Page 105 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization
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looking at their skin color or physical appearance. By using the discredited racist catego-
rization of human groups,such as Semitic,Hamitic,Negroid,and Cushitic,Habashas place
Oromos between themselves and the people that they wrongly call Shankallas, whom
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they consider Negroid. Despite the fact that Habashas are black, they consider them-
selves Semitic to associate themselves with the Middle East and dissociate themselves from
Africa whose peoples they consider both racially and culturally inferior. For instance,
when Haile Selassie,the emperor of Ethiopia,was interviewed by the Nigerian Daily Times
about Ethiopian racial identity in the 1930s, he said “that Ethiopians were not, and did
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not regard themselves as negroes [sic], as they were a Hamito-Semitic people.” Soren-
son expresses this racist attitude as “a multiplicity of Ethiopians, blacks who are whites,
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the quintessential Africans who reject African identity.” Since the concept of race is a
sociopolitical construct,it is essential to critically understand a historical context in which
Ethiopian racism is produced and reproduced to denigrate colonized peoples to deny
them access to Ethiopian state power.In Ethiopian discourse,racial distinctions have been
invented and manipulated to perpetuate the political objective of Habasha domination of
the colonized population groups.“The fact that racial distinctions are easily manipulated
and reversed indicates,”Sorenson notes,“the absurdity of any claims that they have an ob-
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jective basis and locates these distinctions where they actually occur,in political power.”
Habasha elites recognize the importance of racial distinctions in linking themselves
to the Middle East, Europe, and North America to mobilize support for their politi-
cal projects.Jews,Arabs,Europeans,and Americans see Habashas as closer to themselves
than the peoples whom they consider “real black.” Also, the West, particularly the
United States, places Habashas at “an intermediate position between whites and
blacks” and considers them to be closer to “the European race” or members of “the
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great Caucasian family.” There are Europeans who consider Habashas a very intelli-
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gent people because of their racial affinity with the “Caucasian race.” There are also
those who see Habashas as “dark-skinned white people” and “racial and cultural mid-
dlemen” between Black Africa on one side and Europe and the Middle East on the
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other side. One German scholar admired the intelligence of Habashas and noted that
he never saw such mental capability among Negroes,Arabs, Egyptians, and Nubians. 65
These racist discourses are unchallenged in academic and popular discourse because
they help reproduce Ethiopian ethnocratic and colonial state power. U.S. foreign
policy elites, diplomats, and other officials recognize and defend such “racial preten-
sions of Ethiopia’s ruling class.” 66
Habasha racism prevents the peaceful coexistence of different cultures as shown by
the destruction of the Gafat and other peoples. Habashas see themselves as a Semitic
people who are racially and culturally superior to others in the Horn of Africa. Paul
Baxter explains that they “used to stress their Middle Eastern rather than African cul-
tural roots, as is so obvious in the reiteration of the Solomonic legend, taught in
schools as history and justification of imperial rule. Just as the expansion of the Euro-
pean empire in Africa coincided with that of Abyssinian, so the latter took on some
of the same sanctimonious assumptions of bringing civilization to the savages. Mene-
lik and his courtiers became honorary, if second-class, bearers of the ‘white man’s bur-
den in Africa.’” 67 Habashas have effectively used cultural racism 68 in destroying or
suppressing other peoples. Cultural racism and its contradictions may result in the ex-
termination or/and continued subjugation of the dominated population group.
Racism does not necessarily manifest itself in the discourse of biological difference.
Usually it combines the discourses of biological and cultural differences to justify un-