Anti-racists who define the values of hard work and productivity as exclusively “white” are doing us no favours.
By Tunde Obadina
The Smithsonian National Museum for African American History and Culture in the United State created a stir after it published in March 2020 a chart depicting the features and assumptions of whiteness. The diagram displayed the museum’s rendering of the attributes of “white dominate culture, or whiteness.” It included “hard work is key to success”, “cause and effect relationships”, “self-reliance”, “heavy value on ownership of goods”, “work before play,” and “objective, rational linear thinking”.
The chart was supposed to be an anti-racism guideline for talking about race. But in declaring hard work, delayed gratification, rugged individualism, and emphasis on the scientific method as white values the museum displayed racism that is as obnoxious and damaging as anything professed by white supremacists. In July 2020, after criticism, the mainly black run and partly public-funded museum removed the chart from its website and apologised for publishing it.
The museum’s depiction of whiteness implied that black people are lacking the characteristics needed for wealth creation and material prosperity. Teaching black children that hard work, delayed gratification, self-reliance, and reason are white qualities is to seek to condemn them to failure in a capitalist society. Such sentiments may be applauded by opponents of economic development but do nothing to advance the cause of black people.
When intellectuals, white or black, endeavour to define blackness or whiteness they invariably run into trouble. This is because race concepts like black or white culture, black or white personality, and black or white psychology are collectivist fallacies. There is no such thing as black culture, white culture, or Asian culture. Skin colour, ethnicity and sex are not indicators of personality, or taste in music, fashion, cuisine, philosophy, or religion.
Black intellectuals have for decades sought to define blackness and whiteness as part of their quest for identity in racially divided societies. Their conclusions have often been as racist and demeaning to blacks as was the chart published by the National Museum for African American History and Culture.
The myth of the African Personality
Edward Blyden, a nineteenth-century African cultural nationalism, saw black and white people as distinct. Blyden, a race proud West-Indian born Liberian intellectual, condemned the ethnocentrism of European missionaries in Africa and urged Africans to retain what he reckoned were the socialist characteristics of their personality and society. In 1872, well before Europe’s scramble for Africa, Blyden called for “spiritual decolonisation”, urging West African coastal elites to shake off the spiritual bondage to which assimilation of European culture had enslaved them.
Africans, he declared, must not emulate Europeans but grow according to their personality. Blyden wrote: “The mistake which the European often makes in considering questions of Negro improvement and the future of Africa, is in supposing that the Negro is the European in embryo — in the undeveloped stage — and that when, by and by, he shall enjoy the advantages of civilisation and culture, he will become like the European; in other words, that the Negro is on the same line of progress, in the same groove, with the European, but infinitely in the rear.”
Europe and Africa, according to Blyden, were moving along parallel lines. One was not materially superior to the other. Africa had evolved a socialist and co-operative socio-economic system that is as advanced as anything in Europe and lacking the class divisions that beset Europe, he contended.
For Blyden, Africans are the antithesis of Europeans, whom he painted as harsh, individualistic, competitive, combative, highly materialistic and lacking in faith, except in their ability to meddle with nature through science and industry. He thought non-westernised Africans to be morally superior to Europeans,
Blyden wanted Africans to acquire western technology and science but adapt them to their own culture. He opposed the development of capitalism on the continent, scorning the attempts by westernised ex-slaves to develop enterprises in Liberia. Such ventures inevitably fail, he explained, because they ran against the grain of the African genius. Nonetheless, Blyden saw the possibility of trade between spiritual socialist Africa and the materialistic capitalist west. The former providing raw materials in exchange for the latter manufactured goods. Furthermore, the West may come to need Africa’s spiritual qualities when the world is threatened by the consequences of western consumerism.
“When the civilised nations, in consequence of their wonderful material development, shall have their spiritual perception darkened and their spiritual susceptibilities blunted through the agency of a captivating and absorbing materialism, it may have to resort to Africa to recover some of the simple elements of faith,” wrote Blyden. Africa will be the “spiritual conservatory of the world”, acting as the peacemaker and a “consoler” when crises occur in the world, because of Western worldly thirst for material satisfaction.
Negritude’s anti-racism racism
Mid-20th century exponents of negritude acclaimed the superior human qualities of black Africans. Blacks may not rival whites in inventions or building complex industries, but they at least live in harmony with nature and have attained a level of spiritual existence unknown to Europeans, they maintained. Negritude was developed in pre-Second World War Latin Quarters of Paris by black intellectuals who affirmed their race to counter the racism they encountered. Leopold Senghor, who become Senegal’s first president, was one of its leading proponents. He described negritude as “the whole complex of civilised values…which characterises the black people.”
Senghor claimed for his people a uniqueness that distinguishes them from Europeans. Blacks are superior in the mental and emotional order, he said. Black reason is intuitive through participation, while white reason is analytical through use. Black reason is expressed by emotions through the abandonment of self. Blacks are imbued with a great sense of communion, the gift of mythmaking, the gift of rhythm, all of which said Senghor are indelibly stamped on their work and activities.
The ‘anti-racism racism’ of Senghor and other advocates of negritude, who were mainly black Francophones, was criticised at the time by other African nationalists who rightly saw in it a vindication of white racist ideology. “Negritude is actually a good mystifying anaesthetic for Negroes who have been…whipped to the point where they have lost all reason and become purely emotion,” said Ahmed Sekou Touré who became the first president of Guinea. “The master transforms his slave into a Negro whom he defines as being without reason, subhuman, and the embittered slave then protests; as you are Reason, I am Emotion and I take this upon myself.”
Sekou Touré and other African nationalist critics of negritude were more down to earth but their portrayal of African traditional society was only relatively less idealistic. To varying degrees, they also presented Africans as a race of angels. It was the selflessness and trusting personality of black Africans that made them easy prey of unscrupulous white Europeans. Many of Africa’s initial post-independence leaders professed some form of African Socialism based on notions of democratic and non-materialist values of traditional societies. Like Blyden in the 19th century, they defined Africans as counter-distinct from the selfish, individualistic, greedy, war-like white Europeans.
Racism is harmful in whatever guise
In drawing cultural and psychological distinctions between white and non-white people the National Museum for African American History and Culture and other proponents of racial stereotyping give credence to the racial ideology. A black person who values individualism, hard work, objectivity, delayed gratification, aspiration to wealth, self-reliance, timekeeping, the nuclear family and belief in progress may think himself to be inferior if he or she accepts the idea that these values are the exclusive preserve of white people. Indeed, the argument of white supremacists has long been that black people are poor and unaccomplished because they are lazy, irrational, spendthrift, temperamental, have dysfunctional families, and depend on others.
Telling black children that they should not try to compete with whites because they inherently lack the attributes of the white dominant culture is terrible. With supposedly respectable black institutions peddling such toxic rubbish, white supremacists are having their job done for them.
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