The black man is not a human being

Reading these ?#‎XenophobiaSA reports is maddening and saddening. Today I saw a picture So allow me to rant a little:

It has occurred to me that the black man is not a human BEING. Because he has failed to just BE. For so long he has seen himself as black. And nothing else. He has failed to develop his identity beyond that, his identity is always dependent on someone else's. There can be no black without white. There can be no dark skin without light skin. There can be no native without a foreigner. Because I don't know who I am, I can only define it by who I'm not.

If library books were arranged by the color of their covers and not by their content, we would say that is ridiculous. And yet that is the lie the black man has bought, and then sold to his own children. You're not an entrepreneur, astronaut, singer or world-changer. You're black. We loathe the blackness of our skin because it is a badge of shame.The blacker the skin, the blacker the shame.

 It's so bad that we come up with terms like "light skin" to refer to those who are lucky enough to be one degree removed from the extremity of our shame. We yell from our rooftops that black is beautiful while our lonely hearts ads burst from the seams with requests for "brown" women.

We hate our skin, this skin that we've allowed to dictate the place we have in this world, but we are too lazy and cowardly to change that, so we turn that hate to others. To those whiter or blacker than us, because they are "better" than us or we are "better" than them. There's nothing wrong with our skin. There's something wrong with our content.