On Economic Violence
By Joe Madison
Part Two
A further examination of tastes, interests and values reveal that once you adopt or are coerced into perpetuating the tastes, interests and values of another group of people you will not only be committing economic violence against yourself but you will be committing violence against your health.
Example 1: In Hawaii, over 50 percent of native adults 40 years old or more were diagnosed with diabetes. The Hawaiians are a Polynesian people who have for centuries flourished on a local diet of vegetables and fruits from their land.
After the U.S. invasion and displacement of the Hawaiian Queen Liliuokalani, the tastes, values and interests of native Hawaiians were changed to the tastes of white people. Hawaiians began eating hamburgers, pizza, etc. and became zombies of American fast food-ism and forgot about their traditional foods.
Something interesting happened: Disease in the form of diabetes. Diabetes was never a problem for Hawaiians until their tastes were changed. In effect, Hawaiians were funding their diabetes.
A Hawaiian doctor trained in western medicine and traditional healing sciences went on a crusade to save her people from diabetes. She did not prescribe insulin-controlled by white pharmaceutical companies, which is a band-aid to the real problem, but she prescribed a traditional Hawaiian diet and forbade her patients to eat European made food.
As her patients ate green leaves, fruits and root food vegetables from the place where they evolved, their diabetes was wiped out completely. Additionally, in this manner, Hawaiian farmers benefit from the purchase of food grown on their own land, thereby restoring economic and physical health-simultaneously.
Example 2: I was at a supermarket in Miami, Florida buying a yam. Not a sweet potato, but a real yam, brown and hard. The cashier was Black and said, “What’s that, a turnip?”
I was startled and had a serious epiphany. Black people have been so oppressed in America, that we do not even recognize our own ancestral foods. The implications again are self inflicted economic and physical violence (dis-ease).
A major disease that affects Black Americans is Sickle Cell Anemia
However, this disease does not affect Black people in Africa nearly as much. The reason: The shifting of tastes, interests, and values much like the Hawaiian example. The sickle cell trait is a trait that helps Africans fight off malaria. The sickling of the red blood cell helps prevent the malaria parasite from binding to the cell due to the peculiar shape of a sickled cell and its hemoglobin.
Since Black Americans are literally from West Africa, they have this trait just like any other West African. The difference is the West African diet contains root foods from the Africans soil like cassava and yam.
Studies by Nigerian researcher, Dr. Ogi Agbaihave, shown that thiocyanate in cassava and yam and their leaves alleviate the symptoms of Sickle Cell Anemia. Black Americans do not eat cassava or true yams, so Sickle Cell Anemia is rampant.
Instead, Black Americans have been forced to develop a taste for everything, other than African root food, therefore the disease is present. Disease is defined as imbalance.
When a person or a people have tastes, interests and values outside of who they really are, all types of imbalances occur such as economic and physical health imbalances.
Recalibrating a Black American diet from chitlins and fried chicken back to a West African diet of plantains, cassava, yams, etc., will create a necessary economic balance by supporting African commodities markets and enriching personal, group economic and physical health simultaneously.
Have you committed economic violence today?
The Opium Wars: “There is Nothing You Have That We Want” — China
In studying economic violence, tastes interests and values, a cursory discussion on the Opium Wars is extremely important. Please note that major wars occur due to the addictions of Europeans.
Today, there is a war in Iraq, due to the European addiction to oil. In the 19th century, the Opium wars between Britain and China were due to the British addiction to tea.
The Chinese have an ancient tradition of drinking tea as part of their daily ritual. The British developed this custom due to the travels of many European “explorers” who successfully made it over to Asia. By the 19th century, tea became a staple of the British, particularly the middle class and ruling class.
The British imported all of their tea from China. In a short amount of time, there was a huge trade imbalance between Britain and China in favor of China. The British paid China for their tea with gold. Soon, the British became nervous as their gold reserves were being depleted.
However, the British population’s taste for tea was insatiable and there would have been riots if the British population was deprived of their tea. In response to the economic violence that Britain was suffering at the hands of China, British leaders arranged a meeting with Chinese leaders.
The British wanted to stop trading tea for gold. They told the Chinese that they would trade anything else that Britain produced for the Chinese tea.
The Chinese response was laughter as the Chinese retorted, “There is nothing that you have that we want.” The British were stunned as they took this as an offense to their way of life and their plans to keep their gold.
The British went back to Britain and decided to pump opium into China. The opium was to be traded for gold in China, and thereby getting the gold back into British hands. In addition, the British took lands from the Indian subcontinent for two purposes:
1) for growing the poppy plant for opium to facilitate their drug trade and
2) for growing various other plants for tea so that trading tea with China would be obsolete.
In fact, today one of the most famous tea names is Ceylon tea. Ceylon is the former British colonial name for the country in the Indian sub-continent now named Sri Lanka.
One day, in 1839, the Chinese seized a ship off of its shores containing tons of opium. The Chinese rightfully seized the ship as opium was illegal in China and anyone caught with opium was given the death penalty.
The British declared the Chinese seizure of their ship as an act of war, and hence the initiation of the Opium wars which were from 1839-1842 and 1856-1860 between Britain and China.
The Chinese have never forgotten the economic war with Europeans and the implications are felt today. Their major strength has been maintaining their own tastes, interests and values.
Black people, can we say the same? The reason why we have been in trouble as a race for so long is our unrelenting taste for things European.
Remember, African prisoners of war (slaves) were traded for white commodities like European processed rum, spare parts and European textiles.
Have you committed economic violence today?
Slavery and the Value of Labor: Adam Smith
Adam Smith was an economic philosopher from England and considered the patron saint of European Capitalist thought. He was also an opponent of the enslavement of Africans in America and Europe. However, he was not opposed to our enslavement for moral or noble reasons.
He was opposed to slavery because he thought it was inefficient in the capitalist world. He believed Africans should be paid for our labor so that we could buy European goods.
That was his sole argument. He didn’t like the idea that such a large population could not be consumers because slaves were not allowed the ability to earn money.
What does this mean? It means that the only reason why it was acceptable for you and I to not be enslaved is so that we could feed the economic system of white supremacy better and more efficiently.
And what are Black people now? The biggest one-dimensional pure consumers the world has ever seen. The slavery relationship is still the same.
If you work a job that pays you ten dollars per hour and you pay $150.00 to Tommy Hilfiger for his jeans, you have effectively given 15 hours of your labor to Tommy Hilfiger.
You worked 15 hours for him.
When are you going to work for yourself and your people, by purchasing Black goods and services with your labor hours? Tommy Hilfiger and company doesn’t even have to whip us anymore to turn over our labor to him. He is still economically violent, and we are still bleeding.
Lesson: In your economic life, if you are not buying from your own people first, then you are committing suicide on many levels and enlisting for slavery and zombification. Buy Black with no apology and if you have to buy from others, try to make sure it’s a bootleg.
Never pay full price for anything from others — especially those who have historically and continue to benefit from your underdevelopment. For in fact, our relationship is dialectical to our oppressors.
Their development is dependent on our underdevelopment.
(I did not write this article but thought it worth sharing even if I do not agree with every single point made. — Trojan Pam)
Counter-Racism Economic Stop #3: STOP Committing Black Economic Violence-Part 1
Racism Is White Supremacy 