Melville Cooke
After the attacks on America on September 11, 2001, George Bush led the way in asking and then answering the question written in the dust of the World Trade Center's towers and inked in the blood of those who jumped from 80 floors up, choosing to fly home rather than burn.
Why do they hate us? (Whoever 'they' is).
It is a question that I suspect he had more answers to than the ones he gave as he held up Lady Liberty's torch as a beacon of freedom that the forces of darkness wished to douse. I do not, however, have a clue why white people hate my skin colour so much.
While I could point to the United Sates' unwavering support of Israel's brutal treatment of the Palestinian people and the overthrow of Iran's democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 as two legitimate reasons for well-thinking persons of that region to despise the hypocrisy of the United States, I cannot identify one single incident why those white people who really have clout hate my skin colour so much.
Unrelenting
There is this rage, this white rage, towards black people which is consistent and unrelenting, which is as individual as a black body swaying under a tree (Strange Fruit, Lewis Allan - a Jew, incidentally - wrote and Billie Holiday sang) while a sea of white faces looks up and as all-encompassing in apartheid South Africa or the initial refusal of drug companies to allow cheaper versions of AIDS drugs to be provided to Africans.
This rage is not, of course, universal to every single white person and, in one of the more bitter ironies of the racial divide, the Caucasians who have cause to be consistently physically closest to blacks are often the ones without the persistent prejudice, the reserved rage. But they are not, in the final analysis, the ones who make the real decisions.
The ninth edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary defines a 'white lie' as "a harmless or trivial untruth". There is no definition for 'white rage', but since a lie is a lie is a lie, I have taken the liberty of making a substitution in the meaning of 'white lie' to define 'white rage' as 'harmless or trivial anger'. Which it is not, of course, but these days on the face of it is a polite rage, seemingly harmless or even non-existent.
Why lynch a black man when you can simply fail him in the school system? He will be killed by another frustrated black man or the police, anyway, or simply live as an example of a race's failure.
The cruelest irony of this white rage, which is not restricted to black people but seems most harshly directed at we darkest of the darker-skinned races, is that it is the whites who have been the initiators.
From the sailing of the SS Jesus of Lubeck as the flagship of the first fleet in West India Slave Trading Company through to the partition of Africa, Jim Crow laws in the southern U.S. and apartheid in South Africa (which is not yet over), it is the white people who have raged against the blacks, with sporadic and often futile reaction.
Still, I am yet to know the source of that initial hate.
I do have a theory about the continued prejudice, though. A rapist, I understand, almost invariably hates to see his victim after the deed. He hates the evidence of his guilt and shame in the flesh (in more ways than one). Similarly, the raging whites prefer to be politely vengeful against the descendants of their cruelty rather than consider their race's behaviour the nadir of human decency.
And instead of responding as we should with black rage, we still ask: what did we do to you in the first place, to stir this white rage?
Next week: The low black standard.
Melville Cooke is a freelance writer.
