Respect yourself, respect yourself
If you don’t respect yourself
Ain’t nobody gonna give a good cahoot, na na na na
Respect yourself, respect yourself
So say the Staple Singers in the song “Respect Yourself” from the 1972 album Be Altitude: Respect Yourself. It occurred to me as I was searching for housing information for disabled people that I was running across all these souls who, for one reason or another, didn’t like who they were. They disliked the way the rest of the world reacted to them and so they downplayed their difference instead of acknowledging it and moving on. These weren’t only disabled people, but gay people and black people and . . . and . . . Anyone who wasn’t white, hetero and able-bodied seemed to face the same issue at some point in their lives: whether to come out of the closet. “Coming out” isn’t only a gay thing and it isn’t always something one does in front of a crowd of family, friends and peers. The most important step in coming out is acknowledging to oneself that there is something that sets him or her apart from the majority of other people in one’s environment. Having “come out” to oneself, the next thing is to accept the difference and become comfortable with it. As any out gay person knows, that is far easier said than done. It often takes many years to get comfy in one’s own skin. It’s almost as though coming out is giving birth to an infant. That child has to grow up in the world for a few years, make the usual mistakes, learn the usual things, go through puberty, grow physically, emotionally and spiritually to become a mature adult. It doesn’t happen overnight.
I used to hang out in African history newsgroups on Usenet in the mid 90s or so. I’d often encounter a number of North Africans, particularly Egyptians, who’d swear on the holy Koran that the population’s phenotype is the same now as it was upwards of 3000 years ago. Given the number of times North Africa, especially Egypt, has been invaded by everyone from Nubians to Babylonians to Visigoths to Greeks to Romans it is impossible that the population has not changed. Invaders have this nasty habit of leaving their seed everywhere. If they didn’t, all black folks would be approximately the same color with minor variations. We aren’t. We range in shade from what used to be called “light, bright and damn near white” to a brown so dark that it looks blue. All of them are lovely, in my opinion. Unfortunately, my opinion is not shared by many. Slavers and colonists found that it was in their interest to divide populations, turning them against each other, as a way of controlling them. We see the legacy of that today in the genocides of Rwanda and Sudan. People with certain physical characteristics were labeled Semitic and, therefore, Caucasian while their brethren were labeled Negroid–black. Very bad things happened to black people while Semitic people might be spared some of the hardship and may even inflict it on their “lesser” black neighbors. Consequently, we have the Janjaweed who are Muslim and darker than a paper bag, but consider themselves to be Arabs, slaughtering Nubians–black Africans–in southern and western Sudan. It does not help that those in the south are also Christian or animist. However, it is a mistake to characterize the slaughter as sectarian because it isn’t. Black Muslims are being killed just like black Christians. The Christian Science Monitor called it what it is–racism–in a 2004 article.
“Race – not religion – is the fundamental fault line in Sudan, though religion has certainly added fuel to the fire in the south. Indeed, since independence from the British in 1956, the demon of Sudan has been race. The Arab north, except for brief periods when token Africans were included in government, has exclusively held political and military power. To protest political exclusion, military repression, enslavement, and economic exploitation, Africans in the south rose against the state several years after independence,” writes Makau Mutua, a law professor and director of the Human Rights Center at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Mutua adds, “President Omar Bashir and his fundamentalist Islamic government declared a holy war against African groups in the south – the Dinka, Nuba, and Neur peoples.”
As mentioned, many, though not all, Egyptians consider themselves to be Caucasian just like the Janjaweed. Furthermore, feelings of superiority are endemic. There is a population in southern Egypt near the Aswan Dam that is more Negroid than people below the dam in the north (the Nile flows south to north and empties into the Mediterranean Sea). Priceless Nubian antiquities were destroyed when the dam was built and the world lost one of the most important caches of artifacts that may have contained clues to understanding the as-yet-indecipherable Meroitic script. There was a great hew and cry from archeologists, anthropologists and other scientists when it was learned these lands would be flooded. Unfortunately, the Egyptian government felt it was more important that the dam be built and there was little time for experts from the United Nations to find and catalog these treasures. I know why I think this happened. It is obvious to me. However, an Egyptian from Cairo or Alexandria may feel differently. I say that it was naked racism. It is the same racism that commands a great many to deny they have any black blood no matter how dark-skinned they happen to be and in defiance of history and logic. You see, black is shameful. Black is never to be admitted. Respect yourselves, my Egyptian friends.
