The profundity of “There are no black people in Africa”

As Alan Watts was fond of saying, echoing a basic tenet of Taoism, you can't have good without bad, virtue without vice, up without down — or indeed any quality without its opposite. 

Everything becomes what it is in relation to something that it isn't. 

If everybody in the world had always believed in God, there would be no religious people. There would just be people. Ditto if everybody had always lived without any conception of God. Then there would be no atheists, just people.

Before sentient creatures who can conceive of abstractions arrived on our planet, the natural world didn't have the conceptual divisions that are so much a part of human existence. 

A hurricane or earthquake wasn't destructive until we humans evolved the ability to conceive of "destructive." 

Of course, I'm not suggesting that we'd be better off with a more limited brain. Conceptualization is entertaining, valuable, and a great survival tool. If concepts weren't favored by natural selection, we wouldn't have evolved the capacity for them.

But it's wise to keep in mind how arbitrary many of our customary ways of dividing up the world are. Here's another excerpt from the book by Isabel Wilkerson that I'm reading: "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents."

(My first blog post about Caste is here.)

A few years ago, a Nigerian-born playwright came to a talk that I gave at the British Library in London. She was intrigued by the lecture: the idea that 6 million African-Americans had had to seek political asylum within the borders of their own country during the Great Migration, a history that she had not known of.

She talked with me afterward and said something that I have never forgotten that startled me in its simplicity. 

"You know that there are no black people in Africa," she said. Most Americans, weaned on the myth of drawable lines between human beings, have to sit with that statement. It sounds nonsensical to our ears. Of course there are black people in Africa. There is a whole continent of black people in Africa. How could anyone not see that?

"Africans are not black," she said. "They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele. They are not black. They are just themselves. They are humans on the land. That is how they see themselves, and that is who they are."

What we take as gospel in American culture is alien to them, she said.

"They don't become black until they go to America or come to the U.K.," she said. "It is then that they become black."

It was in the making of the New World that Europeans became white, Africans black, and everybody else yellow, red, or brown. It was in the making of the New World that humans were set apart on the basis of what they looked like, identified solely in contrast to one another, and ranked to form a caste system based on a new concept called race. It was in the process of ranking that we were all cast into assigned roles to meet the needs of the larger production.

None of us are ourselves.

I think that's true. But wouldn't it be wonderful if it weren't true, if each of us actually were ourselves, and there was no societal pressure to put people into boxes that don't reflect who they truly are? Wilkerson speaks of containers.

Each of us is in a container of some kind. The label signals to the world what is presumed to be inside and what is to be done with it. The label tells you what shelf your container supposedly belongs on. In a caste system, the label is frequently out of sync with the contents, mistakenly put on the wrong shelf and this hurts people and institutions in ways we may not always know.