To be a Black American is to live with anger as the defining emotion of a racial experience. To be successful is to learn how to keep that emotion from consuming or debilitating your ambition. (Edwards and Polite)
Hypocrisy is the gap between words and actions. America’s originating gap was spawned at our founding between assertions about equality and reality, and it fostered the other gaps that continue to plague us.
Consciousness about national hypocrisy induces. Moral Injury in members of oppressed groups. Moral Injury is the psychological pain that arises from witnessing or experiencing actions that violate the conscience. The national conscience we are encouraged to inculcate, starting in our earliest school years, was built on America’s professed core moral values as based on historic Democratic Principles.
MORAL INJURY can lead to shame, disorientation, depression, persistent self-criticism, and suicidality. It can take the life of those suffering from it, both metaphorically and literally; prevent victims from living full and healthy lives; and destroy relationships in the family, the local community and society at large. Hurt people are prone to seek revenge.
In my early life, I was taught that revenge did more harm to the revenge-seekers than it did to the wrong-doers. While the admonition is valid about the harm misguided “revenge-seekers” do to themselves, that conception was derived primarily from a singular definition of revenge — getting even personally.
My own philosophy contains both anger and revenge. But, like Gandhi, I learned how to turn my anger into energy and power. Thus, revenge in my philosophy is more akin to vengeance, and it impels me to accept my divine responsibility to seek vindication for the harm inflicted on my people — to gain reckoning, justice, and equality that is meaningful and lasting.
The anger and vengeance aspect of my philosophy developed when I came to understand that my people’s natural hu man drive to live in our historic truth had been thwarted, and that we were prevented from acquiring the spiritual power for self-determination, which distinguishes human beings from non-humans.
Like all other ethnic groups, African Americans have an unlimited and indeterminate faculty for improvement over at-birth circumstances. However, the African American culture evolved as a protective undertaking in a Hypocritical National Moral Environment. Hypocrites and I recited the same pledge of allegiance.
Historically, some white Americans accepted the notion advanced by T. H. Huxley which asserted that even if all our disabilities were removed, and fairness prevailed with no oppression, Black people would still always be inferior to white people intellectually.
However, over the decades, the White Supremacists who knew that the Black cognitive-inferiority notion was false reacted strongly against changes in the education made available for the descendants of slaves because they understood the relationship between educational attainment and freedom.
People who consider themselves to be truly “dominant” do not attack members of subordinated groups if they stay in their ascribed places. High quality education challenges the fallacious and weaponized assertions about natural superiority-inferiority and disrupts ascribed and assumed racial hierarchy.
Racism has been too evident to be ignored. Unfortunately, people’s resulting rage and need for personal vengeance too often become so overpowering that they destroy their lives and take their families down with them. They are unable to prevent the natural emotion triggered by Moral Injury from misdirecting their ambition and responsibility.
Nevertheless, people who claim to be members of the African-American “tribe” who are personally offended by racist actions and decide to seek unilateral revenge cannot claim a moral high ground if they respond simply for direct personal satisfaction. To be moral, the revenge has to link directly with the best interests of the entire ethnic group, both for the immediate time and for the future. Anything else would be disrespectful, ineffective and advance the causes of our enemies. Morgues, hospitals and prisons are filled with these misguided individuals.
We avenge our ancestors and hurt our enemies the most when we achieve resources our enemies want so desperately to prevent — those empowering instruments change the fortunes of the people fundamentally and forever because they can be passed on to future generations. Would-be leaders must pursue personal excellence in all their endeavors so that they can be of effective use to the people.
The only honorable vengeance for all of us in current America is to help the children prepare themselves so completely, excellently, and spiritually that they will be free from self-victimization and the devastation that befalls all Americans who are under-educated and poor.
Even today, competent, well-educated Black Americans are less vulnerable to the harm targeted specifically at African Americans. The lives successful Black people live assault the sensibilities of enemies who revel in our failures, as well as stand as African-American’s Model of Redemption and Salvation for others to emulate.
