The Question of Black Self-Abnegation

By Dr. Samuel Adjei Sarfo

Attorney and Counselor at Law

The first year I got inducted into the sanctum of the law here in Texas, USA, in 2011, my eagerness to give back to society led me to do some voluntary work with a pro-bono group here in Austin. I remember that I was the only black lawyer in a group of some fifty or so lawyers who met thrice weekly in several schools to offer free legal advice to people who were not financially capable of paying for such services.
For every one of the sessions we did, I was almost always the most well-dressed lawyer, fully suited with my lawyer’s badge conspicuously displayed on my chest. Always ensconced in the front bench with other lawyers, I was of the opinion that nobody had to look too hard to see that I was indeed an attorney and counselor at law who unmistakably belonged to the group. On this particular day, I arrived rather early and was comfortably seated in my chair looking through the crowd when my eyes got locked with that of a rather elderly black woman. I smiled at her and nodded slightly.
She said sternly: “Please those seats are for the lawyers. Those of us coming to seek legal advice have to sit here,” pointing at the seats where she and her group of other citizens were waiting to be advised. I burst out laughing, and all those other members in the group-Blacks, Whites, Hispanics-joined in, pointing out to her that I was also a lawyer. The lady hastily apologized.

Of course, the lady had not yet heard me speak to even determine by my foreign accent that I certainly did not belong to my seat; she had formed a firm conclusion based on a prejudice lodged in her head since her birth, that despite that I was in a full suit and properly badged, it was still not conceivable that I, a black man, could ever be a lawyer in the USA.
Of course, that was not the first time my professional status was mistaken: I went to work in Dallas and flew back into Austin one early morning and hurriedly picked a taxi at the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, determined to hit the Travis County court house before my case was called. On that day too, I was quite well-dressed in a full suit with my fedora hat slightly tilted to one side like a rich cowboy. The driver was an old handsome African-American gentleman with a rather beautiful white beard and a set of piercing, large eyes. I could see him occasionally observing me through the driver’s window while at the same time trying to keep his eyes on the road. Finally, he blurted out:
“Man, you look dapper this morning. What do you do?”
“Guess what I do,” I replied jovially.
“You a reverend minister or something?”
“Nah”
“Well then a limousine chauffeur?”
“Nah”
The gentleman was silent for a moment as if mulling carefully over the matter of my profession before finally blurting out:
“Tell you what? Then you are a pimp!!” He stated with the finality of a judge who had made a firm conclusion, thumping the steering wheel as if his fist was a gavel.
I burst out laughing until the tears were sitting on my eye-balls. What else could I do? As my mother Akua Sarpomah used to say, “You have to laugh over some things otherwise you will always cry over everything.” I don’t claim to be any one of your cut and dry charming Romeos that these beautiful women will hold a candle up to and sing in praise of at the festival grounds. But I definitely do not look like an orangutan enough to be mistaken for some pimp even while Dan-dappered in my most expensive suit. So why couldn’t I be placed in the context of my learned profession by people of my own darn race?

And how would I feel if these two people- one challenging my right to a seat, and the other concluding that I was a pimp- were actually white people? Will I then be calling them racists? And how does one call a purely black person who cannot conceive of a high place or a noble profession for his fellow pure black person? How do you call a person of your race who instinctively hates the race and has firmly concluded that we blacks are not worth anything? Because within the circles of our African-American brothers and sisters who have really gone through too many struggles, it is not easy to have a very high opinion about a fellow black person. This is because they have regularly seen him or her roaming down the streets and dealing in drugs; or even incarcerated on simple issues as child support or domestic violence. And while it may not altogether be an excuse for any of them to see blacks as inferior, they are somewhat exonerated by their peculiar history of white oppression and supremacy. We may not condone their viewpoint of the race, but it is our responsibility to understand and honor them and love them.

The same cannot be said of those of us who have come in to inherit the fruits of their struggles. We have a duty to demonstrate the pride of the race through proper self-esteem, confidence, dignity and exemplary character. Yet if any one has been carefully looking at the statistics, one will conclude clearly that there is never a group of people more prone to insult themselves and the race than black Africans themselves. To begin with, it has never been too difficult for many to view askance the integrity of the humanity of their fellow blacks. So deep inside us, we have developed some sort of hereditary prejudices against our fellow human beings, naming them derogatory names and describing them by their worst representatives and painting all of them with a paint-brush of evil. Our habit has therefore been to denigrate others as a cover-up for our own inferiority complexes. We have named unspeakable names to our fellows and gone beyond such naming to name our fellow Blacks here in America on whose land we have come to seek economic refuge. And when we have alienated all our fellows by our self-inflicted prejudice, we feign surprise that they would not call us siblings or cooperate with us or help us.

And when we begin to insult ourselves, and extend that insult to others, we do not leave the matter there; instead, we go ahead to condemn the whole race as inferior. In doing this, we solicit support from the white person who has not uttered any word yet against us and enter his head and declare:” That is why the whites do not respect us.” So we project our own self-denigration unto the white person’s consciousness and state on his behalf that he has no respect for us; whereas the source of all the disrespect actually emanates from our own consciousness: We have never had sufficient self-esteem to hold ourselves in proper honor and dignity.
We are the only race still putting ourselves down while blaming others for putting us down. One time, a person wrote a commentary which I found rather troubling. He stated that the White spits on the Indian, the Indian spits on the Colored, the Colored spits on the Black, but the Black, with nobody to spit on, chooses to spit on another Black. By what we say and do to ourselves, we are probably affirming this hierarchy of repugnant spittle. After all, we are the only race constantly quoting authorities to support our inhumanity. Thus, we regularly quote Lord Lugard to support the notion that we are inferior. There was even somebody that lodged a fierce debate about our humanity on Ghanaweb’s Say It Aloud (SIL). Another person stated with confidence that the race was per se inferior, and that anybody that amounts to anything within it is an outlier. I guess by “outlier”, he meant himself and his father and mother! Our musicians are busy celebrating lighter skins and our most successful men, even where they fail to find a real white woman, will still go for the woman whose color or hair is closest to that of a white woman. What are our pure Black beauties supposed to do? Stay unmarried or go into prostitution?

So we have failed to develop the kind of self-confidence that will enable us discover our self-worth and inner strength; and because we have the notion of inferiority, others have succeeded in clapping on us their sense of superiority. If we will not describe ourselves in any positive terms, why are we expecting that somebody else will respect us.

A year or so ago, I had the opportunity to handle a certain case in which my client was charged with domestic violence assault involving strangulation (a felony). Because of the individual’s history with narcotic drugs, I determined that what he needed was treatment for mental disease, not a prison cell. I wrote an insanity plea to the judge who ordered a psychiatric evaluation before making a decision. I gathered the relevant documents and stopped by the psychiatrist’s office hoping for a face-to-face meeting with her before she saw my client. As usual, I was very well-dressed with my Travis County Court Attorney badge conspicuously displaying. But at the reception, the two white ladies appeared rather hostile and would not let me go to see the doctor. Finally, I decided to leave the documents with the receptionists. When I reached home, I found a long email stating that it was against the hospital’s policy for any attorney to allow psychiatric clients to come directly to the hospital unattended. Henceforth, I should not allow my client to come alone again, since it would constitute a security breach at the hospital. I burst out laughing before I wrote to the doctor that I came in myself to deliver the files, and had been mistaken for my client. The doctor hastily apologized.

Incidents such as the foregoing may easily be construed as racism by many of us if those meting them out to us happen to be of a different race. But I knew by then that the view of those two white ladies was no different from that of the black lady who asked me to vacate my seat for lawyers, or the cab driver who called me a pimp; or even many of those web rats here who concluded with a flourish that I was out pimping when my luxury SUV was stolen. People who don’t have faith, character, dignity, confidence, self-esteem, self-assurance and ambition will always start out in life by first finding those they can ridicule in order to feel less inferior. Thereafter, they classify the whole Black race to be inferior, impliedly agreeing with the racists that the Whites are superior. Then at the nadir of their own extreme self-abnegation, it will be inconceivable for them to conclude that even a black lawyer in America deserves any status beyond that of an impostor, a pimp or a madman.


Samuel Adjei Sarfo, J.D., is a practicing attorney in Austin, Texas, USA. You can email him at [email protected]