Prometheus 6

On this blog, I do not claim to speak for all black bloggers, as blacks in the blogosphere are as unique and diverse as any other blogger -- in many ways, and on many topics. Though I am proud to be black (and I always will be), I am even more proud to be a self-thinking individual.

On this blog, I speak for me, myself, and I. No one else. You'll get my perspective on news items in my backyard and abroad, politics, education, liberty, economics, race, culture, religion, and whole lot of other stuff as it stimulates my brain. Your mileage may vary.

And that's all I have to say about that...

Robinson, I think, is suggesting that race is not a category imposed by western society, but rather a category extended from the group which it is claiming, in an attempt to shield it from the oppression of its western determinants. Robinson later talks about how there was a slave tradition that if you don't eat the salts from the new world, you are not tied to it and, when you die, you can fly back to Africa. In a sense, this refers to the slaves power to create an identity without succumbing to the imposition of the white world; as that identity is maintained, it will bring them back to Africa.

In this case, we're talking about color blindness. And for some reason mainstream western (ie, white) culture got it into their heads that they created race, so they can choose to be color blind. According to Robinson, this is far from the case. White culture cannot be colorblind because it is race that is being imposed on them as a response to their oppressive glance upon the individuals-as-categorized-as-community.

(Pardon my existentialism.)

But my point is that it is part of the oppression of the white mainstream to first, to pretend to racialize others, and second, to pretend to be able to halt the racialism. This is the exact oppression that racialism is attempting to confront. The Black, or laden, or even Female (thought gender will take a many unique twists) communities are creating their "Africa" in their rejection of white embodiment (Pardon my phenomena.) In other words, it is in the racialism that they are responding to their own situation, not the situation as forced on them by the oppressors.

Did I make this clear enough? Am I just blowing in the wind? I have no idea. But it builds, I think, towards a system that I would definitely like to take further. In the end, I would like to move along similar lines and find a unity in the forms of oppression, though very distinct, between Race, Class, Gender, and Sexual Orientation.