Sigh. Let's go back to Modern Race Dialogue 101:
1. Substitute for the words "white people" the following words: Imperialists, Capitalists, Racists, White Supremacists, Eurocentrists.
2. Now calculate just how many "white people" living in Africa (or America, or who are even on this list) do NOT fit in any of those categories. There wouldn't be that many left.
I hate having to explain the obvious each time I try to talk to white folks, but WHITE, when spoken of by Black folks, has very little to do with phenotype or racial categorization.
I remember when growing up that my Father would sometimes come home and recount a particularly difficult day he had in dealing with customers (he was a waiter). As Black people often do, he would sometimes shake his head in a weary manner while lamenting their ARROGANT and CONDESCENDING behavior, and just say "white folks", then sigh. This shorthand is something often used to refer not to people's skin color, but to their value system and behavior. The issue for my father was the fact that his internal emotional computer alarm had been set off by a pattern recognition of certain types of behavior, that had a tendency to be associated with certain types of people, i.e., white folks. Of course, we all understand now that part of that also had to do with their class position, but in terms of how Black people have had to cope in this White Supremacist society, they've tended to use "white" as a shorthand for asshole, racist, oppressor, and a whole bunch of other perjoratives.
Notice how you can somewhat tell who the white people are on this list by their attempts to intellectualize racial oppression out of existence, whereas for the Black and other non-white people, the idiocy of such simplistic formulas is self-evident. Yet the "white" people think, because of their Eurocentric worship of the so-called western intellectual tradition, that they are smarter or have it all figured out, when instead, they need to be committed to an asylum for the mentally disturbed. Yes folks, their denial is that serious.
In any place where Black people have not come to some sort of more conscious realization of their "Blackness", such as Brazil, they are MORE OPPRESSED than they are here simply because they have no way to fight back against the elephant that is standing on their neck. They can't see the elephant, so attribute their poverty and oppression to something else, or in the time honored tradition, blame themselves for what is beyond their own personal agency to correct.
What is wrong with you people? Are you just stupid, disingenous, or both?
Yes, and Yoshi, being a woman of color, but also being someone clued in to common sense, clearly understood that I wasn't really contemplating some terroristic purge of white people from the African continent, raping virginal white women and then sending them packing, which I know was the scenario that popped into your White Supremacist heads. I was really trying to see what sort of contortions your White Supremacist mentality would twist into to try and disabuse me of the African people's right to do such a thing. As is typical, you followed the traditional pattern of denial. That's why you're white. You're not white because of your skin color, you're white because you are clueless. You're white because even though you understand Hegel, Foucalt, etc., you're still stupid. Pitiful.
Art