By: Lavi Ramphomane
You know why white women did not ascend to the rafters in order to hog the limelight with declarations like “all WHITE men are murderers” in the wake of Oscar Pistorious’ murder trial? It’s because white women were genuinely concerned about getting Pistorius locked up and send a message to would-be white women-killers to think long and hard before harming a white woman. While they spit on any form of abuse against them, white women truly love and cherish white men, and by directing and piling their collective scorn on Pistorius and on Pistorius alone, white women accomplished the twin mission of removing an undesirable stain from whiteness, without soiling the entire white male species, a species which serve as a prerequisite in the production and re-production of the white race. But apart from being an indispensable agent in the perpetuation of it’s race, a charecteristic which obviously makes it beloved to it’s white female counterpart, what is a white male species?
A white male is that species which woke up one morning and resolved to initiate the bloodiest, centuries-long and an unceasing orgy of dispossession, displacement and de-humanization of the black race across the length and breadth of the globe. Needless to say, this genocidal project also included (past tense?) the rape and killing of black women and black children. Notwithstanding a white male species’ disposition to initiate bloodshed, to rape, and a proclivity to other sadistic atrocities, a white female harbours only love and affection for his white male partner.
You know why? The white self-preservation agenda and the black genocide project are two sides of the same coin, and the white female species is disposed towards preserving it’s own race. Now this historicity, that is, the facticity of gratuitous violence accruing to the black female body at the whims and hands of the white male, compels us to make a detour to another arena: the phenomenon of ‘feminism’ as (1) a white female philosophy, and (2) as a conceptual framework to elaborate black female structural-positionality in particular, and to imagine political ontology in general. At the crucible of black fungibility and accumulation, which is to say at the height of Afrika’s rape, murder and plunder, the white female world picked up feminist cudgels and tools of analysis as weapons-of-choice because they viewed white patriarchy as the fundamental contradiction and ipso facto viewed the raging inferno that the anti-black project was as a necessity!
That is to say, feminism as a conceptual framework has in it’s DNA a desire to end white female suffering within a world subsumed by glaring slave relations in the first ontological instance, without precipitating a crisis to the white master/black slave dynamic. Whiteness, through the deployment and the appropriation of the aggresivity of it’s male species, established and sustains it’s dominion over blackness through direct relations of force (black genocide continuum). In other words, white supremacy produces and re-produces itself out of the debris of blackness, that is, no black death = no white male hegemony = no white feminist subalternity for recourse.
This is the basis of my conclusion that foundational to feminism is an implicit desire to perpetuate the black genocide because the fruits of “equality” after which feminists clamour are vouchsafed through the black dispossession and genocide. Which brings us to the so-called black radical feminism, it’s machinations and it’s rhetorical labour. From the above synopsis, it can be argued that black feminism is foregrounded upon a pedestal which views the violence of slave qua black making as significantly negligible or negligibly insignificant. This is why in the sad event of a gruesome murder of a black woman, and in contrast to the white feminist reaction apropos to the murder of a white woman, black feminists declare from Killimanjaro that “all BLACK men are murderers”!
Now instead of addressing and wrestling the scourge of violence against black women and it’s historical background, causes and effects, we are enmeshed in a debate on whether or not all black men are trash. Instead of hunting down black killers, black rapists and black child-molesters, and in what is reminiscent of a theory suffering a nostalgic moment to tenets foundational to it’s conceptualization, black feminism has initiated a campaign akin to the movie King Kong to template all black men as psychos disposed to frequent outbursts aggressivity towards the female body. But isn’t this what the anti-black world preached when they first initiated and justified the black de-humanization programme? Black men are killers. Black men are rapists. Black men are apes. Black men are niggers. Black men are kaffirs. Black men are savages. Black men are trash!
Déjà vu? No, as Black Consciousness proponent, Vusi Mnguni argues, the “all black men are trash” assertion is an historical continuum (albeit under new performance and a new epoch) which blossoms out of the original anti-black libidinal economy which birthed all other derogatory descriptions attached to black men throughout the annals of history. If you were to check the statistics, the picture would present a disconcerting viewing. The majority of women who are uneducated are black; the majority of women in jails are black; the majority of child-abusing women are black; the majority of substance-abusing women are black; most ‘illegal’ abortions are performed by black women; most infants killed and dumped at rubbish sites are killed by black women; most women who die from AIDS are black…the list is inexhaustible.
Now, during their gatherings in their backyards when they eat hot marinated beer and drink ice-cold boerewors (or however they prefer to consume their meals and liquids), white people will discuss these statistics and say: “You see that black women are a filthy sub-human species which devours it’s own offspring. Just look at the stats. All they do is drink, have sex, get pregnant by different men, run to the government for grants, abort their kids, throw others to the hounds, and then catch AIDS.” White people would not say: “Black women’s troubles today take their genesis from the colonization and de-humanization programme of the black race which spans more than three hundred years and continues to this day!” This is the naked truth – ills committed by black women cannot be disimbricated from the anti-black insurgency, that is to say, the black dereliction is an epi-phenomena which originate from the black body’s long history of openness to gratuitous violence.
Yet black feminists, just like their white handlers, obstinately refuse to appraise the fact of blackness from this historical and empirical angle. This refusal to adopt this approach suggests that, just like the Klu Klux Klan, black feminism has long concluded that black men are all that white people have always labelled them as! Because those black men and women who populate black feminist spaces are bitter people, foul-mouthed distorters and loquacious hooligans, they are quick to make lofty declarations and when called upon to elaborate on their conclusions, they resort to accusing their interlocutors as rapists, killers and child abusers. For instance, they say black men “must unlearn” their trashy, rapey ways. But they will never as much give a hint on where, when and how did black men learn the art of visiting atrocities upon black female bodies! They seek to analogize black suffering with crimes which accrue to the black female body by declaring that our rejection of “all black men are trash” mantra is the same as white liberals’ argument that “not all whites are racists”. But this is shallow as it is disingenuous! Anti-black racism is a global, elaborate, systematic, structural, legitimated, and a well-orchestrated programme which willy-nilly benefits all white people – bad and good.
So the failure by those good whites to destroy white supremacy makes them guilty of this unceasing anti-black violence. The same, however, cannot be said about the rapes and murders of black women by black rapists. Rape and murder are punishable crimes in occupied Azania. Moreover, how does a black man’s structural “privilege” over a black woman in my advantage when I live in constant fear for the safety of my grandmother, mother, wife, sister and daughter in the wake of the scourge of rapes, murders, abductions and mutilation of black women?
In conclusion, I posit that the government, white people, Klu Klux Klan, black feminists and defeated black men who say “all black men are trash” are all anti-black birds of the same feather who are not genuinely concerned about the scourge of rapes and murders which gravitates towards black women. Whether we locate this strange brand of black feminism to our modern-day’s Judas Iscariots who seek to profit from black disunity, or view them as the post-1994 version of the Askari, is not clear. What is pellucid, however, is that we have degenerated to such sewage depths that even our women turn the sadistic murders, rapes and mutilations of our black women and black children for cheap point scoring! I also challenge black feminists and the “all black men are trash” brigade to answer the following questions: – if black male criminality is not traceable to the programme of black de-humanization, are we then saying black men are genealogical trash?
– when you posit that black males must unlearn their trashy ways, you imply that once upon a time, somewhere, someone taught black men to rape and kill black women. So when were they taught to be trash, where and by who? Was it before or after colonialism? Was it in our initiation schools and homes? Were these lessons embedded in our cultures and taught to us by our Indunas? – how is a non-rapist black man admitting that he’s a rapist going to stop real rapists from raping? – why are black feminists not demanding the land and it’s wealth, and repairations for hundreds of years of rape at the hands of white men under colonialism? Or is it because land is masculine and rape by white men is good? – what do I, as a black man who has daughters, stand to benifit in this climate of rape culture?
Lavi Ramphomane is a Black Consciousness proponent and a black studies student.