Black supremacy
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Black supremacy is the belief that blacks as a group are superior to members of other races.
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Black supremacy vs. white supremacy
It its simplest form, black supremacy is the belief in the inherent superiority of the "black race." Unlike many white supremacists, who often embrace the label, black supremacists generally do not regard their belief in black superiority as equivalent to white supremacy, which historically has been reinforced and sustained worldwide by instruments of Western economic, political and military power. By comparison, there has never been any powerful, far-reaching nexus of instruments under black control with a corollary effect on whites.
In modern history, black supremacy has been a reactionary phenomenon most evident among various religions or cults as an ideological tool in framing a kind of liberation theology for the societally marginalized and oppressed. Scholar and philosopher Cornel West comments in his essay Malcolm X and Black Rage:
...The basic aim of Black Muslim theology -- with its distinct Black supremacist account of the origins of white people -- was to counter white supremacy. Yet this preoccupation with white supremacy still allowed white people to serve as the principal point of reference. That which fundamentally motivates one still dictates the terms of what one thinks and does -- so the motivation of a Black supremacist doctrine reveals how obsessed one is with white supremacy....
In neither its intellectual nor its political context, however, is black supremacy -- as many are inclined to believe -- mere sophistry; it is a strongly held notion. Even so, black supremacy is little more than an intellectual construct; black supremacy, per se, as a corollary of white supremacy, does not exist. In Killing Rage: Ending Racism, noted author and social commentator bell hooks writes:
...it is the system that promotes domination and subjugation. The prejudicial feelings some blacks may express about whites are in no way linked to a system of domination that affords us any power to coercively control the lives and well-being of white folks. That needs to be understood.
(1995, p. 154)
Black supremacy as a core belief in the inherent superiority of people of indigenous, black African decent has been a thriving, if marginal, notion among blacks for 75 years or more in the modern era.
Some black supremacist organizations have joined forces with white supremacist or extremist organizations. Marcus Garvey invited a Ku Klux Klan spokesman to speak at one of his rallies, and the Nation of Islam has ties to George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party. The NOI also has estabalished ties with a number of organizations across racial and ethnic lines, including the Unification Church; and has a working relationship with the organization of wealthy economist and outsider politico Lyndon LaRouche, widely considered a neo-fascist by the mainstream media. White supremacist Tom Metzger of White Aryan Resistance spoke at the "National Black Power Summit and Youth Rally," hosted by the New Black Panther Party.
Rastafari
RoyalParchmentScrollBlackSupremacy.jpg
The Rastafari movement was originally founded on principles that included a belief in the inherent wickedness of the white race and the superiority of the black race, though these beliefs rapidly evolved into a more universalist approach which accepts converts from all ethnicities. One of the three major Rastafari orders, the Bobo Ashanti Order of Rastafari, however, continues to adhere to a black supremacist doctrine. Marcus Garvey is a Rasta prophet who believed that white achievements were due to white children being taught that they are superior. By the same token, he held that if black children are taught that they are superior, then there is a greater chance that they will suceed in life.
Along with the Holy Piby, the Royal Parchment Scroll of Black Supremacy, written during the 1920s by proto-Rastafarian preacher Fitz Balintine Pettersburg, is recognized as one of the root documents of Rastafarian thought. It influenced Jamaican Garveyite leaders of the 1920's, and was promulgated by early Rasta leader Leonard Howell, who adopted some of Garvey's black supremacist tenets. Howell used the Royal Parchment Scroll of Black Supremacy as the basis for his book The Promised Key (also published under the Hindu name Gangunguru Maragh which means "teacher of famed wisdom"), which he wrote during his imprisonment in 1934-36.
Nation of Islam
In the 1930s, the Nation of Islam emerged, coming to prominence during the 1960s, when charismatic minister Malcolm X became a spokesman for the movement. It was during the time of the American Civil Rights Movement when a number of African American organizations became more militant in their demands for equality.
The Nation of Islam teaches that white people were genetically engineered "devils", created to be liars and murderers. They are held to be the enemies of all black people. The group's founders "Master Fard" Muhammad and Elijah Muhammad, preached the Doctrine of Yakub, which held that the Original Man, was an "Asiatic black man." White people, it contended, were "grafted" from black people 6,000 years ago by an ancient black scientist named Yakub.
Additional to the Yakub doctrine, it's the teaching of the Nation of Islam that Allah, (God) himself is the original and supreme black man and that all black men today are a part of this God-race and the black race is thus divine and superior to all other races. It's also the teaching of the Nation of Islam that some time in the future, Allah will bring a spaceship into the earth's atmosphere and bomb the cities of the world so that the unconverted white race will be purged from the world.
Elijah Muhammad also preached black self-reliance, black separatism, cooperative economics, strict moral and physical discipline, and opposed black-white miscegenation. Since its founding, the NOI has gone through reorganizations, and internal conflicts, but eventhough the Nation of Islam moves closer to the mainstream of Islamic belief and practice, such as the observance of Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting, Farrakhan's organization has not rejected any of Master Fard's doctrines and oppose any changes in the major beliefs and programs that had been instituted by Elijah Muhammad, including the annual "Savior's Day".
Most historians and social scientists classify the Nation of Islam also as a black nationalist, or black separatist, organization. Recently, the Southern Poverty Law Center headed by Morris Dees placed the Nation of Islam on its list of hate groups.
Melanin and Melanin Theory
Based on the single-origin hypothesis, black supremacists believe that, because human beings first evolved in Africa with darkly pigmented skin, blacks are more advanced than other peoples of the planet. They claim that the early, powerful black civilizations of Nubia and early dynastic Egypt are proof of inherent melanin-based superiority (see Afrocentrism). This contention, known generally as "Melanin Theory", is founded upon a combination of scientific information and pseudo-scientific claims, and has been a subject of interest among some African-Americans since the discovery of melanin as an organic semiconductor in the early 1970s.
The purported qualities of melanin, some accurate, many based on distortions of scientific fact or pure speculation, are used to justify black supremacist assertions. The central idea of "Melanin Theory" is that the levels of melanin in dark skin naturally enhance intelligence and emotional, psychic and spiritual sensitivity. Believers in Melanin theory also claim that, because melanin is a proven neurotransmitter, higher levels of melanin enable nerve synapses to fire more quickly and efficiently, thereby enhancing the natural athleticism of blacks. Some black supremacists believe that melanin is a semiconductor of sound and heat energy and a superconductor of electromagnetic radiation, claiming that it can convert light and magnetic fields to sound; that it can process information without reporting to the brain; and, further, that it is the chemical basis for what is commonly called "soul".
One of the most widely accepted and fundamental notions of Melanin Theory is that whites are "mutants", that white skin is an aberration, a form of albinism. Melanin theorist Wade Nobles takes this notion even further, stating that only blacks are fully human because of their higher levels of skin melanin:
"That in the evolution of the species, in what some people call the ontogenetic evolution of humankind, that in the evolution of the species the human family separated in a sense that one branch of the family stopped its evolutionary path and simply depended upon the central nervous system as the total machinery for understanding reality. Whereas, the root of the family continued its path and not only evolved a central nervous system but developed what I called at that time an essential melanic system. And that I even went so far as to try to develop a little formula and suggested that CNS + EMS = HB. CNS (Central Nervous System) + EMS (Essential Melanic System) = HB (Human Being). That the central nervous system combined with the essential melanic system is what makes you human. That, in fact, to be human is to be Black. To be human is to be Black. (Nobles 1989)."
Others, such as psychiatrist and writer Frances Cress Welsing, express the same idea by their use of the term "hue-man" instead of "human," the implication being only people of color are truly human. Welsing is the author of the Cress Theory of Color Confrontation, which in predominant part ascribes certain purported, inherent and behavioral differences between blacks and whites to a "melanin deficiency" in whites. Welsing also claims that the prevalence of high blood pressure among African Americans is due to the fact that melanin exchanges "black photons" with other electrons and, therefore, picks up the negative energy vibrations from white people.
Melanin theorist Carol Barnes argues that white scientists deliberately create drugs, such as cocaine, that are specially structured to chemically bind with melanin. Barnes claims that melanin and cocaine have a high affinity for each other because both are alkaloids, and that blacks get addicted faster, stay addicted longer, can test positive for cocaine even a year after its most recent use, and suffer more from these drugs because cocaine co-polymerizes into melanin. Yet, melanin is not an alkaloid, and there is no evidence that melanin co-polymerizes with cocaine in vivo.
Scientific research indicates that neuromelanin, which is found in the substantia nigra (in Latin, literally "black substance") of the human brain, plays a role in the transmission of neuronal impulses, with neuromelanin deficiency or neuromelanin deterioration being a distinctive etiological factor in certain disease states affecting neuromotor functioning in humans, such as Parkinson's disease. Further, albinism and vitiligo, both forms of melanin deficiency, are strongly implicated in deafness in mammals, including humans. Research into the properties and possible commercial applications of melanin is ongoing in the biotech fields of organic electronics and nanotechnology.
Most consider Melanin Theory pseudoscience; it has little credibility in mainstream medicine or science.
Black supremacists and organizations
- African Hebrew Israelites
- Bobo Ashanti Order of Rastafari
- Robert L. Brock
- The Nation of Gods and Earths
- Nation of Islam (see Nation of Islam and anti-Semitism)
- Nation of Yahweh
- Original African Hebrew Israelite Nation of Jerusalem
- United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors
- Yahweh ben Yahweh
- Dwight York
References
- hooks, bell. Killing Rage: Ending Racism, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995. ISBN 0805037829
- West, Cornel. Race Matters, Beacon Press, 1993.
See also
- Afrocentrism
- Black nationalism
- Cress Theory of Color Confrontation
- Liberation theology
- Melanin
- Racism
- Scientific racism
- White supremacy
External links
- CSICOP article on melanin theory and associated pseudoscience (http://www.csicop.org/si/9201/minority.html)
- The Making of Devil, by Elijah Muhammad (http://www.muhammadspeaks.com/Makingofdevil.html)pl:Czarna supremacja