Initial Broadcast Date: December 14, 1971
Re-Broadcast Date: December 17, 1971
30 minutes – Color
Black Journal conducts an investigation of institutional racism with the aid of six Black scholars and philosophers in a two-program study entitled “Black Paper on White Racism.” The first part surveys racism in the areas of history, education and Christianity.
The investigative team includes Reverend Albert Cleage, pastor of the Shrine of the Black Madonna in Detroit; John H. Clarke, an associate professor of African and Afro-American history at Hunter College and author of 11 books including “Harlem USA”; and Preston Wilcox, head of the education workshop of the Congress of African People and president of the educational consultant firm AFRAM Associates.
Tracing racist patterns in Christianity, Rev. Cleage, an advocate of Black Christian Nationalism, takes issue with the church’s concept of Jesus as a white man.
He views Christianity as having its beginnings in “an African religion.” A basis for his conclusion is the patriarch Israel’s journey to Egypt with 70 people and his emergence with a nation of more than 2 million. The Reverend sees biblical Israel as a Black nation, and therefore, Jesus as a Black messiah. He feels that Apostle Paul was an “Uncle Tom Black Jew” who contributed to “destroying the basic African background of Christianity.”
Professor Clarke points out that a root of white racism, which also served as a basis for the slave trade and colonialism, was the Papal Bull of 1455 authorizing the servitude of all infidel people, most of whom were non-white and non-European. He also notes that up until the 16th and 17th centuries Black Madonna’s were the images that prevailed in the European Churches and that one may still find them in some churches in Europe.
Preston Wilcox feels that the “clearest evidence of racism is the essential control over Black education” which he says deceives Blacks and whites about such historical “realities” as the religious interpretations by Rev. Cleage.
The educational institution, according to Rev. Cleage, does not teach the “objective truth but what the white man wants to project as truth … (just as) sociology deals with the white man’s pattern of living as the norm by which we judge how other people live ….
“We have to protect, then, a Black psychology, a Black sociology, a Black music, a Black history that takes in the realities and that is essentially sound as opposed to the mythology that the white man has developed out of his own ignorance.”
Part II of the Black Journal study on white racism surveys the areas of culture, colonialism and imperialism, and personality development with Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Dan Watts, and Dr. Alvin Poussaint.
“Black Journal,” a production of NET Division, Educational Broadcasting Corporation
Executive producer: Tony Brown
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