My analogy to this adage is Black Generational Disconnect.
There is a contingent of Black educational-economic elites who contend that they got to the upper educational and economic echelons on their own effort and owe nothing to their Black ancestors.
Today’s successful descendants of slaves, as with successful people from the other historically oppressed groups, worked exceedingly hard to rise above the traps White Supremacist had laid for us. But if we had been strapped with the condition the Confederacy had intended for us – wretched illiteracy and impaired spirits — our hard work would have availed little or nothing.
Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Missouri, and Virginia, passed anti-literacy laws pertaining to Black people. Other states enforced informal prohibitions.
As Brown was under discussion, the racists who knew that the genetic cognitive-inferiority notion was false were reactive against any change in the two segregated educational systems because they, like Jefferson Davis, understood the relationship between educational attainment and true freedom. So do the Trumpists. People who consider themselves to be truly “genetically dominant” and others to be truly “genetically inferior” do not attack subordinated groups, particularly if such groups are willing to stay in their ascribed and assumed places. Education disrupts ascribed and assumed places in society. Black K-12 schools and colleges were major disrupters; and for that reason, became targets of White Supremacists after Brown was decided.
Compare what the Confederacy intended for freed slaves with current educational outcomes. Many Black students are bound to compete in higher education with what Julian Bond labeled: 12 years of schooling and six years of education. In 2021, only 6% of Black ACT test takers were rated ready for college-level courses in the four core areas: English, mathematics, science, and reading. At present, only 9% of ACT-tested high school graduates who are categorized as first in their family to attend college, low-income, and minority show strong readiness for college coursework. Few poor Black children attend college now and few succeed.
Superior educational acquisition — a Black Cultural Tenet — allows us to climb out of the pit of mental, spiritual and economic slavery. If we descendants of slaves are fully educated, then we know that countless ancestors made our freedom possible, and that we have a moral obligation to lift someone else.
THE DISCONNECTION. To be successful, each individual must take steps to strengthen both sides of “African-American” through the empowerment of ancestral knowledge so that he or she survives, thrives and achieves freedom. There are no contradictions between the six African American Cultural Tenets — educational superiority; workplace excellence; respect for Black women; fiscal conservativism; open honesty about Black crime and personal morality; and self-reliance — and America’s Democratic Values, Vision and Mission and their source: education.
“It is impossible to pretend that you aren’t heir to, and, therefore, however inadequately or unwillingly, responsible to, and for, the time, (people) and place that gave your life without becoming, at very best, a dangerously disoriented human being.” –James Baldwin
The rub is in “disorientation.” The lives of the disoriented are fraught with stressors because they are bombarded with signals that remind them of their connections with former slaves no matter how high they rise. The stressors, as Einstein suggested, are what drives people to do such irrational things as embrace a man who is our people’s and America’s worst enemy. The majority of the 2.3 million African Americans who voted for Trump in 2024 — Moral Ignorance at play — joined Trump’s Cult after it was clear that he was a traitor, a racist, and a misogynist.
There is a tighter connection to the Black Cultural Tenets and America’s Democratic Ideals by older Black Americans than by the younger generations. Young African Americans have opportunities to acquire educational resources that would render White Supremacists’ intentions ineffective; but they are failing in large numbers to take advantage of the opportunities for personal-development for the benefit of themselves and their country.
No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. – Charles M. Schulz
The newly freed slaves – destitute, ignorant, and brutally oppressed – through educational attainment, produced a huge number of successful Blacks by the third post-slavery generation, 1955-1965 — our greatest generation. And we of that generation did more to democratize, desegregate, America than any of the other oppressed groups. If our young people were truly connected to our ancestors, they would be driven to achievements that would likely exceed those of our greatest generation. They would be passionate about educational acquisition and driven to vote in every election, thereby exacting real vengeance for crimes committed against our people and America.
