RAW: Now you have raised the possibility of genocide before in books such as Black-on-Black Violence. Could you briefly talk about how Black-on-Black crime serves white supremacy by playing a role in our own genocide? WILSON: Well, what we are experiencing in the African American community is not just confined to America. You’ll find this experience in the Caribbean, in Africa, wherever you have large populations of Black people. You go to Brazil Black children are being shot in the streets; people just get in their cars and shoot Black children. You will find this sort of thing going on in Uruguay. A lot of us don’t realize that there are large populations of Black People in Central America and South America. Africa is suffering tremendously. You can even look the millions of Blacks in Europe. We are finding that there is a general oppression of Black people across the globe as the global economic system reorganizes itself, and reorganizes itself in a way to leave Blacks out of the global economic system, just as they are being left out of domestic economic systems. What you’re getting here when it comes back to Black-on-Black violence are reactions to the dynamic economic changes. You’ve got a lot of people who want to lay all of this on family values and the absence of old time religion and things of this nature. And while that’s a part of the mix, you cannot just blame this all on the loss of family values. People don’t eat values, you know. You have to actually work; you have to feed your family. There are concrete material things that people have to have. The mere training of people in family values is not going to solve this problem. As a matter of fact, when you transform people’s material position in the world, you transform their values. So a part of transformation of the values that we complain about is a result of the transformation of the concrete living conditions of Black people. The key to understanding the relationship that Black-on-Black crime has to white supremacy and genocide is knowing the context in which the problem occurs. Too often people want to talk about the problems that exist in the Black community as if they are unconnected to everything else going on in the country. This is a terrible mistake in analysis. You have to begin with the political and economic context in which a people exist in order to begin to understand their behavior. When Blacks commit violence against other Blacks, they’re committing it within a certain political economic context. Violent acts are social acts. We may call them anti-social, but they are still social, whether anti- or pro-, which means that they have to do with the nature of relationships between people. That’s what we mean when we use the word social. If we are to understand the social relationship of Blacks to whites and to the social and political system in which we exist When we look at this system under which we exist as Black people, we’ll see a connection between it and the kind of behavior the Black community is undergoing at this particular time.
Posted on: Fri, 09 Aug 2013 10:21:57 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015