Black supremacy

The term black supremacy is a blanket term for various ideologies which hold that Africans are superior to other races. Common manifestation is bigotry towards persons not of African ancestry.

Overview
Some forms of black supremacy are best understood as a reflection of, or response to, white supremacy, yet not its analogue. The distinction comes with respect to how each manifests in sociopolitical dynamics along racial lines. The difference is summed up in Killing Rage: Ending Racism, where author and social commentator bell hooks asserts that "...it is the system that promotes domination and subjugation. The prejudicial feelings some blacks may express about whites are in no way linked to a system of domination that affords us any power to coercively control the lives and well-being of white folks. That needs to be understood. "

Cornel West, professor of Religion at Princeton University, describes black supremacy in his essay, "Malcolm X and Black Rage", as a phenomenon that developed to counter White supremacy. He comments:

Others explain black supremacy as a form of black rage. The term black rage is derived from a book of the same name by psychologists William Grier and Price Cobbs who argue that many black people living in a predominantly white and sometimes racist society are psychologically damaged by the effects of oppression and that this damage may cause some black people to think or behave in destructive ways.

The Ethiopia Africa Black International Congress argues that Black supremacy is the supremacy of good over evil. Black represents the good and white represents the evil. It is something symbolic, not related to the color of the skin.

Nation of Islam
In the 1930s the Nation of Islam emerged, coming to prominence during the 1960s, when charismatic minister Malcolm X became a spokesman for the movement. The group's founders, "Master Fard" Muhammad and Elijah Muhammad, preached the Doctrine of Yakub, which held that the Original Man was an "Asiatic black man." White people, it contended, were "grafted" from black people 6,000 years ago by an ancient black scientist named Yakub.

The belief in sacrificial killing and ritualistic murder was part of the early Nation of Islam doctrine. Fard thought explicitly that it was the duty for every Muslim to offer as sacrifice four "Caucasian devils". A portion of Fard's lesson reads as follows:

Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan later argued that the lessons about murdering devils was only a metaphor designed to "rally NOI members to 'slay whites' psychological and social grip on them" but Fard's lessons on the murder of white people in at least one instance were taken literally and verbatim: "One afternoon in the early 1970s, when Ali K. Muslim, then Charles 41x, was guarding the temple, a man carrying a sack asked to meet a temple official. The man, thoroughly confused about Elijah Muhammad's teachings, believed that if he killed four white 'devils' he would win a trip to the Holy Land. He had come to redeem his prizes. In the sack, Ali K. Muslim says, were four severed heads."

This teaching also culminated in the creation of the Death Angels, a small splinter group of the Nation of Islam. Between 1972 and 1974, the Death Angels murdered 14 white people in the San Francisco Bay area. These murders later would become known as the Zebra murders because the police used Radio Z to communicate about the case.

Elijah Muhammad also preached black self-reliance, black separatism, cooperative economics, strict moral and physical discipline, and opposition to black-white miscegenation. Since its founding, the NOI has gone through reorganizations and internal conflicts, but even as it moves closer to the mainstream of Islamic belief and practice, NOI leadership has not rejected formally any of Fard's doctrines. It opposes any changes in the major beliefs and programs that were instituted by Fard Muhammad and Elijah Muhammad, including the annual "Savior's Day".

Members of the NOI have been publicly criticized by the leadership for making anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic anti-white and anti-homosexual statements, and for urging the murder of such people. Farrakhan has been banned from entering the UK since 1986 because of his "racist and anti-Semitic views".

Most historians and social scientists classify the Nation of Islam as a black nationalist, or black separatist, organization. Recently, the Southern Poverty Law Center headed by Morris Dees placed the Nation of Islam on its list of hate groups.

New Black Panther Party
The New Black Panther Party (NBPP), whose formal name is the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, is a U.S.-based black supremacist organization founded in Dallas, Texas in 1989.

United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors
The United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors was founded by Dwight York who is considered to be "one of the most successful — and least known — black supremacist leaders in America". The Nuwaubians believe in black people's superiority to white people, that white people are "devils," devoid of both heart and soul, that the color of white people is the result of leprosy and genetic inferiority, and that the ancestors of white people are the sexual partners of dogs and jackals.

White people (sometimes also referred to as “Amorites”, “Hyksos”, “Canaanites”, “Tamahu”, or “Mankind”) are said in one myth to have been originally created as a race of killers to serve black people as a slave army.

Tribu Ka
Tribu Ka was founded in 2004 by Stellio Capo Chichi ("Kémi Séba"), dubbed as "the French Farrakhan", in Paris. The group identified itself as following Louis Farrakhan's ideology but their thinking was also described as a mix of antisemitic Kemetism and Guénonian Islam. After an investigation of racist incitement, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy dissolved Tribu Ka on July 26, 2006 but it reformed under the name Génération Kémi Séba. In April 2008, a Parisian court verdict judged Génération Kémi Séba was the refoundation of the dissolved group Tribu Ka. In June 2009, Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux ordered the dissolution of the group Jeunesse Kémi Séba, founded to replace Génération Kémi Séba.

Black Hebrew Israelites
In late 2008, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) described as black supremacist what it called "the extremist fringe of the Hebrew Israelite movement". It wrote that the members of such groups "believe that Jews are devilish impostors and ... openly condemn whites as evil personified, deserving only death or slavery". The SPLC also said that "most Hebrew Israelites are neither explicitly racist nor anti-Semitic and do not advocate violence".

The Black Hebrew groups characterized as black supremacist by the SPLC include the Nation of Yahweh and the Israelite Church of God in Jesus Christ. Also, the Anti-Defamation League has written that the "12 Tribes of Israel" website, maintained by a Black Hebrew group, promotes black supremacy.

Nation of Yahweh
The Nation of Yahweh is a black supremacist religious group that is an offshoot of the Black Hebrew Israelites line of thought, and was founded by Yahweh ben Yahweh, meaning "God the Son of God" in Hebrew, formerly known as Hulon Mitchell Jr. At its height, the Nation of Yahweh controlled an $8 million empire of properties, including a Miami headquarters known as the Temple of Love and temples in 22 states. Followers of the Nation of Yahweh view black people as the only "true Jews" and believe that White Jews are the spawn of Satan.

According to the Crime Library, followers of the Nation of Yahweh formed a secret group called "The Brotherhood". To become a member of The Brotherhood, applicants had to kill a "white devil" and bring Mitchell a body part - an ear, nose or finger - as proof of the kill. Several Nation of Yahweh members were convicted of conspiracy in more than a dozen anti-white murders, among them Robert Rozier, a former pro football player and member of the secret Brotherhood, who admitted the killing of seven white people. Mitchell started a private school for his followers and held sex classes for boys and men in which he showed them movies of white women having sex with animals to dissuade them from lusting after white females.

Bobo Shanti
The Bobo Shanti are a mansion within the Rastafari movement and led by the late Charles Edwards preach a form of black supremacy based on the original teachings of Leonard Howell and on the teachings of Marcus Garvey. The Bobo say they are not racist.

Black supremacist theories
Many of these theories espouse an ideology of a past Black Supremacy in the world that has been lost. Some focus on claiming this supremacy by claiming they are the chosen people in one religion or another as seen in the Nation of Islam or the Black Israelites. Others even claim extra terrestrial intervention, such as the Nuwaubians or the Nation of Islam. Two trends have acquired a veneer of respectability in many places of Black Academia and Black Studies departments; the Melanin Theory, and Afrocentrism/Global Pan Africanism.

Melanin theory
Some black supremacists justify supremacist assertions by assigning dubious properties to melanin based on pseudo-science and distortions of scientific fact or speculation. This body of belief is known generally as "Melanin theory". The central idea of the Melanin theory is that the levels of melanin in dark skin naturally enhance intelligence and emotional, psychic and spiritual sensitivity as well as physical prowess. Such claims have made inroads among some African Americans within academia.

Alliances with white supremacist groups
Due to some commonly held separatist ideologies, some black supremacist organizations have found limited common cause with white supremacist or extremist organizations.

In 1961 and 1962 George Lincoln Rockwell, the leader of the American Nazi Party, was invited to speak by Elijah Muhammad at a Nation of Islam rally. In 1965, after breaking with the Nation of Islam and denouncing its separatist doctrine, Malcolm X told his followers that the Nation of Islam under Elijah Muhammad had made agreements with the American Nazi Party and the Ku Klux Klan that "were not in the interests of Negros." In 1985 Louis Farrakhan invited white supremacist Tom Metzger, leader of the White Aryan Resistance (a neo-Nazi white power group), to attend a NOI gathering. The Washington Times reports Metzger's words of praise: "They speak out against the Jews and the oppressors in Washington. ... They are the black counterpart to us."