From: HF.GTD@forsythe.stanford.edu (Gabrielle Daniels)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.african.american
Subject: A bushel of raspberries for Kolodney
Date: 21 Jan 1993 17:14:47 -0800
Organization: Stanford University
NNTP-Posting-Host: morrow.stanford.edu

A bushel of raspberries, Kolodney.
.
I dont buy this premise that if Indians or Africans had the
technology, they would have overrun Europe.  Where did this bankrupt
ideology come from?  Something from Harold Bloom, perhaps?  So it
was better us (white folks) than they (people of color)?  This is
bad intellectualism, bad politics and bad culture.  This lets off
white supremacy too easy.
.
What do I mean by white supremacy?  I mean, that you ARE excusing,
despite your claims to the contrary, all these conquistadors,
colonialists, and neocolonialists for their despicable march for:
Well, everyone does it.  We just happened to have the right weaponry
and we were in the mood.  This is reductionist.  It does not always
follow that because someone has the technology, one is going to be
imperialist or expansionist.  Certain tribes, certain countries made
a choice.  There are conscious decisions, moral and otherwise,
depending on the culture, made in all these situations.  Do you have
any proof for what I consider the spuriousness of your claims?
.
If anything, the only thing that people have in common is the
tendency to dehumanize the opponent.  However, in some of these
cultures, they extolled even the military prowess of the
challengers!  Unfortunately, however, what Ive seen in studying
white folks is that people of color in their cosmology stayed down.
.
Europeans and their descendants made a virtual cosmology--with
themselves at the center--for their claims for hegemony over most of
the world.  White skin privilege was a big part of it.  This makes
Europeans all the more persons of distinction, and I use the term
loosely.  Despite your post of bell hooks article, despite Jews
insistence (at least, conscious Jews) that they are not white,
Jews are not immune to _acting white_ and exercising white skin
privilege over dark-skinned people of color, as if they had
something in common with the goyim.  And, begging your pardon, the
darkest looking Jew (barring intermarriage with the brothers and
sisters) is still WHITE LOOKING to me!  I think this is what black
people on the whole object to in regards to Jews.  Claiming to be
people of color, and claiming privileges, too!  I mean, whenever I
read for example, Walkers _Meridian_, or recently, _How I Became
Hettie Jones_, which is the really interesting autobiography of
Amiri Barakas white and Jewish first wife, I hear/see the Jewish
parents freaking out over the marriage partners or someone doing
_kaddish_ over them.  I do not believe that this is just because
they picked non-Jews as husbands or wives either.  There is
something about our blackness, as well as by extension, the
_blackness_ of Palestinians who are nothing if not ethnic brothers
to the Jews, that bug the hell out of certain Jews.  Its in-bred,
and I believe it is cultural.  It must be their fear of throwback,
too!
.
Furthermore, let me make it clear.  I do not subscribe to
Farrakhanism, the worst excesses of Public Enemy (who despite
_right_ politics have problems with both Jews AND women for
starters), or any of that clack.  I do not condone the murder of
that Australian Jew, whose supposed attacker, a young brother,
recently got off in New York.  I think of some of this stuff that
the black community is facing is understandable.  They see whites
getting off for crimes, so they are on the jury and they let
brotherman off.  Two wrongs, in this case, in revenge for a Jewish
resident of Crown Heights running over a black child, dont make it
right.
.
Getting back to the main issue.  My feeling is that if folks had the
technology but didnt wanna jump some other country, like the Aztecs
against the French, for example, if they knew they existed before
Fernando Cortes, they didnt hafta.
.
The Moslems waged jihad with Eastern Europe, etc., first and
foremost for the glory of Islam.  Greed most probably entered the
scene, too.  Technology?  Reason?  Look, both sides had cannon by
this time, too.
.
As far as the Aztecs and their conquering ways, they probably had
access to the same weaponry as their neighbors.  They probably had
more numbers.  Thats technology?  Whats in a certain culture that
would allow them to be warlike and by extension, imperialist?
Because some people of color were not, and never got into that
number in the first place.  Whats the beef?  Were they just dying to
conquered?  Were the oppressors looking for raw materials?  Markets?
Get a grip.  What was the modus operandi behind their expansionism
and tribute system with other Indian tribes?

Look at the Chinese.  Im not saying that they werent casting
covetous glances at the Vietnamese and the Cambodians.  There was
the Mongol Empire, too.  But when it came time to check out the
great unknown of the Pacific, or even to consider stretching out to
the Levant and Eastern Europe, they probably just said, wait a
minute.  Whats the limit?  Are we stepping into something we hadnt
oughta?  Do we have everything we need?  Maybe we need to look into
ourselves and develop our inner selves.  Maybe controlling others
doesnt get the same result in the long run as controlling ourselves
and depending on our own initiative.
.
Look at England.  Everybody had to be under the heel of this
iddy-biddy island in the Atlantic at one point.  Even the most low
class of white Brits considered himself superior to a black--or even
an Irishman for that matter, and still does, long after the freaking
_sun_ has _set_.  I refer you to the oft-repeated, _Jewel in the
Crown_ series on PBS based on the Raj Quartet books.  Why?
.
People dont have to be racist because of technology, too.  They can
be racist without it as well.
Newsgroups: soc.culture.african.american