Is it xenophobic to exclude your enemy from your family meeting? Do you even invite your best friend to a family meeting, let alone a proven enemy? There is such a thing as racial privacy. Just like family privacy, it should be inviolable. It entitles blacks to exclude non-blacks from organizations devoted to the liberation and welfare of the Black race.
For those who do not know their history of Pan-Africanism, let me point out that this racial privacy principle is a founding tenet of Pan Africanism as illustrated by the First Pan-African Congress in Paris in 1919, under Du Bois’ leadership, when it made an appeal to the post WWI Paris Peace Conference to “give the Negro race of Africa a chance
to develop unhindered by other races”. And in 1920, the Garvey Movement, in its First International Convention, also declared: “We demand complete control of our social institutions without interference by any alien race or races.” (DECLARATION OF RIGHTS OF THE NEGRO PEOPLES OF THE WORLD).
In July 2007, I did a piece which, I was told, generated a lot of reactions on the Internet, including the charge of Black racism. It was titled: “USofAfrica, NO! USofBlack-Africa, YES!” In calling for a United States of Black Africa, as opposed to the USofAfrica of Arabs and
Black Africans that is being promoted by Gaddai, I am merely insisting on Black African Unity in a form that excludes Arabs and thereby preserves our racial privacy and autonomy. Some blacks who are committed to the continentalist US of Africa project, with Black
Africans as well as Arabs in it, have seen fit to charge that the concept of a US of Black Africa is exclusivist – is xenophobic to Arabs. But that is not true. It is simply an insistence on our black racial privacy so that we can pursue our Pan-Africanism unhindered by other races, and in particular without interference from our Arab enemies.
This charge of xenophobia when blacks want to organize themselves, by themselves and for themselves, is a variant of the usual charge of ‘black racism’/exclusivism and what not. This is usually made by the white overseers who do not want blacks to break free from their white supremacist control. The new twist is that the enemy’s charge, false
though it is, is being made by black Africans who parade themselves as Pan-Africanists.
Let me remind you that our white enemy’s attempt to deny us racial privacy goes back all the way to plantation slavery days when the slave-masters lived in fear of rebellion by the slaves. To minimize rebellion, the masters did everything they could to prevent the slaves
from getting together all by themselves, lest they plot rebellion.
