‘That race is everything, is simply a fact, the most remarkable, the most comprehensive, which philosophy has ever announced. Race is everything: literature, science, art — in a word, civilization depends on it’
(Robert Knox, The Races of Man, London, 1850, P. 7)
The above words illustrate the basic elements of Racist Pathology.
Published in London at the height of the British Colonial Project, they encapsulate the attitude of the British Empire towards the ‘lesser’ non-White peoples of the world.
Even Charles Dickens, the celebrated English author expressed his agreement with the sentiment they conveyed.
The British were inherently superior, and all other people’s inferior, it was a Scientific fact and that was all there was to it!
Sadly, the Racists’ reliance on his own delusion only reveals the depth of his own affliction.
The need for the Racist to derive a false sense of superiority from what is in-fact a distortion of reality is the most disturbing aspect of Racist Pathology.
It is quite tragic and in some sense pitiful that White Supremacy has relied on distortions, Historical or otherwise mythologised as reality in order to infuse ‘Whiteness’ with legitimacy and a sense of inherent self-worth.
However, this is a mass delusion, and it follows that ANYONE else who relies on the same Psychological device for a sense of their own worth has fallen into the same web of the Racist machinations and delusions inherent in White Supremacy.
For this reason, in my view, ‘Black Power’ and ‘Black Pride’ movements should not create an equally false and self-serving delusional myth of Black Superiority as a counter-narrative to the mythology of White Supremacy.
This is a trap some Pro-Black movements appear to have fallen into perhaps due to the need to counteract the effects of Racism by developing an equally false Black superiority narrative.
It would be equally neurotic to find ourselves in a world where Blacks construct a narrative and actually come to regard themselves as superior to White people or any other Race.
It would simply be a reversal of the same Pathology we’ve already seen this time with the Blacks as its enforcers.
Its true that as Black people, our dignity has been violated and continues to be assailed by the doctrine of White Supremacy which pervades every aspect of Society today functioning as a kind of Algorithm which acts impersonally in accordance with the Parameters that have been programmed into it by History.
Nevertheless, in attempting to reclaim our own sense of worth and Self as Black people, let us not resort to the same cheap Psychological devices that have attempted to destroy our own self-esteem.
Black people or anyone else for that matter, cannot measure their Self-Esteem in reference to another Human being’s perceived sense of worth.
Black Supremacy therefore does not seem like a constructive response to White Supremacy because it only cages the minds of Blacks in the same Prison that White Supremacy traps the minds of Whites.
Black Supremacy, also further heightens the Polarity between the Races by ultimately introducing its own Pro-Black mass delusion.
In Black Skin White Masks, Fanon Author and Psychiatrist discusses the neurotic nature of Racism as a form of Psychopathology regardless of who perpetrates it.
In light of the above, it cannot be said that the Black Lives Matter Movement is a form of Black Supremacy because it does not seek to prepetuate Black Social, Political and Economic structural dominance.
Rather it only seeks Black recognition, equality and increased participation from spaces where Blacks are still excluded.
In that sense its a movement that seeks more Black inclusion and intergration in order to address the shortcomings of the Civil Rights Movement not the domination of Blacks over Whites or any other Race for that matter.
