Dr. Amos Wilson: 'We empower White People by the nature of our own behavior and attitudes as a people. They cannot be what they are unless we are, what we are. To a good extent, the European is our creation'
/"So we shouldn’t look at consciousness as some abstraction. As I often tell people, the most practical thing you can have is a good theory, is a good concept to guide your behavior, to be used as an instrument, to measure reality, as an instrument, to test reality. A good theory then organizes the world, organizes one’s approach to the world. It permits one to be able to evaluate the world, in terms of where one wants to go, in terms of what one wants to do. To be without theory, is to approach the world on an “ad-hoc” basis, you know just to meet it here and there, and to not approach it in a systematic form, to live “reactionarily,” “always reacting to what other people are doing, always being overwhelmed by events, and overwhelmed by the future, instead of creating events, and creating the future, and making the future.” See when one has then a good theory, and a good concept, one is able to do that. Consciousness… without human consciousness there is no world. It is the presence of human consciousness that brings meaning into the world. Without human beings in this world, conscious human beings in this world, in effect, there would not be a world. We bring the world into being through our consciousness. And through our consciousness, we create the world we live in. Out of the totality of reality our consciousness cuts our world at the fist itself. In other words, the kind of world you exist in reflects the kind of consciousness that you have. And notice if you change your consciousness or values and orientation, you enter into a different world. You interact with different people, people often you didn’t know existed in the world, social situations that you might not have even recognized, until you entered into a new level of consciousness. You see people say for instance, who become addicted, say to crack or something, and now enter into a whole world and enter into a whole social system, that before they became addicted, they hardly noticed, they didn’t know what it was all about, and they picked up new friends, and new relations, hold new ways of acting, hold new purposes in life, they loss with old friends, broke with old families, and all kinds of things, in other words, the consciousness, that addictive consciousness, brought into the world a new foreground, and put other things into the background.
Therefore, man’s consciousness is a creative act, and the kind of consciousness you have, will determine the kind of world you create. And consequently, when you look at the world that we live in African people, we must recognize to a great extent, it is a world of our own creation, it is a world that has been generated with a type of consciousness we’ve been permitted to be instilled in us as a people. As I told you earlier today on the radio, we talked about the white man as having power, and I want you to recognize that power ultimately has to do with a relationship between people, and that the white man’s so-called power, is to a great extent based upon the nature of the relationship he has with the Black man. We empower him by the nature of our own behavior and attitudes as a people. He can not be what he is, as I said earlier, unless we are, what we are, I’m telling you. To a good extent, the European is our creation … yes, un hunh, un hunh. If we look at our behavior, we will see that to a good extent, it is our behavior, our values, our consciousness, the kind of personalities we’ve established in ourselves, our taste, our desires and needs; that maintains the European in its position.
We talk about the Civil Rights Movement, and the Apartheid system of the South, when Blacks decided to just get out of the buses and just walk, the system changed, yeah, when they stop sitting behind the white driver, just changing that relationship, changed the nature of power, in that system. When they decided then to walk side by side, when they decided to walk abreast and line themselves up, because they had not walked that way before … for the ends to be fought, the relationship changed. When they kept their monies in their pockets, when they set on the stools and blocked the other people from them, and change the nature of the interactions between themselves and europeans, the nature of the system changed. So therefore we have tremendous Power. It depends upon how we align ourselves as a people, and how we decide to relate to other people in the world, because they can not have what they have, unless we are who we are. And that is why we don’t have to waste a great deal of time always appealing to them, and analyzing them, because we can better appeal to our own sense of self, and our own consciousness, and we waste a lot of time trying to transform them, when through transforming ourselves, they will be transformed automatically. The Power is in our hands. We are not destined to be the servants of white folk, that is not the destiny of Black folk, no way. And we have to change this idea, because many of us are still operating on that concept, as I said earlier, many of us go to these schools to become what, qualified, to work for whom, them. Why do we assume that their going to have the jobs for us …yes, these people are having difficulty making jobs for themselves. The greatest problem that the european is facing today, and the european economies are facing today, is that they are not even generating enough jobs for their own people. And even though America is bragging about the millions of jobs it’s creating, those jobs are part-time jobs, the bulk of them are part-time jobs, low-wage jobs, and jobs that have little or no future. So when people talk about creating jobs, you have to ask, what kind of jobs are being created. That is why of course the system is not investing in Black education. It no longer needs Black people for its employment structure. You see it bringing in people from outside of the nation to be employed. You see it is even hiring in the world itself in other nations and other places. Already it has reached the point where its need for Black males, is pretty much saturated. And it is literally then warehousing us in the jails and prisons, and provoking us to kill each other and to destroy each other out here in these streets. And yet we are still organizing the education of our children, as if the white man still has jobs waiting for them, in multitudes. [MORE PDF]
