Because the right information can change the world.

The Auris Project, Inc.

The Mis-Education of Kwame Zulu Shabazz

An Open Letter to a Black Nationalist

Dear Professor Shabazz: I noticed that you blocked me from your Facebook page in the middle of a discussion about the plight of Africans and the African diaspora. You have a robust forum on Facebook, where Black people from all over the world convene to debate and discuss a wide range of social and historical issues related to Africa. The forum has many positives, not the least being a wide array of historical and contemporary sources on Africa and the Black experience. But increasingly, the forum has become disturbingly anti-intellectual in nature. You have repeatedly argued that the White race as a whole is unceasingly malevolent, and that every awful thing that happens to Black people can be traced to White oppression, bigotry and violence. I have pushed back on that notion, my primary conviction being that Black people would be better served by focusing on selfimprovement and self-determination. I believe that we have persistent social pathologies in our communities that we continue to perpetrate on ourselves. I believe that we will never solve them by solely focusing our energies on the historical and contemporary misdeeds of members of the White race. This is not the first time you have blocked me from your forum. A few weeks after signing on more than a year ago, you kicked me off after I disagreed with you about one thing or another. To your credit, you thought better of it and invited me back. In the time since then, I have been careful to disagree with you in a respectful and thoughtful way, certainly as it related to your wholesale denunciation of White people, but also as it related to your tendency to absolve African leadership of any responsibility for the current plight of Africans. I decided to write this open letter because not only did you block me this time, but you also blocked the people who agreed with me. That is unacceptable behavior from anyone who pretends to be an intellectual looking for solutions. What that singular action tells me is that you have managed to purge whatever democratic tendencies you might have had a year ago. It tells me that you are no longer really interested in finding solutions. You do not want a free exchange of ideas where people are allowed to disagree and whereby the exchange of information and experiences leads to heightened awareness and epiphany. You do not want to learn anything from the thousands of people who access your forum. You are not interested in knowing if or how your worldview is flawed. You want to be the only word and you want to be the last word.

You want to be king. On the one hand, you say you are an advocate for race consciousness, a staunch proponent of African Americans developing pride in their Black African heritage. You say your goal is to encourage an understanding of what it means to be Black in America. The problem for you, though, is that what you choose to share about being Black in America has very little resemblance to the life that you actually lead in America. Kwame Zulu Shabazzs Facebook America is a violently repressive Dystopia whereby White America has complete and unrestrained control of the Black American experience. Kwame Zulu Shabazzs actual America is quite different. In your actual America, you gladly rake in the untold privileges that come to Harvard graduates who choose to live out their careers in the sometimes rarified circles of American academia. White America has oppressed you, but not in the way you think. It has oppressed you because it has given you a doctoral degree from one of its finest universities without ever requiring you to demonstrate critical thinking. You should be howling in outrage about that, but of course, you had no idea that it had happened. Your obtuseness, your rabid racism and your intolerance of opposing views surely those are the results of your unsatisfactory American education, fueled by your distinctly American vanity. In other words, if you have been harmed by White America, it is because White America has placed you in a position of influence on behalf of your people without giving you the skills necessary to be of any use to us. That is the slyest of oppressions, my dear, the act of sending someone out to do the devils work while the victim remains convinced that he is on a mission from God. We need people of influence who are true world citizens, people who are humanists who come from a place of love for all of Gods children. We need people who understand the true complexities of power and oppression. Black people suffered when White people did not speak up in large enough numbers against racial hatred and tyranny. My promise to my people (broadly defined as people) is that I wont make that same mistake. And I will say this: If you can only articulate oppression in terms of race, then what you have to say is no more valuable to the world at large than the ravings of the Ku Klux Klan or the Neo-Nazis. The impoverishment of social perspectives built on the construct of race has been obvious for some time now. A person who still forms his thought on that false premise really has nothing useful to say and should be quiet. Black Americans are as diverse as the stars that dot our universe. There is no Black community, just as there is no White community. The African Diaspora is so vast and complicated it is a mystery unto itself. It will take persistent collaborative discipline to even begin to fully understand it, if that is even possible. It should be talked about only in wonder and definitive statements should be used sparingly. By constantly

talking about it through the prism of racial strife, you rob it of its ability to be appreciated simply for what it is. You refuse to allow people just to fall into the wonder of it. You sully it with your obsessions. This is a seminal moment in time, not just for Africans and the Diaspora, but for the entire world. The history of Africa is so immense, so incredibly rich and vibrant that we are just now scratching the surface of it. Like children awaking from a long nap, we as humans are discovering how Africa came to be the mother of the human race and we are maturing in our appreciation and respect for the one who made us possible. We cannot afford people in positions of influence thwarting that awakening with xenophobia. We cannot afford people who purport to speak for us silencing any of our voices. We cannot afford intellectuals picking and choosing information with a single viewpoint in mind. We cannot throw off one oppressor for another. You should be quiet. You are doing Africans and African Americans a grave disservice by your insistence that they need only blame White people for their struggles. The Black underclass in America grows every day, and the pathologies that affect them become more and more intransigent in every new generation. The chasm between the Black middle class and the Black underclass has grown to such an extent that the current phenomenon in poor Black neighborhoods can be dubbed Black flight. That means that the simple gift of role modeling is unavailable to the most vulnerable among us. But on this note, from your cozy house in a nice neighborhood, you are silent. The violent pathologies that afflict some of the most underdeveloped areas of Africa - the demonization of homosexuals, the impunity surrounding rapes of women, the hunting and killing of children as witches - are things that should be of major concern to anyone purporting to be a voice for Africans. But on these notes, as well, you are often silent. If you are only interested in telling part of the story, then you should commit fully to your reticence and you should be quiet. Also, I wanted to address another point. Before you blocked me from your Facebook, you accused me of being someone who has an irrational love of White people. You inferred that my love of White people made me somehow a traitor to my race, much in the same way that White bigots routinely taunted evolved White people with snarls of nigger lover to shut them up. You even counted my Facebook friends and noted that at least a third of the people on my Facebook were White while you bragged that you have never even let a White person into your house. And like your counterparts on the other end of your imaginary racial spectrum, you told only part of the story. You failed to note for your audience that in addition to White and Black friends, I also have hundreds of Hispanic friends, Asian friends, Arab friends, Native American friends, and friends from just about every corner of the globe. I look at my Facebook page and I practically grin with happiness seeing all of those beautiful faces. I have strong disagreements with some of them, but every one of them

has taught me something about the world and about myself. I look at my Facebook page and I see Gods green earth, and I am awash with gratitude and pride. In your writings you have stated that you believe that so long as White supremacy exists, we can best combat it collectively as Black/African people. I have two things to say about that. First of all, pretensions of supremacy are a clear sign of moral and metaphysical weakness. It is not something worth rallying against, because it evaporates in the light of everyday exposure. True leaders know this intrinsically. People who are exposed to other cultures tend to be more enlightened than people who are not. People who walk into a room feeling superior often leave it looking for something to suckle. So while you are sitting there exhorting your followers to avoid White people in order to better tilt at the windmills of White supremacy, the rest of us are interacting everyday with your enemy, and through that interaction, the windmill disappears. If it still looms for you, well, you can see that that is your fault. Secondly, you cannot on paper talk so prettily about the need for collectivism of Black people and then have the temerity to silence the voices of Black people you do not agree with. That is fascism of the worst sort, and it is as repugnant coming from a socalled Black nationalist as it is coming from some big-bellied sheriff in the Deep South. If you are so fragile and unprepared that you cannot bear to hear people disagree with you, then please do not start the conversation. And lastly, I want to encourage you to stop and rethink the direction you are taking your nationalism. Be very careful. You seem to be advocating not for the liberation of your people, but for an unlikely reversal of fortunes, that is, an opportunity whereby the people of your choice get to be the oppressor for a change. That is regressive in the extreme. There really is only one true path to full equality and respect for Africans and African-Americans and it is through mutual respect and tolerance of all people for all people. There simply is no other way. Most sincerely:

Denise McVea