They are black. We
are white. That is for the sake of argument. It is the immediate visibility of
this difference that makes it so
penetrating, so final. The only man so far who has bridged the gap, is Michael
Jackson, a transracial victim of his own disease. Whatever that disease really
is.
Because of the
history of the European expansion, its vigour and brutality in all aspects,
that difference has become charged. Black students in
Is this justified?
NO.
Whose fault is it?
Fault?
Europeans caused
all this didn’t they?
Nonsense!
What do you mean
nonsense? You are yourself a racist if you deny that the Europeans were at
fault! If you deny their racism.
Nonsense! I do
deny their racism. They do not remain
an homogenous entity at that level. At the level of racism,
Then there are
racists, who are doubly unfortunate and douby dangerous, in that their racism
is the result of the misguided aesthetic I have talked about above. The most
damaging racism is merely aesthetic
and is used to justify the metaphysical. It has been conceptualised in a
misguided sense of aesthetic superiority. It is the ignorant who find
themselves able to adore the Negro or
to abominate him, because of their wild ability to generelise the particular
and believe to see what they have so comfortably grouped into a category, to
love a style. By that you merely expose your own emptiness, doing precisely
what your distinctions were supposedly geared to disguise.
My basic thesis
is, that a. Black men and white men, must refrain from existing against each
others background. People have formed a habit of being which is primitively
dialectical. Blackness only exists against
whiteness, and vice verse. In fact this dialectic served the white man horribly
well in formulating his superiority, giving him the confidence to conquer and
exploit. But that is not the whole world. There is another way. Get rid of the
dialectic. There are many men who are merely men, they exist in their own
right. Not against the background of racial relativity. I hope to be such a
person. And on that basis I want to analyse Jamaican arhitecture.