If the majority of Americans understood the derivation, principal purpose, primary targets, and universal effects of our current evil, its counteraction would be undertaken immediately. Through the ages, America – formally and informally, governmental entities, and ordinary citizens — has targeted the Indigenous people, women, the poor, and, especially, the descendants of slaves for oppression.
Wicked rulers, those who frame injustice by statute, will band together against the life of the righteous and condemn the innocent to death (From Proverbs 29:12).
If you can train people to demean and degrade themselves, you can oppress them forever. You can even program them to kill themselves and each other and they won’t even understand what happened (Dr. Frances Welsing).
A People cannot survive betrayal from within — PROXYISM. Avowed enemies are much less formidable, for their animosity is known. But traitors in the community don’t look like traitors, for they wear the “face” of their people; appeal to the pain deep in the people’s hearts; use words familiar to their victims; and employ the people’s grievances in fraudulent, self-serving arguments. Proxyists work surreptitiously to undermine the people’s empowering cultural tenets and rot their souls, so that the deceived victims find it difficult, too often impossible, to resist self-disempowerment (From Cicero).
Black folks had been formed by the images made of them by those who had had the deepest necessity to despise them (James Baldwin). The most powerful means White Supremacists used for the continuing oppression of the descendants of slaves were to convince us that our own God (foisted on us by enslavers) wants us to be enslaved; that we have no power to improve our condition; and that we are genetically inferior.
Effectively, therefore, America’s greatest crime against slaves and their descendants – making us a class and a caste — was that many of us were driven to inculcate feelings of subordination, self-hate, self-victimization, self-destruction and internecine-hatred, impelling us to harm our own people.
The instruments of oppression have been intensive, extensive and multifaceted; perpetrated and supported by “national, state and local governments; extant for some 500 years; and have been manifested by both harm inflicted and developmental resources withheld.
Many of even our most successful people feel like imposters when they reach a high socio-economic status and others with great potential too often self-restrict, which is discussed by Woodson under Miseducation: if you can control a People’s thinking you do not have to worry about their actions; they will do your bidding without being told.
The African American experience is the classic miseducation case-in-point. As desegregation proceeded apace after 1965, Racism By Proxy became an ever more dominant and effective element that extended the desired effects of slavery beyond “Emancipation.” This form of subjugation requires a symbiotic relationship between the main oppressors and the local “miseducated “leaders” and spokespersons within the families and communities whose anti-voting rhetoric — e.g., voting does not matter – infects the people’s spirits so that they do not participate in efforts that can relieve their suffering. e.g., VOTE. About 11 to 12 million Black adults are consistent self-disenfranchisers.
There is not a more repulsive spectacle than a people who will not seek with unrelenting power and perseverance to transform the nation which has already forsaken, oppressed, suppressed and exploited them, whether the tools used to harm them were religious, political, or social (From T. S. Eliot).
Despite horrendous brutality, against Black men, including 6,500 lynchings, in the 2024 presidential election, 20 percent of Black male voters and 7% of Black female voters, 2.3 million total, chose Trump — the ultimate embodiment of and spokesperson for White Male Supremacy, misogyny and racism. Most of these Black people joined with Trump after his Fascist intentions were crystal clear. Trumpists tout that Black number among Trump’s cultists as though it represents a majority of Black people when it is only 4.8% of the Black population, but still too many!
Black people assisted America’s early national advancement in two major ways: with our free labor during slavery, which made the country an international superpower in short order; and with our participation on America’s side in the Civil War, which saved the nation from a confederate victory and despotism. Nevertheless, White Supremacists deceived us and America with duplicitous actions over the decades.
If Blacks as a whole People are going to survive, once again, we will have to assist America in order to help ourselves — this time by thwarting the rapidly evolving “fascistized dictatorship.” Black leaders must assume a larger burden of direct action, beginning right now and fostering by every possible means a massive turnout in the 2026 Midterm Elections. FOR CONSIDERATION: The 111 million adults who self-disenfranchised in 2024 — including 12 million Blacks — lean heavily toward the Democratic Party; and Trump’s win hinged on a mere 2.4 million votes.
