Hate, Separatism Can Even Sever Roots
Is he a self-hating black, politically incorrect and too “white”? As people of goodwill - and there are millions of us, both white and black - try to grow our way out of the American history of racism, there’s a new voice that should be heard for its painful introspections and unexpected conclusions.
That voice belongs to Keith B. Richburg, Africa bureau chief for The Washington Post from 1991 to 1994. What he says about slavery, Africa, blacks, Afrocentrism and America in his superb and unforgettable new book, “Out of America,” deserves a wide and open-minded hearing in the face of what will be bitter criticisms.
“I watched the dead float down a river in Tanzania,” Richburg begins. “There I was, drenched with sweat under the blistering sun, standing at the Rusumo Falls bridge, watching the bodies float past me. They were bloated now, horribly discolored. Sometimes the hands and feet were bound together. Some were clearly missing some limbs.
“These were the victims of the ethnic genocide going on across the border in Rwanda. The killers were working too fast to allow for proper burials. It was easier to dump the corpses into the Kagera River, to let them float downstream into Tanzania, eventually into Lake Victoria, out of sight.”
When Richburg sees the bodies stacked up like firewood in the refugee camps of Zaire and the people dying of starvation in Somalia and the bloated dead floating down the river he thinks that “these nameless, faceless, anonymous bodies … look like me … There but for the grace of God go I.”
His African ancestor was taken from his native village, “probably by a local chieftain.” Richburg surmises the ancestor probably suffered a treacherous trip across the Atlantic in a crowded, filthy cargo hold and worked as a slave in the Caribbean. Generations later, one of his descendants was sent to South Carolina. His father worked as a union official in the Detroit auto industry.
Richburg went to integrated schools in Detroit and Grosse Pointe, the University of Michigan and the London School of Economics. He became a foreign correspondent, he says, to escape the countless little humiliations of being a black in America, from the unintended insults and the “constant reminder that being black means being different, alien, never quite belonging.”
He welcomed being posted to Africa after reporting assignments in several troubled Third World places, expecting to find his own identity in a place where he would not stand out for the color of his skin, where he would not feel different and apart.
Richburg spent three years covering the continent’s senseless violence, corruption, bloody and incessant cruelties - machete-wielding Hutu militiamen, a cholera epidemic in Zaire, famine in Somalia, civil war in Liberia, disease, dirt, dictatorships, killer children, AIDS, terror.
“I’ve seen cities reduced to rubble because their leaders let them rot and decay while they spirited away billions of dollars - yes, billions - into overseas bank accounts,” Richburg writes. He saw friends and international aid workers hacked to death in senseless outbursts of terror, a man on the street with a machete chopping off the hands of a boy accused of stealing just blocks from his house, people dying of starvation on the dusty streets while bureaucrats and kids with AK-47s stole relief shipments of food.
And, he thinks, “Thank God. Thank God my nameless ancestor, brought across the ocean in chains and leg irons, made it out alive. Thank God I am an American.”
“Had my ancestor not made it out of here,” Richburg muses, “I might have ended up in that crowd, smiling gleefully while a man with a cleaver cuts off the hands of a thief, or maybe I would have been one of those bodies washing over the waterfall in Tanzania, or maybe my son would have been set ablaze by soldiers. Or I would be limping now from the torture I received in some rancid police cell.”
After three years in Africa, Richburg sees the flaws in America clearly. “I curse the intolerance. I recoil from the racial and ethnic tensions. And I become infuriated at the often mindless political debate that to me never seems to cut deeper than the crispest sound bite.”
But he worries about the growing trend toward black separatism and African identity, toward blacks pushing for their own separate communities, schools, businesses, celebrations.
“We need instead to go back to the original idea of America as a melting pot and create a society that’s truly colorblind, not carved up into racial and ethnic duchies,” Richburg writes. “I’ve seen what happens when separateness and division is taken to extremes - you have Rwanda, you have Liberia, you have Somalia. Why on earth would we want to start heading down that dangerous path?”
“Afrocentrism” has become fashionable for many blacks, Richburg notes. “It cannot work for me. I have been here, I have lived here and seen Africa in all its horror. I know now that I am a stranger there. I am an American, a black American, and I feel no connection to this strange and violent place.”
He is aware of the criticism he will face for his views. But his message is clear and urgent. “There is no point in talking about going ‘back’ to anywhere, in finding some missing ‘roots,’ in finding a homeland … Far better that we all put our energies into making America work better, into realizing the dream of a multiracial society … America is home.”
xxxx