Mereja.Forum

There was a time, not too long ago, where I used to take part in the very same divides that I now speak and write against. As much as I inveigh against manufactured differences, six years ago I used to deride all “white” people and blame them for all the sins of the world. I used to also vilify Republicans and castigate anyone who did not accept my political orthodoxy.

It took a dance with misfortune, a journey where I lost everything and my life transformed from living in a premium condominium in Falls Church, Virginia to residing on the sidewalks of Greenville, South Carolina, for me to put away tribalism and stop looking at this world through the lens of “us versus them”. Living next to a sea of humanity struggling with homelessness and enveloped by poverty gave the wisdom to realize that there is a commonality of our pains that transcend our differences. A fact that crystalized the minute I saw a seven year old “white” girl in the same mission I was living in, tears washing away decades of indoctrination.

During the heydays of my community organizing phase, an Ethiopian comedian who decided to become an advocate for justice pulled me to the side once and said “Teddy, once your eyes open, you can’t close them back again”. It is precisely because my eyes have opened to the ways humanity is sliced and diced into an endless list of identities and categories—all in order to manufacture dissension—that I am so adamant about the need for us to unite and stop fighting over labels that have been imposed upon us.

To my great dismay, far from coming together and forming a coalition of the marginalized, the zeitgeist is one where society is walking in the opposite direction. People who have little bashing others who have a bit more, fighting over who is privileged instead of uniting to ensure equity for all and letting the caste systems of race, gender, religion, identities and ideologies condition us to view justice through the silos of social constructs; we insist upon ourselves as we simmer in the boils.

When I was in college, I wrote a paper about the way tribalism was weaponized in Africa by colonizers in order to subdue nation after nation. It was not the guns of Europeans that conquered the Zulus, Igbos, Hutus and a litany of civilizations in the continent that was once called Ethiopia; rather it was the way the French, British, Dutch and exploiters from the north manipulated communities who lived next each other for centuries to take up arms against each other instead of defending their common interests.

The country that escaped the fate that met every country in Africa was my native land Ethiopia. We resisted the menace of despots because we united when perils arrived at our doorsteps. The Battle of Adwa, a historical moment where an African nation defeated a European power, would not have been possible if my ancestors did not rally to the flag in order to defend a common foe that would have oppressed all. Our solidarity was greater than...continued...

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teodroseIII wrote: ↑

20 Nov 2020, 10:47

There was a time, not too long ago, where I used to take part in the very same divides that I now speak and write against. As much as I inveigh against manufactured differences, six years ago I used to deride all “white” people and blame them for all the sins of the world. I used to also vilify Republicans and castigate anyone who did not accept my political orthodoxy.................

..These same tribal prisons that incarcerate tens of millions of Ethiopians and Africans writ large in a perpetual cycle of deficit and anguish is the reason why the American dream has transformed into a dystopian nightmare. It is tribalism that prevents poor “whites” from uniting with poor “blacks”, it is sectionalism that makes us act like crabs in a barrel, it is identity politics that makes fellow strugglers bash others who struggle. People who feel aggrieved on all sides are conditioned by a constant stream of demagoguery that incite passions, demonizes “others” and ghettoizes America into warring camps based on social constructs. Our politics, national discourse and pursuits of social justice are all filtered through the prism of division, this is why the bottom 90 percent’s pie keeps getting subtracted while the few who have much multiply their riches...

Tedy,

"Poor blacks" are such characters by themselves.

Whites don't need to be differentiated by their ethnicity like people of color. Many white say “I’m not anything, I’m just white! Which, isn’t true. Their families came from somewhere. They didn’t just spontaneously poof into existence. White people have ethnicities. They could be Irish, English, Greek, French, Swedish or Dutch, among others.

They just have white privilege of being part of the dominant group. And therefore, unlike people of color, they don’t dwell in their primordial selves.

In other words, unlike "Oromuma" , "Agazian" and others who blame "Amhara" for everything under the "sun" in Ethiopia, here, whites don't waste time in blaming the WASP for giving them the English language to communicate among themselves. Complain day in and day out, for the building/giving them the "colonies" that made up the USA. They're not interested in the defeatist TPLF/OLF kind "ethnic federation". That whites character is more advanced.

So, let us acknowledge as blacks in Ethiopia our problems are the primordial kinds, not in par with issues whites are facing.

Today, Ethiopia is in the similar era of the American Civil War from 1861 to 1865 and hopefully at the end of TPLF/OLF & other ethnic pimps demise, Abiy will do same as Abraham Lincoln. [Lincoln led the nation through the American Civil War, the country's greatest moral, constitutional, and political crisis. He succeeded in preserving the Union, abolishing slavery, bolstering the federal..]