Helplessness, accompanied by a strong dose of rage, is the general feeling I get when I look back on the history of Blacks since our initial encounters with caucasoids. I feel helpless, not because I fear them, which I don’t, but because it seems my people do not see them as the greatest instigators of Black pain and suffering.
I feel this way because if I were present when Malcolm was gunned down, when Fred Hampton was gunned down, when Assata Shakur and Mutulu and Mumia were set up, I would have expected my people, Black people, to have been there to protect them from infiltrators, corrupt caucasoids and Black impostor sell-outs.
But that isn’t the general theme for Blacks living in Amerikka. We’re too busy consuming ourselves with the menial tasks created by caucasoids to redirect our energies that we feel no need to protect our legacy, let alone these fighters of our freedoms.
How did it all get so twisted, and when did it occur? A theory of mine is that it began to occur when we removed the restrictions and expectations from our children. When we spoiled our children, until only a shadow of the decayed remains were left. The end of an empire begins the same way the beginning of an empire occurs: through the children.
When we give up our responsibilities and accountabilities for our children to strangers, we all suffer. We all lose. And we’ve been losing a long time. By the time a great number of our children exit the womb, they’re already ruined by parents who carry with them the general philosophy that we have no power to change things, or worse yet, that nothing needs to change because we only look at the sum of the parts and not the whole.
Any community that operates in parts cannot function as a solid unit. And the longer it remains so, the more fragmented the community becomes and the harder it is to put “Humpty” back together again.
Considering the minds of current-day Afrikans living in Amerikka, it’s not difficult to believe that at the end of the “first cycle” of slavery in Amerikka when they were told they were free there were some who refused to leave their masters for fear there’d be nobody to feed, clothe, rape, lynch and provide them with dirt-floor houses. And that just scratches the surface of how traumatic were their experiences. The idea that they would rather stay in brutality’s lair than to venture out on their own.
I’ve made it up in my mind that if we save the children, we save ourselves. Through the rejuvenation of our children, we build a nation, one with staying power. Not the shaky, questionable, scary perceived power we have lulled ourselves into a false sense of complacency over, but real, tangible power that we can see, touch and feel.
I remember well the words of Brother Amos Wilson, when he said, “You can talk about Egypt, you can talk about Afrika, but if you’re not including a talk about power, you’re not talking about anything.” He knew that as long as we remained powerless, others were free to wield power over us at will.
It’s surprising that some of us will speak of the atrocities faced by our brothers and sisters in Afrika, but do not see the atrocities faced here in Amerikka. How can you be free, when another man, who does not have your best interests at heart, dictates when you wake up, when you go to the “plantation,” and who “raises” your children?
And because we have been indoctrinated into believing that the only success is the kind that purchases big, empty houses, fancy cars and clothes, etc., we “work” ourselves to death, sacrificing our children in the process.
And, sadly, we have those, who while their hearts might be in the right place, decide they want to save Afrika. Fix Afrika, when they haven’t fixed themselves and where they are. I tell them that the worse thing they can do for Afrika is to bring their Westernized thinking to Afrika’s soil.
Until we have purged our minds and spirits of the hell that has beseeched us here, there is very little we can do for Afrika. Afrika doesn’t need another european, even if it comes cloaked in a melaninated body.
~evolve~
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