This essay says that white Americans appear to have a sadistic need to degrade black Americans, indeed all human beings; it says that this penchant for humiliating folk in the long run leads those degraded to realize that they have worth that no human being can take away from them. Human worth is inherent and is not given by other people or by the state. When those degraded realize their existential worth and develop no regard for their degraders they may work with external forces to bring down their degraders empires.

White Americans As Tragic Heroes

By Ozodi Thomas Osuji

If an African looks at Americans empirical behavior and left it at that he could conclude that Americans are evil.  He could believe that their actions are so unspeakable that the only thing left is to consign them to hell (if it exists).

The founder of Christianity taught his followers to love one another but white American Christians do not exhibit love for black Americans. In fact, they seem to thrive in humiliating black Americans. (Someone may point out that I am over generalizing, and remind me that there are decent white Americans. I am aware of that reality but the fact remains that when the average white American relates to black folks it is as if Satan, whatever that is, has taken over his mind and he is no longer rational and behaves like the devil. To make my point I will talk as if most white Americans fit my characterization of them; you can write about the exception to the rule.)

A little over a year ago I was at a court hearing; I had been invited to testify at a child custody hearing. Then in came prison wardens with men in black prison jumper suits, their legs chained together and their hands chained; they walked in a shuffling manner.  What was their crime? Many of them had not paid child support or failed to do what their judges told them to do, such as seek jobs so as to be able to pay child support hence were arrested and jailed.  Not paying child support warrants putting folks in jail and marching them into a court room like they were murderers?

And after such humiliating treatment you honestly expect them to pay child support? You humiliate a man and then expect him to do what you humiliated him for not doing? Common sense would suggest that if a man is so terribly treated that his pride would kick in and he would simply refuse to pay child support and the result is a bunch of children growing up poor (to become criminals, and, apparently, to make sure that the “Court-Prison Industrial Complex” have continued jobs).

The prison guards I saw marching prisoners to court, apparently, enjoyed humiliating their fellow human beings; they are sadists and derive devilish pleasure from disgracing people.  They look for every opportunity to degrade people.

(I am not advocating not holding people responsible for their responsibilities; I am not opposed to prisons; what I am opposed to is inhumane treatment of people; I would not chain adult men and march them through the public because they are owing someone a few dollars. If the apparent sadistic judge I saw in that court room is so invested in children and wants to make sure that they are well taken care of why not work to have the cold hearted Republican Party that rails against contraceptives and abortions but when children are born cannot extend state help to their poor parents to help raise them; they want to gut all the aid that the other party has worked so hard to be available to children. Indeed, if they could they would privatize all schooling and have children pay for them and as would be predicted the majority of the children in the land would not be educated; if these monsters are so interested in the welfare of children there are a few things they could be doing rather than sending their poor fathers to jail. The hypocrisy of the Republican Party makes me want to vomit; they claim to be the party of families but would not do anything to help distressed families. And this does not necessarily make me support the Democratic Party; it appears as if liberals have not seen any morally depraved behaviors that they would not support. I am not a moral relativist; there are good and bad behaviors, period.)

Humiliating prisoners is the tip of the iceberg. Now, think of what white police men do to black men.  If you are a young black man and a white police man stops you and asks for your driver’s license you had better have it in order (and have no outstanding warrants issued against you). If not he is going to have his sadistic pleasure gratified by marching you out of your car, asking you to lay down on the ground or against the car, handcuffing you and bundling you to his police car’s backseat and driving you to the county jail where his fellow sadists would proceed to humiliate you some more.

These people literally enjoy degrading people. They have done it to Indians, whose lands they stole, to Africans whose labor they stole and used to develop the land. They steal from you and then degrade you and add insult to your injury by saying that they are superior to you.

Superior, indeed; advanced human beings do not degrade other human beings; they nurture them and enable them to develop positive self-esteems.  If you have any kind of insight into the human condition you would recognize that human beings are in an untoward condition: they are born, grow up, suffer diseases and pain and then must die and become foods for worms.  Their dreadful, absurd fate makes them feel as if they are nothing; you, therefore, do your best to enable them develop positive self-regard despite their existential lot. But here you see white Americans, a people who call themselves civilized, insulting their fellow human beings, adding to their already existing feeling of low self-worth!

If you observe the manner white Americans treat black Americans you must conclude that they seem to deliberately want to do bad things to black folks. Consider their schools. In the white suburbs are well funded good schools. In the inner city where they segregate black folks to live at the schools are generally poorly funded. More importantly, the schools are saddled with the worst teachers in town. Black kids go to these schools and actually reach age eighteen and are unable to read or write!

Instead of providing black youth with first rate education they are set up to drop out of school and gravitate to petty crimes. They are then quickly arrested and given stiff jail or prison terms.  And once a young fella experiences jail he becomes used to it (he is socialized by the long term jail inhabitants into prison culture); his subsequent life style is characterized by going in and out of jails.

As we speak, one out of every four black youth is either in jail/prison or supervised by parole and probation officers. Black folk constitute about ten percent of the American population but constitute over fifty percent of the over two million Americans in jails and prisons.  America has more of her people in jails and prisons than any other country in the world!  As they say, America is the fairest and freest country in the world, indeed!

Black kids get arrested for possessing crack cocaine and given long prison sentences; white folks get arrested for possession of cocaine and may not even be sent to jails, perhaps they are given community service work to perform. This is justice American style!

(Provide drug users with drug treatment; drugs such as alcohol, cigarettes, cocaine, heroin, LSD, even prescription drugs such as Xanax or painkillers are addictive; addiction is a disease that needs to be treated, not jailed for.)

It costs more to keep black youths in jails and prisons than to train them in college and help them find jobs.

In prison these imprisoned black youth call themselves political prisoners, not criminals. These are folks being trained to hate America and when there is an external push they will push from the inside and destroy what they call white America’s criminal empire.

If you limited your observation of white Americans only to their empirical behaviors you would conclude that they are worse than predatory animals and, as such, ought to be shot and left to hyenas to eat.  But something more than their apparent sadism is going on here.

The crazy gods are using white Americans to humiliate human beings so that human beings would reach a level of development where they learn that no human being can humiliate them. After white America is through with you, you learn that they are less than apes and do not feel good or bad from their behaviors; you learn that they cannot degrade you; how can monkeys humiliate human beings? They cannot.

The effect of white Americans sadistic behaviors is to teach black folks that they cannot be degraded, that they have existential worth that no human being can take away from them. In fact, the more these Neanderthals degrade black folks the more black folks learn of their ultimate worth.

I personally do not hate white Americans; however, I see them as children to be pitied and helped to grow up. To be grown up and become fully human is to love all people hence I strive after making white Americans to become loving persons. I cannot afford to be hateful towards white folk; for one thing I need them; they have scientific and technical skills that black folk need (until black folk acquire those skills and develop a culture that reinforces them).

One must treat those who have what one needs gently, at least until one gets what one needs and then one treats them as they deserve to be treated. Any human being who degrades other human beings is despicable and deserves to be treated with contempt.

(I have fear of being degraded; perhaps this is because of how I was raised; perhaps it may be because of my weak biological constitution that made my adaptation to our tough physical-social environment difficult. Whatever is its cause all I know is that I am very sensitive to respect; I want to be respected and I respect all human beings; I cannot tolerate seeing a human being treated with disrespect; I could kill you if I see you disrespecting another human being.)

White American racists probably fancy that by degrading black folks (via enslaving them, discriminating against them etc.) that they are making themselves seem like a superior people. Nothing could be further from the truth than that. The moment you are perceived to have discriminated against someone that someone would not respect you. If you have power, he may, out of desire for self-preservation, desist from attacking you but his desire is to attack you and if possible to destroy you. That is correct; what white racism elicits in black people is a desire to attack them and do away with them; it does not generate respect for white folks.

So, if racists are angling for respect and perception of them as superior folks they are terribly misguided; their racist acts make them the most contemptible persons on earth. In fact, many black folks get to a point where they see white folks as not human beings, as Neanderthals may be. Bobby E. Wright (1985), The Psychopathic Racial Personality. New York: Third World Press speculated that white folks are born psychopaths; he attributed it to the caves they lived in during the ice ages; as he saw it, living in ice made them become emotionally cold and psychopathic.

For our present purposes, the salient point is that white Americans tendency to humiliate, degrade, disgrace and belittle black folks actually works to make black folks attain a stage of psychological development whereby they realize that white folks do not have the power to degrade them; they learn that they have existential worth that is not given to them by men, certainly not by white men.  Racism transforms black folk into a people who understand that human worth is not dependent on what human beings say or do to one but on their inherent worth as part of this universe. Take away one atom from the universe and the universe collapses; every person is necessary for the existence of the universe; every person is therefore very important; no one is more important than other persons.

I am supposing that white folks had intended to humiliate black folks and make them accept that humiliation so as to be able to exploit their labor. If my supposition is correct, they have succeeded in producing the opposite of their intentions. This is perhaps what is meant by the law of unintended consequences: you maltreat folks to make them develop low self-esteem but they develop contempt for you and learn that they have esteem that no human being can take away from them.

White Americans negate the common sense that tells all of us that we want to be loved and respected and therefore should do unto others as we want them to do to us, love and respect them. Instead of loving and respecting black folk, as their supposed lord and Savior, Jesus Christ asked them to do, they hate and humiliate black folk at every opportunity they get. In their warped minds they think that they are succeeding in transforming black folk into their perpetual slaves who would live to serve them. But what they have done is strengthen black folk’s self-respect.

DISCUSSION

In Greek tragedy the tragic hero has character weaknesses that all those around him can see but he cannot see and even if he sees them he does not change them. The tragic hero possesses character foibles that make him do what he does; those character flaws compel him to rise to top. But the same character foibles guarantee his eventual fall from the great height he had reached.

As it were, the gods condemn the tragic hero to keep doing the same thing he does that hurts other persons, behavior that he could change and receive different outcomes but for some reasons he appears incapable of changing.

White America insults black folks; they know that human beings are proud and that they do not like to be insulted. When insulted human beings feel their vanity injured; they experience narcissistic rage and seek ways to assuage their hurt pride.  They attack those who insulted them or wait until they have the capacity to do so. But despite this fact white Americans keep insulting black folks; they do so as if they deliberately want to arouse black folk’s anger.

Anger is generally  caused when ones goal is frustrated; when one does not get what one wants one feels disappointed and angry; people desire respect so if you do not give them respect you frustrate them hence make them angry; angry persons attack whatever obstacle frustrates their goal attainment, in this case those who do not respect them.

As it were, crazy gods have blinded white Americans to seeing the negative effects of what they are doing to black folks until they experience the full effect of black folks' angry attacks on them.

Consider pride as a character strength and weakness. Pride can make the individual to work very hard, give him the ambition to climb social pyramids and reach the top. But by its nature the proud person does not love people for pride thinks only of what is good for the proud person. Thus, whereas the proud, narcissistic character bulldozes his way to the top, using people for his own good, not caring about their good, he inevitably generates enmity for him in people. By and by those he used and discarded like scrap iron would do things to bring him down.  Thus, the tragic hero reaches the apogee of his ambitions but is guaranteed to fall by the same character that made him reach the top.

America is like a tragic hero. She does things that enable her reach the zenith of contemporary civilization. But some of those things alienate many people and those people by and by would work to bring her down.

What goes up must come down, they say. Empires come and empires go; soldier comes and soldier goes; America is like other empires based on oppression of humanity and would experience their fate. The idea of American exceptionalism is a delusion. Like other empires based on oppression of people America, too, will have a sun set, a decline her tragic aspects make sure would happen.

You cannot  keep degrading people, insulting them, not giving them jobs, jail them for trivial issues (such as possessing crack cocaine whereas what they need is drug treatment) and expect them to like you.  If, in fact, you expect them to like you then you are mad.  The chicken always comes home to roost.

Possessing tremendous military power does not guarantee everlasting survival for evil empires; it certainly did not prevent the fall of Rome when rag-tagged barbarian forces (Germans) unleashed their determined fury on her. America’s awesome nuclear weapons would not scare those who do not mind dying fighting for their freedom and thus those weapons would not save America when those she oppressed challenge her very existence.

Only love and respect for all people could guarantee America’s long term survival.

Those America in her arrogant rise to power is degrading will probably have the last laugh.  Like other oppressive empires before her, the American empire will be inherited by those she oppressed. This is the verdict of history.

CONCLUSION

This essay says that white Americans appear to have a sadistic need to degrade black Americans, indeed all human beings; it says that this penchant for humiliating folk in the long run leads those degraded to realize that they have worth that no human being can take away from them. Human worth is inherent and is not given by other people or by the state. When those degraded realize their existential worth and develop no regard for their degraders they may work with external forces to bring down their degraders empires.

Human beings are yet to learn that only love and respect for all human beings is the goal of civilization, not racism and degradation of human beings.

If racism is not stopped clearly America will have a racial war. If this happens, history teaches us that it is always oppressed people who defeat their oppressors.  For example, the Plebeians that Patrician Romans maltreated joined forces with the enemies of Rome and pulled her down.

By and by America’s external enemies would be strong enough to attack her and if she has large enough internally oppressed groups those would join forces with the external attackers and pull her down. America’s health is therefore best served by her white citizens respecting her black citizens.

One cannot improve on the injunction laid down by Jesus Christ two thousand years ago: do unto others as you want them to do to you. You want people to love and respect you, so love and respect them.  To do otherwise is to court hatred, conflict and war.

In disrespecting black folks white folks are deliberately courting conflict and war; and if they persist in their folly they will get what they have worked very hard for. In case hubris has completely blinded them, they should remember that in the end justice always wins. Their infantile physical scientists may tell them that the universe is amoral, after all they killed Indians and stole their lands and enslaved Africans and nothing happened to them. Okay. They are given another chance to make amends for their sins.

The fact is that this universe is a moral place; and those who continually violate universal justice: love all people, will sooner or later be punished.  Human beings may think that freedom means hurting other persons; no, freedom means learning that love is the will of God and voluntarily loving all people.

To love is to obey the will of God; to hate is to disobey the will of God. The Kingdom of God (characterized by peace and joy) will prevail in this world when human beings learn to love each other.