an eye.

In general African traditional systems did not catch up. At the time of the slave trade development dropped off sharply due to the mono economy in captives, dependent on Europe exclusively for final goods. All the skills left at the bottom of a slave ship and were deposited in the New World to feed Western growth at the expense of African development. ¹⁵ Trade deficit became standard praxis. Nothing else was going down. While Japan could eventually keep up and compete, Africa as a whole didn’t. Exceptions like Egypt, Ethiopia, and Somalia did exist which had longer traditions of integration with the broader world.

So when Italy decided to mess with Ethiopia they were in a far more advanced state than South Africa. While Ngoni culture produced religious models suitable for their clime and their stage of development, Ethiopia could amass greater resources from centuries of centralizing Christianity which outpaced any traditional African religious polity. Same with Islam.

CONCLUSION

So yes it is a culture that connects all of these behaviors. The culture that informs how you respond to Black ownership, and African products, is a culture. What some may have called a subculture (from hip hop) has now oozed its way into the actual culture of a people and it has spread way beyond America to infect Africa and even Ethiopians in Israel. Culture is considered a central concept in anthropology, encompassing the range of phenomena that are transmitted through social learning in human societies. It excludes anything innate and focuses on aspects of expressive forms like art, music, dance, ritual, religion, and technologies like tool usage, cooking, shelter, attitudes, prejudices,  work ethics, morals, taboos, and clothing. The concept of material culture covers the physical expressions of culture, such as technology, architecture, and art, whereas the immaterial aspects of culture such as principles of social organization.

Jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie performs at the Boston Globe Jazz and Blues Festival on Jan. 15, 1966.

The modern term “culture” is based on a term used by the ancient Roman orator Cicero in his Tusculanae Disputationes, where he wrote of a cultivation of the soul or “cultura animi.” In its classical or legacy usage it was in reference to the development of a philosophical soul, understood teleologically as the highest possible ideal for human development. We all know where a value judgment gets us. But that does not invalidate a value judgment. This is why we discuss Nia. What is the purpose of the discussion? I believe humans have a potential. And like it or not we ALL value pyramids over mud houses. There is no point playing WOKE, because the argument around social media is about who built the pyramids, not who built the mud houses.

Culture represents all the ways in which human beings overcome their original barbarism, and through artifice, become fully human.— Samuel Pufendorf

Let this be your Culture

Black Culture as a negative discourse is real. I must distinguish it from African American culture.  Despite its historicity in racists though it is alive in the real world and presents a serious challenge to be overcome. Some have coped with it by total rejection of everything “black” or African. So they, with disposable income, enroll their children in White schools of excellence and start ballet and Chopin piano lessons.  Nothing is wrong, on its own, with this praxis but when the motivation is self-hatred it is a problem.  Yes, it is a challenge and it needs a discussion. I find it challenging also. In all honesty, I look at how certain cultures and mannerisms are associated with failure and I can fully understand why nobody wants some groups as neighbors. If I am feeling this as a real lived experience then it is real. Should I reject being intellectual and celebrate “black culture” or should I clean it up and make the N-word a badge to be proud of? Because that is exactly what Black culture does. Its counter to the Eurocentric imposition is not to learn Swahili or wear African clothes, it is to fall into the very trap set for it. To validate the very stereotypes placed on it.

When we were making 500 Years Later we were befriended by some wonderful folks and stayed in a village in The Gambia. When night fell there was no electricity to guide us. They brought candles and stuck them, insecurity, to the table using wax. Being from a different culture I did not want to form a value judgment but I felt disappointed. I asked myself how many centuries were they doing this? And after all of this time, they had not invented a mechanism called a candle holder? This is in 2003. What would racist Europeans think of cultures that failed to produce solutions to common problems? But the truth is the Mande people had solutions to these problems produced by their cultural genius. Unfortunately, when Europeans came they replaced their African solutions with European and then Chinese ones making them dependent. It turns out that in the absence of Chinese candle holders, the Gambian’s genius could no longer solve their problems.

We do have cultural solutions to many of our problems. We have marriage, we have the council of elders for resolving family disputes. The Eurocentric social workers might have black skin but their solutions are lily-white and at odds with our African requirements. This generation, like those before, must take what works, modify what can be modified, and discard what holds us back. To do this requires knowledge of ourselves because we might throw out our solutions thinking they are not European enough.

END NOTES

1. Steve Martin, 500 Years Later[↩]
2. Philosophy’s systemic racism[↩]
3. Complex topics are challenging; we have to deal with factors such as reliability. If we make it short, someone will say “Oh but you missed,” or “You generalized Zulu people. If we make it exhaustive, no one reads it. If you want to find a problem, you will. If you want to read sincere intentions, you will find that also.[↩]
4. In South Africa, we did a one-week study in 2012  of family picnics in a popular location and noticed the difference between Indian Muslims, Whites, and Zulus in their usage of the space as families. The Muslim groups enjoying the area were families made up of all generations. Never were the husbands missing. The whites formed smaller groups but were always family. In the week of observation, not one single family unit of Zulu used the areas. All the groups were either church or work groups. While it does happen, it is very rare to see male participation in family activities.[↩]
5. They are just as White as another person, so if their IQ is low then slavery and race are not contributing factors—only economic status is[↩]
6. See article[↩]
7. Intelligence test results of poor white, native (Zulu), by ML Fick · 1929 · Cited by 68[↩]
8. Japan Surges Ahead of 2010[↩]
9. Educational crisis low priority; how did they get there 30 years after Apartheid? See the discussion[↩]
10. we cannot be equal just be saying so, we must be equal in reality[↩]
11. although she has be born again on some issues, and I believe some of her transformation is sincere.[↩]
12. But is she an outlier, in a family of 11, only two are married, all of them have kids all over creation from multiply men. Where did they learn this? From their mother who has 11 kids with 5 different men. It is a culture by all definitions of the word culture. Her son is now doing it. What else does he know?[↩]
13. grandmother[↩]
14. Don’t quote me as I forgot the details but you got the point[↩]
15. Water Rodney and Hilary Beckles[↩]