I was reading Larry Elder’s website this morning when I noticed a link from his Breaking News section. It read “Fanatic activist demands the death of all white people”. Being a white person myself, I wondered who would want to kill me and why? The link lead to a video of Dr. Kamau Kambon giving a speech at Howard University October 14. In his speach near the end, he clearly calls for the extermination of all white people. He received limited applause for his remarks.
Of course, by the time he makes the call for extermination, any reasonable person would have concluded that Dr. Kambon is mentally disturbed. I poked around the internet for comments related to event – there are thousands of entries. People were clearly upset by his remarks. I decided to check with a blog I respect, Professor Kim, an academic with insight. She had posted on the speech. It was remarkable. Her conclusions are sound. Dr. Kamau is a nutball (my term), he is not active from an academic standpoint, he has not published his views anywhere that can easily be found, and most importantly, his speach was not a newsworthy event. I could not agree more. It is the ranting of a crazy man. Unfortunately, Dr. Kamau’s speech was broadcast Live on CSPAN.
Dr. Kamau Kambon is clearly a nutball, but I think he might be a tin foil hat nutball, which qualifies him for an extended stay in a mental health institution. Although his words are evil and laced with racial hatred, the impact of his words is mooted by his insanity.
I have always been mystified by people who use race to judge others. I do not even thing in those terms. My friends and family run the gamut of nearly every race and creed on the planet. Yet our relationships are based on love and respect – not race. I am proud to be an American, a country where it does not matter where you immigrated from or where you were born. It only matters that you can stand with your equals and look to the future with hope.
Dr. Kamau Kambon's Statements (unverified source)
Statement about the speach
Q & A
Other blogs:
The Political Teen
Michelle Malkin
John in Carolina
Open your minds eye
Technorati Tags: Nutballs, Kamau Kambon, Deep Thoughts, Racism
6 comments:
"Tin foil hat nutball" -- That's pretty funny. Thanks for the props.
Prof. Kim
This man is like a modern day Don Quixote. He is very intelligent, principled, and driven by ideology to the extent that he has successfully disvested himself completely from consumer culture, which he deems poisonous and "psychological enslavement". Like Don Quixote, he is an eloquent speaker, he is for the most part lucid and rational, but the conclusions he comes to about reality are not even marginally acceptable or feasible. While his knowledge of African history is peerless, he has constructed a conflict of polarized good and evil that by its nature can only be won with the utter extermination of the other. Now is he is a demi-celebrity because of his remarks on October 14th 2005. He has clearly lost touch with reality, but there is something there. Don Quixote thought windmills were giants and that a flock of sheep were two armies about to collide. He is quite crazy, but through his folly he unveiled things we would not otherwise see. His words are incendiary, but sometimes it takes someone like this to spark debate in places it would not normally occur. Consider his evidence; you don't have to agree with his remedy. But consider the fact that there may exist a struggle to this day, and that history and the lives of many black americans may be so wracked with this struggle that some can reasonably come to such conclusions.
To anonymous.
I'd like to comment on your analogy and just say that this Don Quijote could just as well have been a crazy white man ranting on about black crime rates and calling for the extermination of races seen as threats (e.g. muslim arabs, blacks, jews.) Only if this would have been a white man preaching, we would all be here to condemn it without trying to explain his views. This speech did in NO way invite to a civilized debate, but it did bring out a lot of mutual hatred as seen by racist posts on youtube etc.
Kambon is like many non-white "academics" in that he chooses to blame black failure,apathy and ineptitude on whitey instead of genes.
I must respectfully disagree with you, sir, in your remark that Kambon is a "nutball." This is a dangerous underestimation of him. It would be a mistake to think these sentiments have never been voiced before. They have been voiced enough by different luminaries in the Black Power movement that I am convinced the extermination of whites -- or at the very least violence, disenfranchisement and oppression of whites -- is a secret or not-so-secret fantasy of many run-of-the-mill blacks. This is not a curtailed, limited phenomenon but rather evidence of a mass dream, a thinly buried wish from many "minorities." I use the term "minority" loosely because even a perfunctory study of a map will show you that in fact whites are the minority globally and in the US will become a minority somewhere near the middle of the century. Do you expect this to be a reasonable transition? I do not. I take Kambon's comments very seriously, and while they do not scare me because I thin they are true, they do scare me because I fear for the blacks who will experience reprisals if this sort of sentiment actually gains traction and becomes more evident in mainstream black politics. I fear that men like Kambon will degrade racial harmony to the point that all our advances in civil rights might be nullified.
And I would also like to disagree with the commenter who opined that Kambon's knowledge of Africa is "peerless." To my thinking Kambon's commentary and ideas about Africa are just as skewed as the extreme right's. And the historicity of his statements are to me highly, highly suspect. For one thing he attempts to deflect blame for African enslavement to the Arabs when in fact African-on-African capture and sale was also common. It was not the Africans who traded slaves to the Europeans but rather Arabs. The truth is, Arabs enslaved twice as many Caucasian Europeans as they did Africans. Kambon is mysteriously silent about that. He is not lucid. His logic is brittle and feeble. He's not a particularly great communicator either. He relies on shock to get his point across and not valuable ideas. His ability to rally the masses is exceedingly poor. What worries me about him is that he will lay the groundwork for someone way more intelligent than he is. Kambon is a pseudointellectual lofted into the Ivory Tower by dint of his race and his extremism. That is all.
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