Extemporaneous musings, occasionally poetic, about life in its richly varied dimensions, especially as relates to history, theology, law, literature, science, by one who is an attorney, ordained minister, historian, writer, and African American.
Tuesday, August 21, 2018
DR. KING, BRER RABBIT RACIAL PARADOXES
DR. KING, BRER'S RABBIT, FOX, TAR BABY: DOUBLE RACIAL PARADOXES
The fuel of white hatred must not be grievance-based; it's something else, since black people have never done anything to white people to cause them to grieve nor hate. On the contrary, it is white people who have consistently harmed, killed, enslaved, robbed us for centuries.
Notwithstanding such, the black people, have not hated, do not hate, but love, tho' greatly grieved!
These are great paradoxes, ironies; indeed, this is doubly paradoxical. For whites to hate but blacks don't.
Perhaps, we misconceive. Maybe white people do not "hate" black people, but prefer to exploit black people for their material gain and for emotional security. This may explain "whites'" peculiar conduct.
The blacks', seemingly historical, lack of integral resentment toward the whites' systemic racial pattern of exploitation based upon color, and blacks massive profitability for the whites have naturally combined to reinforce the fact, the farce of plasticity in European, American, Muslim--African-based resources exploitation for many centuries.
The Africans' legendary lack of "guile"; holy Ethiopian integrity, innate goodness, that is famously celebrated by classical writers, like Homer, Plato, Diodorus Siculus, may have played a crucial part in this pageant of successive exploit.
Certainly the Africans exhibited great hospitality towards all of the whites: Greeks, Asians, Romans, who poured into Africa, in waves as pupils, traders, travelers emigrants, supplicants, who further sparked, encouraged more whites to come to Africa to prosper as well from it.
In due course, the passage of time, and cosmological change brought about the fall of primal African civilizations to the vast hordes of invading armies and navies from Asia, islands of the seas, Europe, into Africa to topple the glory of ancient Egypt (Kemet), ancient Nubia (Ethiopia) others, like Libya, Numidia, for over '2,000 seasons.'
This continental breakdown caused massive migrations, dislocations to much lesser populated parts of Africa in order to escape from their plagues , pilfering, pillaging, plunder. But there was to be no escaping; they all found them, again, in East, West, South Africa and in the interior. Africa convulsed! into a global hunting ground for offspring of the outside earlier invaders. Eventually, the trans-Indian Ocean, and trans-Atlantic slave trade began: to work the "new world", to delight the old.
Slowly, patiently, some modern blacks have come to perceive the truthful dimensions of the racial dilemma of all blacks, as not something emotional, involving hatred nor love. But the logical, logistical, profitable expediencies of emotionless power. The lion does not hate the lamb, nor does the hawk hate the sparrow. All must eat. Whites too must eat; do eat us!
The Rev . Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s final book, THE TRUMPET OF CONSCIENCE (1967) includes "A Christmas Sermon on Peace," that has prompted my rather vivid asseverations. In it, he writes:
"I've seen too much hate to want to hate myself, and I've seen hate on the faces of too many sheriffs, too many white citizens councilors', and too many Klansmen of the South, to want to hate myself; and every time I see it, I say to myself, hate is too great a burden to bear. Somehow we must be able to stand up to our most bitter opponents and say: 'We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws and abide by the unjust system, because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good, and so throw us in jail and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities in the midnight hour and drag us out on some wayside road and leave us half-dead as you beat us and we will still love you. Send your propaganda agents around the country, and make it appear we are not fit, culturally and otherwise for integration , and we will still love you. But be assured we'll wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day, we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves; we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory."
P. 76-77
His "we will still love you" refrain lashes and gashes like a leaden whip upon my raw flesh. It may be so for you too! That fact certainly has been historically true. Our unrequited love, during the Civil War, 1861-1865, precluded mass murders , rapes, arson, rebellions, when most white men were gone away to war, leaving only slaves and children to see about and care for white women, white elderly, in towns, on Southern plantations and other property also ! That notorious black nonviolent fact precludes any further inquiry. That utterly amazing fact further suggests that enslaved black people had been living the gospel of Jesus Christ all along during thralldom, relative to white people. Whites have been the reprobates! The ungrateful, and ungodly man relative to the blacks!
Having said that much about black history as unassailable proof, there now is no need for me to allegorize Dr. King's ringing, "we will still love you " refrain to the "Tar Baby" fable of African American folklore, as another form of proof. That proof would have involved the famous tale about Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, the nemesis of Brer Rabbit, and the "Tar Baby" doll that was erected in by Brer Fox in the middle of a near wayside road to trap Brer Rabbit .
Brer Rabbit rabbit had struck the lifeless, sticky, tricky doll with all four paws, when it was "too uppity" to reply after having been spoken to.
Thus, Brer Rabbit literally was by all four's stuck to the "Tar Baby," when Brer Fox came along. Brer Fox had finally caught that ole Brer Rabbit, who had evaded him for years! But Brer Fox congratulated himself and gloated too long, speculating about how he would kill and eat, Brer Rabbit. This gave Brer Rabbit time to think, to say repeatedly after each articulated option: "Brer Fox, please don't throw me into the briar patch!" Silly Brer Fox was moved by greed to punish rabbit for years of humiliation. Thus, he then himself was beguiled by Brer Rabbit's "briar patch" putsch. He threw him into rabbit in briar patch!
Plop! Back in the briar patch and free. Brer Rabbit taunted Brer Fox, as he skipped merrily away, "I was born in the briar patch Brer Fox! My whole family is here!" So to me "Tar Baby" was Dr. King's torturous "we will still love you," incandescent. As stated above, I was disposed to use just the tale "Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and Tar Baby" in a parallel, eschatological analogy, before the timely visitation of the Holy Spirit upon my historical literary spiritual, very African American imagination!
Thank you Jesus!