Over the years, Nigeria and other African countries have been fighting the sting from racial discrimination. There’s this stereotype that every Black man is inferior and should suffer heedlessness from his fellow beings– Whites. This is a serious fight from the time Black people are born.
Before the threshold of “Black History Month,” a festival that honors the contributions of African-Americans to U.S. history, Black people have experienced lumps in the likes of discrimination every day, with its lore unreachable to White people.
The event (Negro History Month) was first celebrated during a week in February 1926 that encompassed the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. The response was overwhelming: Black history clubs emerged, instructional material was demanded by teachers to instruct their pupils. Black scholars and White philanthropists alike stood ground to endorse the effort. This was the beginning, the baseline of relief.
In line with this realism, Black people everywhere became cautious and managed themselves in a White-dominated society, learning and sharing the rigors and rules peculiar of a White-dominated society in which expressions of White racism were explicitly on the surge.
Amid their own culture, Black people avowed these central lessons, and out of a sense of duty, tried to enculture them to others they care about, especially their children. They posit that experience holds a dear school.
Everyday outcomes leave Black people to doubt that things are getting better. They are convinced that they have to work twice as hard to get half as far in life.
Alicia Garza, one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter, opines in an 2019 article:
Dear candidates: here is what black people want.
We long for the same things as everyone else, and yet few campaigns treat us as if our experiences matter.
These “campaigns” are structures that fail to understand or try to remedy the ways and means structural racism damages Black people’s lives.
These Structures assign Black people different nicknames. In the U.S, they are known as “nigger.” In Brazil they are called ‘“macaque.” In South Africa, they are nicknamed “kaffir.” In India, “bandar.” In China, “hak gwai.” This doesn’t appeal my conscience, and it does not appeal yours, if you are like me.
In the archive of history as far back as the 17th century, about 10 million Africans were transported across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas by European slave merchants and were subjected to critical forms of inhumane treatment ranging from working slaves to sex slaves. And soon after slavery halted in the United States, Black Americans were subjected to seclusion laws- lynching and the complete disavowment of civil rights.
Now, it is of utmost urgency to bring ‘’anti-Blackness‘’ to the forefront of African countries by establishing a working definition. This would create room for decorum.
In 2019, Ahmed Olayinka Sule asserted that these working definitions could cover: caricatures, stereotypes, disparagement, the perception of Black-populated countries and the trivialization of transatlantic slavery.
When these definitions are put in place, “Black discrimination”, “anti-Blackness” and the likes of other threats within this ménage would reduce to the least minimum, if not eradicated completely. And the earth will be a civil society.
As a matter of importance, we need to burn anti-Blackness into our collective consciousness, so as to put an end to the mistakes of the past and the present, which have brought so much misery to so many people (Sule 2019).
