The Joke About Self-Responsibility

The Joke About Self-Responsibility

In one week, our new President delivered a speech in Ghana admonishing Africans there to take responsibility for their future and to stop blaming their present condition on colonialism, while admonishing blacks (the very next week) at the NAACP Convention to “get over it” and be responsible. Maybe he meant be “responsible” like Bernie Madoff and the other crooks who put the whole world in trouble, not just the black community.

At any rate, in that same week, while listening to that madness, Michael Hagos sent out an article entitled “Overcoming Caucasianization and Dehumanization.” He starts off his article with Steve Biko’s quote, “The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”

I recommend the entire article to you, but I want to call your attention right now to what Michael Hagos calls, “the ineluctable pain of blackness.” To put that phrase in context, Michael Hagos quotes Frantz Fanon who says,

“The Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority [both behave in accordance with a neurotic operation.” Hagos argues that neurosis is, in this case, a by-product of alienation trumped truly human values -- -- in the case of the white man, self imposed and imposing, in the case of the Negro, imposed from the outside and then self-perpetuated.

These are the synoptic psychic factors underlying the need for overcompensation in the Negro, in light of his pathological need and relentless efforts to achieve the white existence in order to ease the necessarily ineluctable pain of blackness!”

Hagos is quoting from Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. Hagos goes on to explain why he calls our pain “necessarily ineluctable.”

He says he uses that phrase because of the extremely destructive enduring legacy of European colonialism, which is compounded many times over by the white man’s refusal to apologize and make reparations for his monstrous, historical crimes [this is in the same week that Obama says the effects of colonialism are not really the problem any longer for Africans].

Hagos continues:

“Such a responsibility cannot be evaded given that the basic institutional structures (the nation-state system, capitalism, the Christian church and its disgraceful role in legitimating colonial policies with Christian missionaries having served as effective servants of empire) since the time of colonialism have remained essentially the same in the West, but also because the crimes committed at the time were so very consequential, with noticeable effects on contemporary African, Latin American and some Asian societies.”

Ron Daniels says that our President is well read. Ron Daniels says he is widely read. I just wonder what our President reads when it comes to the country of his father’s birth. Maybe his absentee father is causing some “absentee gaps” in his reading and in his thinking. They are certainly causing humongous gaps in his reasoning process.

Back to Hagos:

“This is why Thomas Pogge invokes the effects of a common and violent history ‘since the social starting positions are the worse-off and the better-off have [globally] emerged from a single historical process that was pervaded by massive, grievous wrongs.’”

Hagos then goes on to make a case in point:

“Most of the existing international inequality in standards of living was built up in the colonial period [are you listening, Mr. President?] when today’s affluent countries ruled today’s poor regions of the world: trading their people like cattle, destroying their political institutions and cultures and taking their natural resources….

“The relevant historical crimes were so horrendous, so diverse and so consequential that no historical-entitlement conception could credibly support the conclusion that our common history was sufficiently benign to justify even the radical inequalities in starting positions we are witnessing today. [Hence] we [in the West in general and in America, in particular] are not entitled to the huge advantages we enjoy from birth over the global poor, given how these inequalities have been built up [or, to put it differently] we affluent have no rights to property, however acquired, in the face of the excluded. Rather, they have a right to what we hold [because] the actual history [ie., the horrors of European conquests] is relevant.”

Hagos is quoting in this passage from “A Cosmopolitan Perspective on the Global Economic Order” that is found in Harry Brighouse and Gillian Brock’s (eds.), The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 97-99; (The italics are in the original.).

Many years ago I preached a sermon entitled: Somebody Ought to Say Something! A lot of somebodies are saying something. The problem is I do not think the President can hear what they are saying.