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When all of society seems to be against you, when you cannot make sense of your place in the world or your purpose, when you are treated with contempt by the powers that be, a story that places you at the center of the universe & depicts your enemies as inferior becomes alluring.
Now although this story may seem redemptive, it is not. It masquerades as being part of the Hero’s Journey template but it is not. Malcolm X began to realize this after going to Mecca.
But it seems to me that the way to break this cruel and dangerous cycle by which a dispossessed person begins to latch on to a story that preaches a fake kind of parochial empowerment based on a superiority complex is to do our damnest to treat each other with love and compassion
Baldwin recognized the allure of NOI. He pointed out how easy it was to believe that whites who were treating blacks in evil, cruel ways must themselves be evil & cruel beings. In one fell swoop, there was a role reversal, a character change, all in the name of emancipation.
But this was not a real emancipation movement. It did instill discipline, and gave especially the black man a sense of personal autonomy and dignity to an extent. But it was not real because it told a boldfaced lie, namely that hatred was a virtue.
It demanded of its acolytes a vigilance against the white man who may kill a person physically, but not against hatred itself which is as old as time & which destroys a person spiritually. Becauae the white man is also my brother, after all. And whatsoever I do to my brother...
You cannot defeat an ideology if you do not understand what torments the ideologically possessed. And at the end of the day it boils down to feeling purpose, feeling needed, and feeling loved. If a society does not meet this basic need, it will be destroyed.
The urgency with which we must all answer the call to love one another cannot be overstated. In our country right now, we are dealing with mass unemployment, poverty, inequality, a pandemic, & abuse of power, among others. We are in pain & need a profound amount of healing.
Moreover, we underestimate the extent to which PTSD plays a role in much of our bickering. We have no idea what traumas & fears our neighbors carry & they have no idea which of those we carry either. But we’re all afflicted by the same fears because we’re human.
But instead of holding space for ourselves and others, there are racialists caught up in the specter of hyper-idententarian ideology literally telling us that the answer to our sorrows is to treat each other with contempt. This is madness.
I dont blame them; all of us on this lonely planet will need to find the courage to make peace with ourselves & stop spilling our insecurities onto others.
So I leave you with the words of Giovanni & Baldwin:
“To love is a tremendous responsibility. It is the only one.”
So I leave you with the words of Giovanni & Baldwin:
“To love is a tremendous responsibility. It is the only one.”
Oh one last thing. Im really trying to my part through my company, Theory of Enchantment. If you’d like to learn more visit http://theory-of-enchantment.teachable.com
And if you’d like to help out, please DM me. It’s about time we learned how to love each other and how to love ourselves.
And if you’d like to help out, please DM me. It’s about time we learned how to love each other and how to love ourselves.
