The Role of Black People in the Future.

by Lennox Farrell
(Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada)

Whenever these issues of the possible future facing humanity are discussed, analysed and concluded, the individuals who are primarily, and automatically at the fore are White people, mostly White males.

It is as if they are the only occupants of this planet, worthy and deserving of deciding what future, if any, will be decided for all humanity. This attitude, for all its lack of incisive and broadguaged representation is beyond arrogance, but not beyond catastrophy.

Are these Demigods? SuperMen?

Of course, there are sometimes some others, for example, Asians included and who have some input.

By comparison, however, any possible role, involvement and representation which might include Black people is considered, inadvertently and no doubt, also non-racially, an anomaly.

Given what has been our experiences as Black people in the last 500 years of enslavement, exploitation, colonization, genocides, Jim Crowism, low academic expectations versus high athletic performance, and an anti-Black racism so pervasive and accepted--if intuitively unacceptable--it is no longer racism.

I tremble for the future of generations already present as children, and grand-children etc.

Despite all the subsequent good intentions and accommodations, what has gone wrong? Lack of cerebral capacity by us? Lack of Initiative? Innate criminality?

What has subsequently occurred, if oft well-intentioned, is a confusing of understanding and implementing what is 'justifiable', versus what is 'just'.

As a child of Africa and of a European, I have a warning for mankind; a warning for a near future when a Human will be replaced by a HUMAC; a future when the Tool will replace the Tool-maker; a future inferred by Bob Marley in his magnum opus, 'One Love'; wherein he poignantly asks, 'What shall we say to the hopeless sinner who has hurt all mankind, just to save his own?'

Today's White-dominated culture, seeking to 'save his own', in efforts which systematically or naively confuses justice with justification, is providing the rationale that will legally and morally be used by the Humacs in a future not more than a century hence, to 'justify' their enslaving, and subsequently their 'removing' (a type of cyber-gentrification) Humanity from their neighbourhoods.

Is it prophetic that it was a Black woman, Sophia Stewart, who wrote the post-apocalyptic series: Terminator, and The Matrix?

In conclusion, Humans as tool-makers came out of Africa. It might very well be ironic that it will be from the loins of Black Africans that White Europeans emerged to become the 'destroyer of worlds' and eventually of all human civilization.

Would a Humac in some future time, some future space acquire the philosophic sensibility to understand and contemplate this fundamental irony; and wonder, too, if for him/her/it/them there is also another type of singularity in which it is Humacs who/that will also become extinct ... if such an extinction could also be justified?