Yo White Boy! (Volume 5)

The Great White Hope Ain't The Pope and White Smoke

Bad news, Billy Bob. I promised you this weekly “sublication” of LookingNWords when it was created a couple of months ago. You may have noticed that it suffered a four week hiatus due to personal matters of no consequence to you. Nonetheless, I’m back because I, unlike you, keep my promises. I’ll always come black; again and again. Ergo, let us continue as I am sure you have missed me.

Knowing Konfrontational Kenyatta (KKK)

One of the words that is constantly used to describe my writing is “confrontational.” There are others that Black Men in the United States constantly hear and are labeled as such as “angry,” “aggressive,” “arrogant” and a host of others. Fine with me, actually. I own it. I just want to make sure that I wear it well and look elegant in my black suit.

For me to fail to confront five centuries, and counting, of dehumanizing oppression and fail to be angry about it, particularly given his-story, would render me nothing more than a mentally enslaved psychopath. Considering the indictment comes from an entity with zero frame of reference to my condition, yet is the cause of it, becomes violent insult. Thus, when these characterizations and labels are applied it is validation that I am sane. Which makes the indictor not only intellectually dishonest, discredited, denialistic and disrespectful of my humanity but, in fact, a cognitively lazy psychotic buffoon.

Pay attention and own your shit like I do, white boy. Unlike you I don’t have excuses, I have reasons. Because, as one of your brethren in a rare instance of candor and intellectual honesty once said to me: “There is no way in the world I would take what Black People have.” He followed that statement with five words I will never forget: “I couldn’t even imagine that.” Kind of like what the tub said to the toilet: “I see assholes every day, but I don’t have to take the shit that you do.”

The Smoke is White: We have a Poop!

By the time a child enters kindergarten in the “US” they are already inculcated with imagery and language that subliminally tells them that good things are white, bad things are black.

Four weeks ago, a new pope was chosen for the Catholic Church. As deliberations and voting for the new pope progress each round of voting is marked by black smoke if there is no consensus. Once there is a consensus, “the smoke is white” signaling a new pope has been chosen. I’ve been dealing with white smoke all of my life. Most of the time it is being blown up my ass.

The Catholic Church played a major role in the enslavement and brutalization of my Alkebulanian ancestors. As I have mentioned many times, the European always shows up with a bible in one hand…and a gun in the other. Without fail.

Early Catholic Church and Roman Law

The early Church, drawing on Roman law, initially tolerated slavery, seeing it as a consequence of sin and a natural part of the social order. Whose goddamned sin? And whose goddamned “order?” Some Catholic clergy and religious orders, including the Jesuits, owned slaves and benefited from slave labor. Papal bulls, like Pope Nicholas V's Dum Diversas (1452) and Romanus Pontifex (1454), were used to justify enslavement of non-Christians.

No bulls-hit.

As the transatlantic slave trade developed, the Catholic Church provided a religious framework used to justify enslavement, arguing that it could be a path to evangelization. Pope Paul III declared the slave trade legal in 1548, and the Jesuits, among others, justified slavery as a means of spreading Christianity. Catholic clergy and institutions, including Georgetown University, profited from the sale and labor of enslaved people. Therefore, I’d be a dope to place my hope in the pope, despite the white smoke.

Another Great White Hope and “A Word To The Black Man”

As I mentioned previously, one of the labels that Black Men in the United States are often subjected to is “arrogant.” This is especially true if he is educated, strong and, most of all, proud. He is to be subservient and love his servitude. He is to dare not “confront” his nemesis (unless it looks like him). Because the best slave in the world is the one unaware of his enslavement. I said the best slave, not the true slave. I’ll enlighten you on who the true slave is upon conclusion.

The sport, if you will, of boxing runs deep in my family. My dad, out of necessity, became a prize fighter as a child and was a Golden Gloves champion. He later became a NLC instructor (non lethal combat) in the United States Marine Corps. When I was a small boy in the early 70’s, he and his best friend, Birt, would take me to see major fights on what was then known as “Closed Circuit Television” at the landmark Wiltern Theater on Wilshire and Western in Los Angeles. There on the big movie screen, in grainy Black and White images I saw Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, Ken Norton and a number of others.

Stick with me just for a few more ticks.

My childhood reverie and nostalgia notwithstanding, I am also a bit of a boxing historian. Few people know where the phrase “The Great White Hope” came from. I do and now, so shall you.

On July 4, 1910, in Reno, Nevada, Jack Johnson defeated James J. Jeffries in a boxing match. The fight took place in a stadium built specifically for the event and was attended by a large crowd. Johnson dominated the fight and secured a victory in the 15th round. J.J versus J.J. Jack Johnson, however, was a Black Man in the United States and a fiercely proud one. Jeffries was a European-Amerikan and got his ass beat something terrible.

White people were infuriated and there was reaction throughout the country; much of it violent. In fact, a series of riots left over 25 Black People in the United States dead after the bout. No dead white folks.

The fight was highly promoted, mainly because of its white supremacy element. Big surprise there. Up until that time, James K. Jeffries was the undefeated heavyweight champion. The white controlled, apartheidist media went ballistic (literally) and, consistent with the “arrogant” label, described Jack Johnson as “an unrepentant black man” that had defeated America’s “Great White Hope.”

The Los Angeles Times, at the time, was one of the nations largest newspapers and this is the story that it published, and though they have done their damnedest to bury it, I exhumed it decades ago. Here it is for your pleasure, cogitation and looking inwards. I mean, in words given the title of the editorial is, literally, “A Word To The Black Man.”

Do not point your nose too high. Do not swell your chest too much. Do not boast too loudly. Do not be puffed up. Let not your ambitions be inordinate or take a wrong direction. Let no treasured resentments rise up and spill over. Remember you have done nothing at all. You are just the same member of society today you were last week. Your place in the world is just what it was. You are on no higher plane, deserve no new consideration, and will get none. You will be treated on your personal merits in the future as in the past. No man will think a bit higher of you because your complexion is the same as that of the victor at Reno. That triumph is the personal asset of Arthur Johnson, a negro to be sure, but not the particular person who stands in your own shoes.

Remember that if it did establish the fact that, man for man all through the two races, yours was capable of being wrought into the best pugilists (which is not the case), even then there would be no room for becoming swollen with pride. That would not justify you jumping to the very illogical conclusion that you are “on top.” You are no nearer that mark than you were before the fight took place. You must depend on other influences to put your race on higher ground, and you must depend on personal achievement to put yourself on higher ground.

Never forget that in human affairs brains count for more than muscle. If you have ambition for yourself and your race, you must try for something better in development than that of a mule.

As for the white man who attempts to insult you because of the fair victory won by one of your race from one of the white race, you can well afford to ignore him and respect yourself. The fact that the man’s skin is white does not make him more or less brutal or cowardly. He is no credit to the white race and would be none to any race. Such conduct is more than foolish. It is asinine. No savage fresh from the jungle could manifest more brutish traits of character than this. White men who are men worthy of the name will not join in any fresh crusade against your race, already too long and too cruelly persecuted.

Do not dwell too much on matters of race, particularly when it relates to the characteristics in which the dullest of the brute creation is superior to all men of all races and colors. Think rather of your own individuality, of your personal achievements. Be ambitious for something better than the prize ring. Cultivate patience, grow in reasonableness, increase your stock in useful knowledge, try for new things which distinguish man from the beasts that perish and leave no results of life behind them. Endurance is part of Johnson’s good qualities which stood him in good stead; hopefulness and good nature are others. Try to emulate this member of your race in these qualities. Their possession will do you more good and count for more in behalf of your race than it would if a black man would “knock out” a white man every day for the next ten years.

Translation: No matter what you do or what you achieve, you are and will remain a nigger, nigger. Don’t look to flex your collective muscles; develop yourselves as individuals and be sure not to be angry or to threaten white people with violence. Just ask “Barack The Magic Negro.”

It should be noted that shortly after beating the cow-snot out of Jeffries, the federal government prosecuted Jack Johnson for violating the federal Mann Act, which prohibited transporting a woman across state lines for “debauchery.” He was convicted mainly because the women in question were white. During his presidency, “Barack The Magic Negro” was repeatedly asked to pardon Jack Johnson posthumously. He was asked many times to do so.

We are still waiting.

Yo White Boy!

I hope you have learned something. Probably nothing you did not already know, and continue to perpetuate. But, alas, hope springs eternal. Does it not?

Oh yeah, I promised to enlighten you on what the true slave is and, irony of ironies, it was one of your own who so eloquently said it. Roman lawyer, statesman, orator and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero stated: The true slave dreams not of freedom, the true slave desires a slave of his own.

Suffer that thought to sit heavy upon thy soul.