Negotiation is only authentic when both sides are near equals. When I was a kid, my friends around the neighborhood used to play this game called “Big Bank Take Little Bank.” This silly ghetto game went like this: two people would empty their pockets; whoever had the most money got to take the other’s money. The big bank took the little bank. The fundamental precept of the game was that each participant was likely to have similar amounts of money, ostensibly because we were all from the same neighborhood. If one of us was from Beverly Hills and the other from Watts, the game would have never been played.
The comedian Eddie Griffith was on Bill Maher’s Real Time last week, and he made an interesting point about the presumed threat to the United States posed by Iran and North Korea. Griffith stated that the fundamental issue is whether the colored peoples of the world and the white peoples of the world will ever negotiate as equals. So long as nuclear weapons are possessed only by Western (white) countries, folks in other countries will always have limited options and an inferior bargaining position. Westerners already know this. Think about it: the U.S. is trying to destabilize the leadership of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. If Chavez had nukes, would the U.S. be able to do that? How would the U.S. treat Castro if we knew he had nukes? How much would the United States pay for a barrel of oil if the Saudis, the Iraqis, the Nigerians and the Iranians had nuclear weapons? I guarantee you it’d be a lot higher.
I’m not writing this to suggest that every country in the world should have nukes, but to point out the underlying doctrine of white supremacy that forms the canvas of all weapons of mass destruction debates.
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