A Checkpoint on the "Versus" Syndrome? – Wole Soyinka | Westminster College Commencement 2016

Please join me in giving a rousing welcome to Westminster to a man who personifies success, importance, sacrifice and altruism. One of the greatest men of letters in the world. The dramatist. The novelist. The poet. The actor. The social critic. shalinka, thank you very much and once again with all my experience I fell into an ambush, thank you because this is a vs

syndrome

checkpoint

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vs. for when we all gather here next. year - a significant part of the Collard family, this nation and the world would have crossed a turning point that many had sworn they would never encounter in their lifetime, but it happened, it is a lesson that those who will emerge from today's rites of passage and in fact in any field and anywhere else in the world of human endeavor they should learn it and hold it as an integral part of their own existence, they should consider it a sign, a secret promise, an immediate inspiration, however, it should also serve as a warning guide. that we should never allow. what has been gained the advances that have been made must be wasted through complacency the flowing stream of the accumulated waters of a basin must not be allowed to dry up to be polluted or reversed to dissipate in arid lands must flow onwards outwards and water that land that belongs to and nourishes all humanity, regardless of gender, race, faith or age, its blessings must be stolen equally from all inhabitants of our common land now, what is that dividing line? of waters that continues or should continue to hold captive the mind we will reach?

At one point seven years ago I made an optimistic statement about that milestone. I asserted quite confidently that humanity could claim to have finally quite plausibly reached a checkpoint in the dialectic of race. I do not allow my optimism to take me so far as to affirm that we had reached terminals that had embarked on the final stage of the dialectic proposed by poets and thinkers such as the poet and statesman Leo postulated only one of the original architects of a well-known movement as Negritude, roughly translated as the beam of the black man you sang or inserted the warning, but first, the historically disadvantaged arm of the dialectic, specifically the black race, must begin by obtaining its most complete material and the affirmation of its self-knowledge as an autonomous reality before embarking on a universalist journey that in turn would mean the separatist and, therefore, exclusive tendency of Demi among the white, European, Caucasian, Melanesian or Semitic races, hence her formulation together with another poet and statesman Emma Caesar, we met Martin of Martinique and others and their formulation of Negritude;

However, in the last decade the world has witnessed one of those events that imply a potential end to what I have often called the dominance of the black versus white versus Christianity versus Islam East versus West conditioning factor in human affairs. communism versus capitalism, etc., etc. to pronounce the end of the racial vector of that The almost instinctive dominant tendency is the versus syndrome simply because a member of a race, once despised and denigrated, of color and humanity, came to preside over the gospel affairs of the 1960s in WA "as a hateful separatism and racial superiority that simply raises questions such as why global tension and class conflict did not disappear with the dismantling of the Berlin Wall oh, why did extreme nationalisms not evaporate with the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa ?Yes, in fact, it is true that the Kuhn of old was given unique powers over the land of the klu klux klan edition that induced the iconic image of a small dividend but defined that a black girl escorted to school by the marine corps for her complement of taunts and saliva from the merchants of hate and prejudice would now be forced to submit to decisions that would affect their lives, decisions that would be created by the progeny of that bewildered black girl's original race.

What made her barrier end up there? versus approaching the way others approach race relations in the United States or elsewhere; the vs. It is a deeply ingrained conditioning that can be found in the global world. and localized levels that take forms such as those who are not with us are against us the enemy of my enemy is my friend and other time-warped wisdoms with all kinds of emotive levels those who insist that, especially in interaction international and places, the Citadels of learning and enlightenment that this does not have to be so and for themselves designations as decadent race traitors the woolly minor liberals an unpatriotic elitist idealist think like other forms of simplistic demonization x' all of which are designed to set aside even the objective evaluation of such designations remains a model that can somehow change notions such as metacultural-sized social hybridization or, more excessively, rainbow elision, not only emerged but became standards of persuasive union in several nations despite such marks in politics and ideologies in a race, however, even at that time it seemed prudent to warn.

In fact, let us prepare ourselves for the possibility that the same rise of a racial underdog, a product of the slave continent, to the dominance in power of an electorate built on the backs of slave labor could trigger, paradoxically, the rise of that very binary opposition that That possibility was real, we could be overwhelmed, I warned, by a latent desire among extremists, manifested in numerous ways, to ensure the failure of such a mandate and, by implication, the failure of their career, leading to a violent reaction, we define it, this also manifests again paradoxically in a tendency to apply condescending attitudes. standards when evaluating these political capacities strategies or eventual achievements not lost especially for me it would mean the highest form of racial denigration a reinforcement of the vs syndrome expressed in the language of condescension it is difficult to eradicate all habits, especially those that simplify the complexity of interaction and human relationships nothing is more pampering and to subsume not seeing the social challenges beneath us versus others and others are responsible for our failures etc etc it is for this reason that I set out and do it to this day as I am sure many others do that even that Decisive event should be read simply as a checkpoint filled with unlimited potential, but not as the end point of a trend toward polarization driven by that ISM.

It is by no means unilateral. Letting it go is no different from asking a severely disabled individual to let it go. Let go. a support animal or a crutch justice if the disability is the product of a collective trauma of being on the receiving end of history sometimes for centuries no one should be unduly surprised that memory plays a more effective role in judgment, even in more objective icy issues, the famine that affects the majority of people. We are willing to admit, as a personal and joyful example, that it took place just after Barack Obama was inaugurated as president.

I was having dinner with a former colleague known for his compulsive conscience. He had said something about the possibilities of change, not just in an American but in a global psyche, coming from the presence of a black man at the head of what is today the most powerful nation in the world. His immediate response was, "The black man, as far as I'm concerned, is white, he's a white man." tell me what's black about him, he has a white mother and that's what I'm afraid we had as an appetizer. I chose not to go out debating on his own ground the palette of Obama's ancestry, being for me a mere distraction since the flight from the party the primaries that ended with his national support some of you who follow the campaign rhetoric may remember that race was not enough of an issue.

I was also pretty used to my friends being outdoors and had stomach or liver on the agenda for the night, which was supposed to be dinner. The gentleman responded, "Oh yeah, why did you say that?", but I seem to remember now that the most common description of target has been that of African descent, this means that he is of black African origin, first in the United States, He also has a wife who is unquestionably American and his children. African Americans in the United States White House designated as the residence of the nation's first family have become, by the fact of the occupation, at least 90 percent of African American households, where in all likelihood the food of the alma might even appear on the menu for the first time.

In American history, I argued that this was what the world would see, the total real world is made up of factory workers, salesmen, men and women, technicians, economists, theologians, artists, plumbers, wet bankers, immigrants, economists legal and illegal, taxi drivers, drug traffickers, truck drivers, Indian chiefs and other tribes, philosophers and futurists. high school students and

college

students, etc., even the blind that I saw would see the transformation of the position, I now demand that it could not affect the psyche of the world or influence, even in an infinitesimal way, a number of acts, decisions, choices and policies in distant places that in turn shaped the future history of that world did that thing that made a difference could this perhaps be considered a small measure of progress seven years later are enough for me to attend and answer my own question, but not yet I will in no way be posed As an academic question, since the answer is embedded in the terms that Americans are currently about to utter, I cite this moment only as an extraction from that unprecedented event of January 2017 as a souvenir for those who They depart from these grounds as a memory of their rites of passage that like every beginning also has an end a gift that can be overlooked since it is something that you all worked to achieve I was here in the United States during that contest my lectures They took me all over the United States, well observing the enthusiasm of youth, the spirit of volunteering in a cause of change.

I saw young people sleeping on their desks, sharing the exhaustion after the day's work. Rushing home was a quick refresher and then they came back an hour later, to resume individually and collectively, they built that Andaman watershed, it's strange. They brought pride to a nation that has almost become a global pariah, so it is their own gift that takes away that sense of achievement today along with testaments to their academic journey when they enter the job market. Keep in mind your protagonist, who will also join you there in that market in another seven months, so whenever you face seemingly insurmountable obstacles on your own journey, always remember that you already possess that armor of invincibility that He says yes, we can thank you a lot. a lot of you