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Re: Barbados: White Rasta director of African Affa
Posted By: yan In Response To: Barbados: White Rasta director of African Affairs *LINK* (Ayinde)
Date: Tuesday, 9 November 2004, at 1:58 p.m.
Events like these drive home the reason why it is critical to keep discussing and reasoning on issues of race discrimination, white privilege and leadership in black movements. When these issues go unreasoned we end up with the worse case scenario- a white person as the director of Pan African issues. No semantics necessary on whether he is full white, part white, no white, whatever; if he cut that dred in the morning and put on a suit no one would bat and eyelash at him on Wall Street or at the fanciest country club in Barbados.
The fact is that people just do not get it. But we have discussed these issues too many times on this board for those that reason here regularly not to get it and then claim some one love, Rasta embraces all races crap. First of all, as usual many Rastas here seem to think that their own version of Rastafari encompasses all the interests and needs of all African people. Whether Rasta embraces people of all races is one affair but we are not talking about a Rasta association, we are talking about a white male, with all his inherent prejudices, his racism, his poor views and his lack of experience with the worst features of racism and colonial education being given a mandate by a black government to direct the way forward for pan African affairs. Well if that is not an act of high lunacy well I don’t know what is.
As a Caribbean person it is not surprising that it would be Barbados that would come up with this, as Barbados has certainly felt the brunt of colonialism in a unique and troubling way and has certainly internalized all the poor values and self hatred that comes with it.
Well anyway, people will certainly have to start waking up. While some may find it trivial to talk about whites infiltrating and wanting dominance and unfair privileges in black communities with reference to this website and its forums, I hope we can see how this can grow by startling degrees and reach a point such as what we have seen here. As far as I am concerned, he can mouth all the platitudes he wishes, and others can be taken in by honeyed words and promises of change. However any white person who has a real understanding of the issues and a reasonable amount of integrity would never have accepted that post. They would have seen that for African people to advance and to redress the imbalance created by racism and colonialism the symbol must be African and the leadership must be African- and dark skinned African to boot. And they would have been delighted to serve the cause in the capacity of support for this higher truth.
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