The History of All Hitherto Existing Society: A New Interpretation
The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of biological and cultural assimilation between different tribes and ethnicities giving birth to new historical peoples that light up and excite the world.
Throughout human history we see the rise of new ethnicities and people that arise out of the assimilation of different tribes or peoples into other tribes that produced new beings. The foundational myth of Rome tells us that the Romans were a people that occupied a small city, their female population was small and they worried about the survival of their seed; in order to ensure the continuation of their people they kidnapped and impregnated females of the nearby Sabine people. This led to a confrontation between the Romans and the Sabines. Through struggle, the Romans and the Sabines pledged to join as one people and thus was the great civilisation of Rome born.
The British civilisation and the English language was born from the coming of continental European tribes to the British Isles after the fall of Roman Britain, who assimilated the indigenous British inhabitants into their culture. From the coming of the Saxons and the Angles until the first Coronation of an Anglo-Saxon King of England, the Anglo-Saxons and the people of other ethnicities such as the Welsh and the Cornish on the British Isles were in a struggle, out of that struggle came a new nation that would come to dominate much of the world.
The history of humanity has been the coming of new ethnicities through mixing of different ethnicities into new ethnicities and identities. The history of human societies is the coming of new historical peoples out of the genetics of other peoples. It is an other and an other becoming one as an other.
When we talk of black history we often miss the facts on something even more interesting that has been developing over the years since the slave abolition; we have seen the coming of a new historical peoples, a people born from both the genetics and culture of the slave and the slave master. A people that carry the blood of Africa and Europe. In our commitment to using the one drop rule to discuss race, we have missed out on an important phenomena; many black heroes are multi-racial in heritage and they do not look like the majority of black people.
The differences between Marcus Garvey and Huey Newton are enough so that an alien would consider them to be of different ethnicities. The differences in skin complexion and facial structure between Khalid Muhammad and Malcolm X are equally as strong. It is only by some intellectual slight of hand that we could make them the same.
The many yellow skinned black heroes, Frederic Douglass, Booker T Washington, W E B Dubois, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Farrakhan, Huey Newton, Bob Marley, Elaine Brown, Kathleen Cleaver and Obama amongst others are products of a specific type of racial psychological experience that is not experienced by figures like Garvey.
Although these heroes are considered to be black their psychological experience differs from dark skinned black folk. For one, the physicality of their appearance makes them stand out in a crowd of black people. Their skin is quite startlingly different from black Africa. Almost like the difference between blacks and whites. In that sense, light-skinned black folks experience their lives as outsiders; they gain a more acute understanding of difference. Their psychological experience means that they often have a temperament that is strong in order to protect themselves from the issues that difference can bring.
Unlike the darker skinned black populations that have an outsider experience with whites, lighter-skinned blacks have an outsider experience even in their own group surroundings as well as amongst whites; whilst also being able to acknowledge the debt to Europe and Africa that lies in their genes and in the structures of their consciousness.
The coming of a new historical people born of both Europe and Africa is unremarked upon in most debates about race. Although a serious study of race would have to examine the experience beyond the one drop rule. Any serious academic study on race would have to consider the experiences of the lighter hued blacks, such as those mentioned above or Rihanna and Beyonce, as the unique experiences of a new historical people who are neither African nor European and are more than simply the parts of their ethnic ancestry before them.
Much of what we term as black thought is in fact the response to the world of a new historical people, born of both Europe and Africa. A people neither African or European, neither slave nor master, with their own psychological response to the western world. Out of these people has arisen a consciousness and culture of resistance, as successive individuals that share that hue and mixture have put their neck on the line to fight for racial and economic justice.
The tradition and culture has become such that many individuals that share the yellowy, brown hue of the likes of Bob Marley, Malcolm X and Huey Newton have internalised the transformational thinking of their heroes that look like them and sought to mimic them as the basis of their cultural identity.
That is why I am like I am. I have internalised the persona of my yellowy, brown comrades and adopted their radical tradition as my own personal identity. I am all those that came before me that shared my hue and made a difference on the world stage. I am also all those that came before me that do not share my same hue and race but whose blood runs through my veins.
I am part of a new historical people, upon whom nature has thrust a new physical identity; who acknowledge a debt to Europe and Africa and their enslaved fore-parents of the Americas but whose psychological experience has enabled them to see the vulnerability of both groups in the world and their very being has brought them to the conclusion that Europe and Africa playing the role of Frankenstein and creating a new historical people of a yellowy, brown hue may be the way towards a new psychology and a new society.
Maybe, the only form of production that drives society is the production of the human.
The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of biological and cultural assimilation between different tribes and ethnicities giving birth to new historical peoples that light up and excite the world.
ALT
