Black Power | Stokely Carmichael
We had intended to prepare a written speech for this Congress, and had started to prepare it three weeks before the trip, but the US government thought that as I was starving it would be better if they saw to it that I got some meals every day, so they confined me to their prison system, and I lost all the notes. So I tried to get another one together.
Now since Iāve been at the Congress from Saturday Iāve been very confused, because Iām not a psychologist or a psychiatrist, Iām a political activist and I donāt deal with the individual. I think itās a cop out when people talk about the individual. What weāre talking about around the US today, and I believe around the Third World, is the system of international white supremacy coupled with international capitalism. And weāre out to smash that system. And people who see themselves as part of that system are going to be smashed with it ā or weāre going to be smashed.
So that Iām not going to centre on the individual ā Iām not even going to talk about him at all. I want to talk about the system. I want to use some quotes to back up my feeling about talking of the system, and the first one comes from one of my patron saints: Frantz Fanon. His quote is that
Freud insisted that the individual factor be taken into account through psychoanalysis. It will be seen that the black manās alienation is not an individual question. It is a question of socio-diagnostics. The Negro problem does not resolve itself into the problem of Negroes living among white men, but rather of Negroes exploited, enslaved, despised by the colonialist, capitalist society that is only accidentally white.
But since it is accidentally white, thatās what we talk about ā white western society.
Now the other reason that I donāt talk about the individual is that I feel that whenever you raise questions about racial problems to white western society, each white man says āWell donāt blame me, Iām only one person and I really donāt feel that way. Actually I have nothing against you, I see you as an equal. Youāre just as good as I am ā almost.ā And to try and clear that up I want to point out the difference between individual racism as opposed to institutionalized racism.
It is important to this discussion of racism to make a distinction between the two types: individual racism and institutional racism. The first type consists of overt acts by individuals, with usually the immediate result of the death of victims, or the traumatic and violent destruction of property. This type can be recorded on TV cameras and can frequently be observed in the process of commission.
The second type is less overt, far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts, but is no less destructive of human life. The second type is more the overall operation of established and respected forces in the society, and thus does not receive the condemnation that the first type receives.
Let me give you an example of the first type: When unidentified white terrorists bomb a black church and kill five black children, that is an act of individual racism, widely deplored by most segments of the world. But when in that same city, Birmingham, Alabama, not five but 500 black babies die each year because of lack of proper food, shelter and medical facilities; and thousands more are destroyed and maimed physically, emotionally and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and discrimination in the black community, that is a function of institutionalized racism. When a black family moves into a home in a white neighbourhood, and it is stoned, burned or routed out, the latter is an overt act of individual racism, and many people condemn that, in words at least. But it is institutionalized racism that keeps the black people locked in dilapidated slums, tenements, where they must live out their daily lives subject to the prey of exploiting slum landlords, merchants, loan-sharks and the restrictive practices of real-estate agents. Weāre talking now about the US, but I think you can apply a little of it to London. But the society either pretends it does not know of institutionalized racism, or is incapable of doing anything meaningful about the conditions of institutionalized racism. And the resistance to doing anything meaningful about institutionalized racism stems from the fact that western society enjoys its luxury from institutionalized racism, and therefore, were it to end institutionalized racism, it would in fact destroy itself.
O.K. then, now I want to talk about de-mystifying human beings, and Iām talking about the Third World, Iām not talking about the white West. I think that the Third World are the people whom, at least in the US, black people are concerned with. The white West has been able to do very well for itself. I want to talk, then, very specifically about a number of things under that.
The first is the importance of definitions. The second: we want to talk about cultural integrity versus cultural imposition. And then we want to talk about the US, specifically the cities and the rebellions (as opposed to āriotsā as they are called by the white press) that are occurring in the US, which are going to lead to guerrilla warfare. And we want to talk about violence because the West is always upset by violence when a black man uses it. Yeah.
I want to start off with definitions by using a quote from one of my favourite books, which is Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll. In the book thereās a debate between Humpty Dumpty and Alice around the question of definitions. It goes like this:
āWhen I use a word,ā Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, āIt means just what I choose it to mean. Neither more nor less.ā
āThe question is,ā said Alice, āwhether you can make words mean so many different things.ā
āThe question is,ā said Humpty Dumpty, āwho is to be master. That is all.ā
Now I think that Lewis Carroll is correct. Those who can define are the masters. And white western society has been able to define, and thatās why she has been the master. And we want to follow up with a lot of those examples, because I think that the white youth of my generation in the West today does not understand his own subconscious racism, because he accepts the writings of the West, which has destroyed, distorted and lied about history, so that he starts off with a basic assumption of superiority which is not even recognizable.
Frederick Douglas, the great black leader of the 1800s, said that when a slave stops obeying a master, then and only then does he seek his liberation. Camus said the same thing 100 years later on the first page of The Rebel, when he said that when a slave stops accepting definitions imposed upon him by his master, then and only then does he begin to move and create a life for himself. Thatās very important, because what the people of the Third World are going to have to do today is to stop accepting the definitions imposed on them by the West. Letās give some examples.
The first one is that the history books tell you that nothing happens until a white man comes along. If you ask any white person who discovered America, theyāll tell you āChristopher Columbusā. And if you ask them who discovered China, theyāll tell you āMarco Poloā. And if you ask them, as I used to be told in the West Indies, I was not discovered until Sir Walter Raleigh needed pitch lake for his ship, and he came along and found me and said āWhup ā I have discovered you.ā And my history began.
But let us examine the racism in that statement Let us examine it very closely. Columbus did not discover America. Columbus may be the first recorded white man to have set foot in America. That is all. There were people there before Columbus. Unfortunately, those people were not white unfortunately for the white West, fortunately for us, they werenāt white. But what happens is that white western society never recognizes the existence of non-white people, either consciously or subconsciously. So that all around the world, the peoples of the Third World never did anything until some white man came along ā and thatās why Chinaās non-existent, because Mao wonāt let no white folk in there. Yeah. And pretty soon Hong Kong is going to be non-existent because theyāre going to kick them out.
So that the situation you have is that history has been written ā but indeed it has been so distorted. One of the biggest lies, I think, that western society could have told was to name itself Western Civilization. And now all through history we were studying Western Civilization, and that meant that all else was uncivilized. And white kids who read that today never recognize that theyāre being told that they are superior to everybody else because they have produced civilization. At best, thatās a misnomer, at worst, and more correctly, itās a damn lie. Yes. Western Civilization has been anything but civilized. It has been most barbaric, as a matter of fact. We are told that Western Civilization begins with the Greeks, and the epitome of that is Alexander the Great The only thing that I can remember about Alexander the Great was that at age twenty-six he wept because there were no other people to kill, murder and plunder. And that is the epitome of Western Civilization. And if youāre not satisfied with that, you could always take the Roman Empire. Their favourite pastime was watching men kill each other or lions eating up men. They were a civilized people. The fact is that their civilization, as they called it, stemmed from the fact that they oppressed other peoples. And that the oppression of other people allowed them a certain luxury, at the expense of those other people. That has been interpreted as ācivilizationā for the West, and that is precisely what it has done. The only difference is that after the Roman Empire, when the British Empire ā on which the sun never used to set, but today it sets, sometimes it donāt even rise ā began to exploit non-white people, what they did was they let colour be the sole choice of the people they would exploit.
Now thatās very important because as we go along you can see one of the best examples you can see today. You see, because youāve been able to lie about terms, youāve been able to call people like Cecil Rhodes a philanthropist, when in fact he was a murderer, a rapist, a plunderer and a thief. But you call Cecil Rhodes a philanthropist because what he did was that after he stole our diamonds and our gold, he gave us some crumbs so that we can go to school and become just like you. And that was called philanthropy. But we are renaming it: the place is no longer called Rhodesia, it is called Zimbabwe, thatās its proper name. And Cecil Rhodes is no longer a philanthropist, heās known to be a thief ā you can keep your Rhodes Scholars, we donāt want the money that came from the sweat of our people.
Now let us move on to present times. Iām always appalled when some white person tells me that āprogress is being madeā. I always ask him āprogress for whom? And from whom?ā Progress for white people might be made, because I would say that since World War II they have learned a little about how to get along with people of colour. But I donāt think thereās been progress for the black people, thereās not been progress for the people of colour around the Third World. And progress will not be measured for us by white people. We will have to tell you when progress is being made. You cannot tell us when progress is being made, because progress for us means getting you off our backs, and thatās the only progress that we can see.
Now then, we want to talk about cultural integrity versus cultural imposition, because that stems from definitions. Because the white West felt somehow that it was better than everybody else ā I remember when I was a young man in the West Indies, I had to read Rudyard Kiplingās The White Maris Burden. I thought the best thing the white man could do for me was to leave me alone, but Rudyard Kipling told them to come and save me because I was half savage, half child. It was very white of him. What has happened is that the West has used force to impose its culture on the Third World wherever it has been. If a few settlers left England to go to Zimbabwe, there was no reason for them to rename that country after themselves, Rhodesia, and then force everybody to speak their language, English. If they had respect for the cultures of other people, they would have spoken the language of those people and adopted their religions. But what in fact happened was because the West was so powerful ā thatās the word nobody wants to talk about, power. It was only power that made people bow their heads to the West, you know. They didnāt bow it because they liked Jesus Christ, or because they liked white folks. No, Machiavelli said a long time ago that āpeople obey masters for one of two reasons. Either they love them, or they fear them.ā I often ask myself whether or not the West believes the Third World really loves them and thatās why theyāve obeyed them. But itās clear that they feared them. The West with its guns and its power and its might came into Africa, Asia, Latin America and the USA and raped it. And while they raped it they used beautiful terms. They told the Indians āWeāre civilizing you, and weāre taming the West. And if you wonāt be civilized, weāll kill you.ā So they committed genocide and stole the land, and put the Indians on reservations, and they said that they had civilized the country.
They werenāt satisfied with that. They came to Africa and stole Africans and brought them to the USA, and we were being brought there to be ācivilizedā, because we were cannibals and we ate each other, and they were going to give us a better life, which was, of course, slavery.
Now I want to make just one clear distinction, before I move on, in terms of cultural integrity. Inside the countries of the West there was democracy for the whites, at least some form of it. But that democracy was at the expense of non-white people. While Britain surely enjoyed her papers, and her Parliamentary nonsense about constitutionality, she was suppressing all of Africa. The same thing holds true for France, and De Gaulle still suppresses Somaliland, I would like to inform him; and the same thing, of course, is true today for the US.
White people are very funny, you know. De Gaulle got out of Vietnam a few years ago, and now heās gotten very broad-minded. But heās still in Somaliland.
So what the West was able to do is impose its culture and it told everyone āwe are better, we are civilizedā. And because of its force, all of the non-white countries began to try to imitate Europe and to imitate its ways, and to try and copy it because nobody wanted to be uncivilized.ā¦ Our ancestors had recognized that they knew what civilization was long before Europeans even got out of their caves, and that they should have stuck to their way of life. Had they done that, perhaps we shouldnāt be in the shape we are in today.
So that all other non-western people have been stripped of their own culture. They have been forced to accept a culture that does not belong to them. And so messed up are the minds of people of colour around the world, that in certain sections of Vietnam today, and in Japan certainly, women who have slanted eyes are cutting their eyes so that they can get round eyes to look like the West. Needless to say what black people have been doing to their hair, especially females: they have been putting hot combs in their hair, straightening it, attempting to look like white people, because the West has defined beauty as that which was theirs ā the white woman, who was supposed to be taboo.
And so the non-white world begin to copy and to imitate, began to do all of the things of the West. I think what is happening in the world today is that thereās a fight for cultural integrity. Each group of people wants to retain its own integrity, and say āTo Hell with the West and its culture. Let it keep it. We want ours.ā I donāt propose to speak for the Red Guards, but I would assume that thatās part of the fight that theyāre waging. Itās a healthy fight and it needs to be waged. I know in the US that one of the fights that weāre waging is the fight for our own cultural integrity. We want to be able to recognize the contributions that the non-white peoples of the world have made. Itās amazing that, when you do some reading, you find out that they did most of what the white people claim that they did. They just distorted history. Pythagoras didnāt give you geometry, the Egyptians gave it to you.
I have something against England, I really do. Because when I was young I had to read all that rot about how good England was to Trinidad, while she was raping us left and right. And all I used to read about London when I was small was the beauty of London, and how peacefully everybody lived, and how nice life was ā at my expense. And I used to say āI sure would like to get to London and burn it down to the ground.ā But thatās violence!
Now the trouble with the West is that it feels it has the right to give everybody their independence. Thatās totally absurd. You can never give anyone their independence. All men are born free. They are enslaved by other men. So that the only act that the men who enslaved them can do is, not give them their independence, but stop oppressing them. Thereās a very important difference, and I donāt think people make that distinction all the time. Iām amazed when I pick up the paper and read that āEngland today decided to give independence to the West Indies.ā Who the hell is England to give me my independence? All they can do is stop oppressing me, get off my back. But it sounds so much nicer when they say, āWeāre giving you your independence. Youāre ready for it now.ā Rather than for them to admit to themselves āWeāre going to s...