This Saturday afternoon, The Dock Bookshop hosts a meet-and-greet luncheon with author Ayo Kimathi a.k.a. The Irritated Genie of Soufeese. He then travels to the Aletheia Temple Church to give a lecture on his latest book, Effeminization of the Black Male. That title caught my eye, so I did some research on the author. The more I found out, the less I liked.
Kimathi first gained notice last year. He was working at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security when the Southern Poverty Law Center blew his cover as the operator of the website War on the Horizon, where he used the pseudonym The Irritated Genie to advocate that black people stockpile guns so they can murder large numbers of white people during the American race war that will happen in the future. He was immediately placed on leave from his job with the federal government, though he wasn’t officially fired until later. (In the meantime, he called President Obama “a mulatto faggot” for refusing to defend state bans on gay marriage. Well, you’ve probably said some unkind things about your former boss, too.) The right-wing press labeled Kimathi a “black supremacist,” and they were pretty much correct in that assessment, but as the following video shows, he’s even worse than that. This talk presumably covers some of the topics he’ll be discussing at Aletheia:
http://youtu.be/3rH5UXvp-cc
If you don’t have two hours to sit through this video, or more likely, if you don’t have the stomach for that much angry racist homophobia, I’ll give you a few bullet points from his presentation:
• Black people are naturally kind, nurturing, God-fearing people, but white people are naturally savages with no concept of God.
• All sex with white people is a form of rape, and various forms of deviant sex (rape, homosexuality, pedophilia, bestiality) are referred to as “white sex.”
• Homosexuality and pedophilia are the same thing, handed down from ancient Greek and Roman traditions that form the basis of a corrupt Western civilization.
• The only reason that black people become homosexual is because white people have systematically raped blacks over the centuries (especially black children) and forced black men to accept a weak, subservient role.
• Black homosexuals are sexual predators who want to create more black homosexuals. They are traitors to their race.
I’m neither white nor gay, and I still felt assaulted by this lecture. But I kept analyzing what he was saying, because that’s what I do. So I’ll say that this lecture is shot through with bad science and history. I’ll give Kimathi the benefit of the doubt and say that he simply misspeaks when he calls Plato “a Roman philosopher.” Even so, he claims that white people get their savage nature from their origins in the Caucasus mountains. No one’s sure where white people first evolved on Earth (indeed, who belongs in the category has shifted over time), but it was a 18th-century German social scientist who first started calling white people “Caucasians” in a racial taxonomy that has since been widely discredited. Also, Kimathi says Christopher Columbus was Jewish, which is wrong. (He also calls Jews “the worst of the worst” among the Europeans. It’s only a glancing reference, but I assume that he gets further into that subject elsewhere in his body of work.)
Even more, you get the sense of a guy who’s overcompensating for his own insecurities by obsessing about the idea of African-Americans being strong and projecting an image of strength. This is understandable given the history of oppression the black people have faced at the hands of whites, but it’s led Kimathi into a very bad place where he advocates genocide against all “race traitors,” including gay people who refuse to turn themselves straight. The good news is, he’s got an awfully long list of people who need to be killed, so it may well be a while before he gets around to the gays.
I wondered why The Dock was hosting somebody like this, so I tried to contact them through various channels about that. I haven’t heard back, but I’ll update this post if they get back to me. The bad news is that there’s an admission charge for all the events where Kimathi is speaking this weekend, so if you want to call him out face-to-face on the load of crap that he’s preaching, you’re going to have to pay for the privilege.
Like the white homophobes he undoubtedly despises, Kimathi is rowing against a considerable tide. (Another thing: If homosexuality is indeed a white thing, it doesn’t explain the white people who disapprove of gayness.) The same week that Kimathi is here, there’s a movie coming out in our theaters where one of the heroes is a gay African-American character. I’ll leave the last word to Lionel in Dear White People, because my reaction to Kimathi’s research is pretty much the same as Lionel’s when he walks into a college party full of white people dressed in blackface: “This is kinda fucked up.”
