Stressing African American people’s responsibility for using our Cultural Power to improve our condition does not make one a traitor to the race despite what some of our own people level at TRUTH-TELLERS. Seeking liberation, success, and retribution through SELF-RELIANCE, once one of our most powerful cultural assets, does not preclude the laying of accurate blame for crimes committed against our people by our avowed enemies, including our own quislings.
If people cannot choose to harm or benefit themselves and each other, they are not free. But what they should never be allowed to do by any means is harm innocents, especially children, by commission, omission, or toleration.
Our true enemies have devised formidable obstacles that have impeded access to the quality and quantity of education and skills that are critically necessary for planning, execution and perseverance toward societal success; and that have induced powerful psychic obstacles in their victims. Thus, it is not demeaning or insulting, against people whose appropriate education, socialization and acculturation have been severely neglected when I say that I do not expect them to have the resources to initiate and sustain the fight for social justice even on their own behalf, or on behalf of their families and communities. They can follow enlightened and ethical leaders as in times past, however.
Having benefited from the cultural power inherited from the first two post-slavery generations, I have always held high expectations for our elected “leaders;” those who assume leadership positions; and those who have the capacity and resources to change the understanding and fortunes of their people.
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their understanding of their history, particularly their forebears’ past accomplishments. Every record must be destroyed or falsified, every book must be rewritten, every picture must be repainted, every school, statue and building must be renamed or destroyed, every date must be altered. The past will be erased, the erasure will be forgotten, the lie will become the truth for those telling it and those hearing it. Nothing will exist except the endless present in which the RULING PARTY is always right. (From George Orwell)
The further a formerly oppressed ethnic group drifts or is pushed from knowledge about its historical, cultural Truth, the more too many seem to hate those who speak it. Denial, blame-laying, and excuse-making will not reverse the declines that are rapidly taking place in the progress African-American people had been making toward full participation in this country. The disproportionate numbers of young African Americans self-destructing, destroying each other and wasting the educational opportunities seem to indicate that they have inherited self-destructive tendencies.
Physical slavery is no longer passed from one generation to the next, lawfully; nonetheless, spiritual slavery can appear to have been inherited from a preceding generation. The causality is located in America’s white dominated social system and children’s earliest experiences by which they adopt adaptive or maladaptive attitudes and
behavior. Symptoms of victimhood, self-hate, low self-esteem, and unmitigated desires for revenge exhibited by people in young children’s closest proximity often foster spiritual deficiencies.
Adults who have not been able to achieve a level of success in America in keeping with their dreams or the promises made by duplicitous leaders have a difficult time passing on to children personal power which they themselves do not feel. Even the most successful people who have unreconciled needs for revenge or an over-sensitivity to external verbal abuses and symbols can pass on to children not only the desire for the best kind of life, but also contradictory, self-destructive tendencies.
America’s formerly oppressed people’s culture should be passed to the children to protect them from personal and external harm — quite directly to assist them in achieving self-respect, self-esteem, self-determination and societally relevant education and skills. A people should never allow others to define and authenticate their children. If others are allowed to define and authenticate the children, then others can label them with demeaning criteria; suggest irrelevant, often unattainable goals; and defeat them with external challenges to their humanity. Once that is done, the children will enslave themselves.
Genuine success can achieve the good life, accomplish vengeance for our forebears’ suffering, and reflect proper gratitude for our ancestors’ sacrifices. Black children do not see the illegal starting point — slavery; or understand the bases – the HOW — for the dramatic change in the percentages of Blacks occupying unprecedented levels of economic and political power. Some youngsters even think that successful Blacks had some unique “luck,” some singular “assistance,” or were “tokens” moved up by whites rather than by their own diligence and perseverance.
In my formative years, our role models, mentors, coaches, and our teachers looked like our parents and acted like them toward us children, thus defining and authenticating us.
