Using the Lumumba to Confront the Inner Racists of America

1. America’s Original Sin: Racism
   1. The Story of Moniqua
2. The Lessons from the Lumumba
   1. Patrice Lumumba
   2. Patrice Lumumba s Favorite Drink
   3. The Racist Overtones of the Drink
3. The White Excuses for Inaction
   1. It was a Long Time Ago
   2. Nostalgia
4. Learning from the Lumumba
   1. Know Your History
5. Image Attribution

With all of the screaming and shouting while we run bandy-legged in circles as we react to the flood of sewage coming from Trump’s flabby hairless white ass, you would be forgiven for wondering why Ye Olde Blogge is publishing yet another post on racism. I came up in the dying days of hippie-dippiedom, which gave way to the woo-woo dominated 80’s where we were all told that the universe would keep giving you the same lesson over and over again until you learned it. If you didn’t, our woorus warned us ominously, the lessons would get harsher and more dramatic in an effort to catch our attention, resulting in a lesson that was the equivalent of being hit by a Mack Truck. However woo-bristic it was to use incense-based healthcare to cure our dandruff or genital warts, it seems to me that our times are desperate enough to start thinking of the #GOPDystopia as America’s Mack Truck moment.

America’s Original Sin: Racism

Racism has been said to be America’s original sin. It has dogged us from day one. It has hurt us as a country and as individuals. It was born of slavery, for slavery, and by slavery. It will define and limit us for as long as we indulge and tolerate it.

While white people can enact their performative anti racism schtick, ranging from “I have a Black friend” to “I didn’t vote for this,” but it won’t end the racism that is inherent in our system and culture. White people have to own and accept that as a group, we did vote for it… three fucking times! And, each time Trump’s racism has become more stark, flagrant, and down-right naked. Mass deportation was right there on the pre-printed signs brandished at the Republican National Convention for God’s sake. Trump jactated that he would deport millions of the worst people a year. It doesn’t take a very stable jenius to figure out that it could only mean using jack-booted thugs to drag gardeners, nannies, and their five year olds kicking and screaming from their beds in the middle of the night. We cannot pretend surprise when innocents are being held in vermin and disease ridden concentration camps every person and media outlet to the left of fascism said so in so many terms.

Racism is the glue that holds the MAGA and toxic masculinity coalition together.

Racism can only be solved by white people. We must recognize the little things that we do and think that are racist. These reactions can be subtle and difficult to recognize, the so-called microaggressions of a racial nature (as opposed to misogynist or classiest nature).

The Story of Moniqua

I worked at a school that had four Monicas on the faculty. Four! Can you imagine? One day, I walked into a coffee shop popular among the teachers and recognized one of the Monicas for the very first time. I had put a name with a face, but it wasn’t Monica, it was Moniqua! I was so genuinely surprised and delighted about realizing who she was I responded with a joyous, “You’re Mon-NIQU-a!” It was if God had reached down and slapped me upside the head with a dumbfounding moment of satori! She turned to me, gave me a weak smile, and replied that she was, and then turned away to resume her conversation as if I weren’t even there. It took me days to realize that it was a microaggression because, of course, she is Black. One that she had probably experienced all of her life.

When my second moment of Zen occurred — realizing that she was the Black woman with a Black name and making a big freaking deal out of it was a racial microaggression — I was embarrassed. Here I was a part-time blogger and full-time citizen that had castigated white Americans about their deeply held inner racist, committing a common garden variety microaggressions like I was as unreconstructed and unrepentant as one of my Appalachian uncles!

I often thought about bringing it up with her, but worried that I might just be compounding the problem. Besides, I was embarrassed I pictured her being annoyed by the first instance and doubly annoyed by needing to take me by the hand and lead me through something so plainly obvious. But, we don’t grow unless we have experiences to fertilize that growth. Those experiences are threatening and so avoided. The problem with white people confronting their inner racist and our racist culture is white pride. So, when I read this article about a German winter drink that was challenging German racial beliefs, I knew I had the perfect vehicle for illustrating the proeblem. It wasn’t too close to home — it is about Germany. And, it is about a drink. What could be less threatening than a drink?

The Lessons from the Lumumba

Here’s the 411 on the drink:

• NAME: The Lumumba
• INGREDIENTS: Hot chocolate and a shot of brandy
• SEASON: Winter, especially the German Christmas markets and ski country
• DATE: It originated in the 1960’s
• VARIATIONS: Coffee, Cointreau, amaretto

It’s a drink with a weird name, what could be racist about that? Unless you’re a history aficionado, and there’s always at least one, so check the comments, you couldn’t guess the connection.

Patrice Lumumba

It starts with the name, Lumumba. The drink was named for Patrice Lumumba, who the Belgians and CIA assassinated in 1961 after he led the Democratic Republic of the Congo to independence and become it’s first prime minister.

His Independence Day speech was one for the ages made in front of the King of Belgium, God, and everybody. It was UNAPOLOGETIC and spoke truth to power, literally. If you haven’t read it, you should. Here’s a taste:

We have seen that the law was not the same for a white and for a black, accommodating for the first, cruel and inhuman for the other. We have witnessed atrocious sufferings of those condemned for their political opinions or religious beliefs; exiled in their own country, their fate truly worse than death itself. We have seen that in the towns there were magnificent houses for the whites and crumbling shanties for the blacks, that a black was not admitted in the motion-picture houses, in the restaurants, in the stores of the Europeans; that a black traveled in the holds, at the feet of the whites in their luxury cabins.

Patrice Lumumba The First Prime Minister of the Congo (Zaire) On June 30, 1960, Independence Day

Patrice Lumumba s Favorite Drink

It left a pretty bitter taste in the mouths of the Belgians and Americans, who subsequently, kidnapped him — like a common Nicolas Maduro — imprisoned him, tortured him, and murdered him. Then, they dissolved his body in acid, leaving only the gold crown of a tooth, which a Belgian police officer took with him back to Belgium as a trophy. Holy Mother of AI, siblings.

That uppity Black man done pissed the white people off! So, in the early 1960’s when the heart-warming drink made with a SHOT of brandy was rebranded a Lumumba, it was a no brainer. It was after all his “favorite” drink, they said. Maybe they should start making it with a shot of acid with a gold-crowned tooth as garnish.

So, once you know all of this, who could blithely order up a Lumumba during your holiday gift shopping at one of those quaint delightful German Christmas markets? The drink positively drips with the love and compassion of Christ, doesn’t it?

The Racist Overtones of the Drink

The racist overtones of the drink exist on several levels. First, there is the “shot,” reminding one of the gruesome end of its namesake. Second, there is the dark chocolate drink, mixed with milk, reminding one of the skin tones of the oppressed. And third, there is the warmth that spreads through one’s chest and heart after drinking a warm mixed drink, reminding the imbiber that any who dare defy the order end up as Lumumba did.

Who could object to renaming the drink? What could they say?

The White Excuses for Inaction

You might think that naming a drink after him might be a way of honoring him, keeping his name and achievements alive in our memories. But that isn’t so according to Congolese.

It was a Long Time Ago

Some Germans argue that so much time has passed that the connection between the name of the drink and the man has been forgotten. It is now immaterial The harm is still there, hurting those Congolese and others who remember Patrice Lumumba and reminding them exactly what their former colonial masters thought of them and their place in the world.

“I was surprised because I grew up knowing about Patrice Lumumba as the first [Congolese] prime minister, someone my parents were really proud of,” she recalls. “It was pretty shocking that there was a drink named after him. And it’s a drink with a shot of alcohol. Knowing how he was murdered and treated, even his dead body, I was shocked.”

Nostalgia

There is the nostalgia argument. Many Germans grew up with the drink in their youth some twenty, thirty, sixty years ago. For them, it holds nothing but good memories of family outings, pleasant cold evenings, and winter sports. It is a part of their culture and heritage. They would like to keep it.

It points to a larger problem, though. They say Never Again about the anti-Semitism of the Nazis, but they’ve completely forgotten their own colonial history. There were genocides of the Herero and Nama peoples in Namibia. Anti-Black racism is evident in Germany given the monkey calls at soccer games when Black players are on the pitch, And, with the electoral success of the far right political party, maybe Never Again was really only Just Not Yet.

Learning from the Lumumba

Perhaps we can learn something from this example. Because white Germans don’t identify with Lumumba, it seems harmless to them. Because they don’t remember the history, it seems like a reference to a distant hazy past. Suggesting that they change it because it is hurtful to some portion of the German populace and wider world’s population, seems unimportant and unnecessarily intrusive into their cultural identity.

Know Your History

Once the history in all of its gory details is explained to many white Germans, many Lumumba vendors have changed the name. They are willing to give up this portion of their cultural history in favor of a wider more important aspect of their history, the harms caused to others in the name of nationalistic and colonial pursuits. It is a way of reconciling the harmful aspects of their history and culture with those that are healthy and beneficial.

The Trump administration is trying to rewrite American history, eliminating the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow, in favor of a patriotic “Song of the South” version. They want to remove references to the pain and suffering caused by slavery and keep the image of benevolent slavers, improving the lives of those they owned by imbuing them with useful skills and introducing them to new friends.

America cannot heal the wounds of our Black, Brown, Asian, and white peoples by covering over the scars with the inanity of white pride and nationalism. Those wounds will only fester and grow. Nor can we resolve it all by ethnically cleansing the country, removing anyone who isn’t white enough from our presence.

The only way to become a more perfect union and resolve the original sin of slavery is for white people to acknowledge, confront, and work through the misgivings of their inner racists. It can feel hurtful to change white cultural artifacts like removing the statues honoring Confederate generals, renaming landmarks like Mt. McKinely, and changing the mascots of sports teams from racist slurs. White people don’t identify with those things as harmful. Indeed, they seem normal, so, of course, we resist and resent the change. But, we must if we are to overcome the differences that now divide us because racism is the glue that holds MAGA together.

Image Attribution

This image was found on WikiMedia Commons using a Creative Commons search.