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The Myth of White Supremacy by Sean Gonsalves
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The Myth of White Supremacy
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by Sean Gonsalves
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Joseph Campbell reminded us how important myths are in shaping human culture and our own individual world views. Of course, mythology cannot be truly understood in the narrow way it is commonly (mis)used today. In contemporary popular lingo, a myth is an unnecessary falsification of reality.
But myths are much more than that. The psychologist and scholar Clyde Ford - in his fascinating book "The Hero with an African Face: Mythic Wisdom of Traditional Africa" - astutely observes that myths are actually narratives that attempt to communicate "unceasing truths."
"Myths are, in fact, the 'social stories' that heal. For myths supply more than the moral tag  lines we learned early on to associate with nursery rhymes and fairy tales. Properly read, myths bring us into accord with the eternal mysteries of being, help us manage the inevitable passages of our lives, and give us templates for our relationship with the societies in which we live, and for the relationship of these societies to the earth we share with all life," Ford says.
I add a further distinction - that between life-sustaining myths and life-negating myths. And apart from "the myth of the market," to borrow a phrase from British journalist and social critic Jeremy Seabrook, the most pernicious myth lurking in American culture today is the myth of white supremacy.
Three recent racially charged incidents come to mind: the acquittal of the New York City police officers who killed Amadou Diallo in a hail of 41 bullets; the shooting death of Providence, R.I., police officer Cornel Young Jr. (killed by fellow officers who thought the off-duty black officer was a suspect); and a frightening episode in Wellfleet, where a smiling Senegal native and Cape Cod Community College student, Mamadou Sow - taking a walk wearing Walkman headphones - was thought to be a possible burglary suspect. He was ordered to the ground at gun point before being arrested. What myths were operating in these situations?
Remember that scene in Malcolm X (or maybe you read the account in his autobiography) where Malcolm is in prison and begins to study the dictionary? The emerging black leader discovered how the English dictionary defines black and white in terms of racial polarity and struggle; black being associated with fear, uncleanness and evil, while white being defined as the essence of purity and goodness.
Undoubtedly, a people's language points to the myths and values that they regard as representative of eternal truths.
Now, the modern Western usage of black and white can be traced to the Middle East of the sixth century BCE In Persia (now called Iran), Zoroastrianism put black and white at the center of a combative mythology. I was astonished to find out, however, that Webster's Dictionary finds no derivation for the word black that goes beyond the old high German word blah. Webster's does suggest there is a relationship to the Latin word flagare and the Greek word phlegein - both meaning "to burn."
But linguists have traced the word for the color of black to the Greek root word melan, which is where we get melanin. Melanin, of course, is the skin pigment dominant in people of color. Interestingly, the Greek Goddess Melantho is identified with the blackness of the fertile earth.
Ford's scholarship uncovered something else. The Greek word melan is a derivative of an older Egyptian word spelled M3nw, which means "the Mountain in the West." The sun sets in the west behind the western mountains, sinking into the mythic darkness of Egypt's underworld. And this idea is not limited to Egyptian mythology.
The Buddha of Immeasurable Radiance is also associated with the setting sun, and is believed to radiate infinite compassion toward all life, incarnated as the Dalai Lama.
In Egyptian mythology, black originates with the Egyptian Goddess Nut, who swallows the sun in the west every day, bears it as a child through the night, and gives birth to the morning in the east. Niger is another root word meaning black (a Latin; not Greek derivative) from which the word Negro was born. Niger refers to the Nigretai, a Libyan tribe of charioteers who were admired for their beautiful black skins, Ford reports.
The origin of all these words is a vowel-less Semitic root, Ngr, which is a poetic way of saying water flowing into the sand; specifically the waters of the Niger River, "whose strange U-shaped course must have convinced early travelers that the river simply terminated in the desert sands."
What was it that Solomon proclaimed in I Kings 8:12? "The Lord said he would dwell in the thick darkness." And in Genesis 1:2, the spirit of God is linked to "the darkness (that) was upon the face of the deep" - the primordial soup from which our universe big banged into existence.
As Carl Jung was fond of asking: What is the myth you are living?
Sean Gonsalves is a Cape Cod Times staff writer and syndicated columinist. He can be reached via email: sgonsalves@capecodonline.com
Copyright © 2000 Cape Cod Times
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