We are all racist.

We are all racist, stop fighting it. Just accept it.

Remember when we were little and we would watch all these movies about how a Yoruba mother didn't want her son to marry an Igbo woman or how an Ijaw man didn't want his daughter to marry a Hausa man? Sometimes, they didn't even have to be from different tribes, they could be of the same tribe, just from different villages. You'd hear things like "don't marry him, our village doesn't marry from that village".
In my hometown in Edo state, there are certain villages where I'm not allowed to marry from even though we're all from the same local government, even though we speak the same language.

Tribalism is something that runs so deeply, so freely in our veins that it's almost now part of our culture, here in Africa and yet, we're always so quick to call the white man evil and spit on him for treating black men as slaves or lesser beings. A lot of us have forgotten that some of those who were sold as slaves to the white man were sacrificed by their very own people. The slave trade is something that has been in our history for years. When you read up on African history, you'll realize that even before the white man came, several villages had certain groups of people they called outcasts, who were not allowed to mix with normal people, they were seen as inferior. They were kept as servants, possessions to be used and discarded at will, some were kept as sacrifices for the gods. They weren't even regarded as human beings and they still had the same color of skin as the same people they served.

Personally, I think that the main reason why we're able to call the white man racist is because he beat us to the chase and he was smart about it. Generations before the white man's invasion, Africans had been engaged in tribal wars and raids where they tried to conquer neighboring villages and regarded them as inferior. If the black man had been the one to invade the white men first, there's a very high chance that he would have been the one doing the colonization and enslaving. The only thing he lacked was the opportunity and resources to do it first.

My point is, we really should stop screaming at the white man for what he did and think about a way to move forward because none of us are really better. Till now, we still harbor prejudices against people of other tribes just because of a few minor differences in custom and tradition despite the fact that we all have the same skin color and we're of the same race.

The problem really isn't with a particular race, the problem is humanity itself. The nature of man is inherently evil. His natural instincts tell him to subdue his fellow man and make him submit, to dominate, to rule, to plunder.

I think that if we could all just learn to understand, to realize that no race is more evil than the other, to accept that we are all equally capable of evil and destruction, if we could just try to stop pointing fingers at others for crimes that we ourselves are capable of, we'd have taken the first step to moving forward, to peace and acceptance.

The worst thing you could ever do to yourself is to lie to yourself, accept that you're really not as holy or as good as you think you are and maybe, just maybe, we can finally move forward. Thank you for reading. Have a pleasant week.

Be kind.

©May