Raymond Sheppard: White supremacy Canadian style

KJIPUKTUK (Halifax) – For more than 40 years now well known teacher and scholar Jane Elliott, an American of European descent, has been saying that all white people are racist, exposing prejudice and bigotry for what it is, an irrational class system based upon purely arbitrary factors. 

There is much evidence to support Jane Elliott’s conclusion. As a poor African Nova Scotian elder, who am I to disagree with this esteemed individual? 

Many persons of European descent argue that they are not responsible for the enslavement of the African. However. they are also failing to take responsibility and ignore the residual effects of slavery and today’s racism and oppression. 

If the oppressors of today do nothing to disassemble racism and the undeserved and unearned privilege that comes with it, they are just as guilty as their great great great grandparents.

99 percent of Europe took part in the Atlantic slave trade and benefited from it. Most if not all of the United States took part in the enslavement of the African and benefited from it, much like Canada benefited from the extension and continuation of slavery.

Few on earth have experienced what we have, but we are still here. Our oppressors will try anything to rid themselves of our entire population.

One of the things in North America that is strongly moving white supremacy is the prediction that our oppressors will become a minority and be extinct by the year 2070. This scares the hell out of our oppressors, and they have stepped up murder in our communities across North America. The slave squads they had during the physical enslavement of the African have been handed over to police. 

This is why it is paramount that we as Africans understand our worth and our power. The main reason we are hated by so many for so long is because they do not want us to realize our power, nor do they want us to be able to reclaim our power. As the song goes, they smile in our face at the same time they want to take our place.

Equally, this is why African peoples need a re-education program for themselves to eliminate the negative images that we have been taught to buy the propaganda of the oppressor. 

True racial pride cannot be obtained if we do not have a re-education. For example, until we re-educate our own children we will never be free. We give our children to the oppressors for some 18 years of schooling and when we get them back they have a virus, yet we think we can re-Africanize them. We can re-Africanize them on the surface but the subconscious has been programmed by the oppressors. 

In the words of the late Frederick Douglass, “It is better to raise strong children than to repair broken men.” 

Once our children’s minds have been colonialized by the oppressors, it is almost impossible to get it back. Let’s keep our children free because we will not be able to free them later in life. We must share all that we know and are aware of as it pertains to our culture, heritage and lineage. Critical race theory should be taught in all schools. Our oppressors never want or will admit the truth because they benefit from the big lie.

Archaeologists and anthropologists have to keep going to Africa to map out the history of mankind. The pharaohs cannot rest in peace. Most of the oppressors’ glorious civilization and rich history was made up.

The first war that we must face as African people is the war on ourselves. The oppressors live inside us, they are in our minds and every piece of material we read including textbooks, reinforce their so-called superiority. There is a two-tiered educational system within North America, that teaches and instills superiority in our oppressors and, ignoring our true history, instills inferiority in people of African descent.

Most of our oppressors tell us what they think we want to hear, only to further manipulate us into believing what they want us to believe 

In my opinion white religion that was used to justify slavery and forced into the heads of African people is a form of abuse. This is especially so when you are forced to give up your own worship and are told to believe the religion of your oppressors. They taught us their religion and to pray, pray, pray and go to church while they committed the most heinous atrocities against African people. Religion has also taught us that when we are abused and fired from a job based on racism, “God closed a door.”

Racist white supremacist try to maintain their claim on superiority by any means necessary because they have always been jealous and afraid of Black African ingenuity. They know Black Africans can and will surpass them in areas of medicine, technology and in all other fields of endeavor. This is why they stole and siphoned our contributions to the world and created obstacles to stop us from achieving and reclaiming our history.

Make no mistake, it has been African ingenuity that built most things on earth although credit has been given and assumed by others. So white racist should stop saying to African people go back to Africa, because if we went back to Africa and were able to take all the things we created, you would all perish by next week.

African peoples in North America and beyond are studied to death. For example, on the internet major companies and governments are constantly looking at our online footprints to see what we are saying, what we are up to and thereafter they target us with advertising and propaganda. 

And then there is white media manufacturing consent, making the general public judge and view African people as troublemakers, lazy, liars, cheats, thieves, drug dealers, pimps, overly sensitive, aggressive and morally reprehensible individuals who will stop at nothing to harm others while the complete opposite is true. 

African people carry a double burden: unflattering racial stereotypes combined with negative unfair treatment. Canadian media, much like society overall, can be classified as racist. They are only willing to apply bandages to mortal wounds and to give crumbs when a real meal is needed.

In the white media there seems to be no true will to have African Canadians interview one another, to truly tell our own history and to cover our news stories as it pertains to our heritage, culture and lineage. How can anyone on earth speak to these like we can? As well, a non-African person will not ask the appropriate questions with sensitivity and from a position of understanding when interviewing African people. 

This is not to suggest that white journalists cannot or should not interview African people, it is simply to point out the inequality and unfairness in decision making.  

Media propaganda is nothing new. Since the beginning of airwaves transmission, there has been a deliberate attempt to brainwash, demean, undercut and to turn African people inward to self destruct.

This also pertains to justice. Many Klansmen and white supremacists just changed their uniforms from white to blue and therefore they continue to kill Black people. More than 90 % of the criminal justice system in Canada is white. Judges wear black but their attitudes and decisions seems to play into the white supremacist ideology.

Our oppressors should not be complicit when there is injustice towards Black people. If you do not share the same ideas as your forefathers, change what they did and give up your privilege that you gained as a result of their actions. 

For all that they may feel they are truly superior to African peoples, why do you have to use systems to secure power and control while sabotaging the opportunities of African People?  After slavery was ended white people were compensated and paid reparations for their loss of revenue.

African people who have been kidnapped from their country, were put in chains, stripped of their language, their heritage, their culture, their way of life, have been turned inside out upside down and backwards and yet they still carry on.  

Now with direct destabilization, gentrification, direct environmental racism, drugs, booze, the lure of fast money, outside influences and the changing make-up of our communities, including changes in the foods we consume with many additives, our values are changing. 

Our oppressors still are doing everything in their power to keep us as a permanent underclass.

All three levels of government should start with reparations for African Canadians.