I believe it is healthy to know where you come from, to be self-aware of who you are and where you are, if you are going to have a real shot at getting where you want to go. When I look at the health of my people, and when I say my people, I mean the descendants of those freed slaves who would choose this date June 19th 1865, to commemorate the day, that nationally, we were free. However, I can see that, 156 years later, we are not truly free, from the years of captivity, torture and being in economic servitude. The haunting nightmare continues and we still find ourselves enslaved to a national health crisis.
The American Negro’s history is braided into the acts, history and makeup of the culture of this country and there is no way of escaping that. Even though the dominant culture has chosen to whitewash the history of the American Negro, intentionally to protect its economic interests, and more importantly to protect its own sanity, conscience, and moral compass, the facts remain. How sane could a kidnapper, torturer, rapist, and child abuser be if they lived in a society that openly condoned this type of behavior and didn’t care who knew about it. This was a national crime perpetrated against a people who was taken against their will, one might even say that these people were prisoners of war that was being waged against them by mad men and women, whose only cause was a corrupted, self-serving mind. Most wars are declared on other states that have threatened war against you or have first attacked you in some way, as a show of action to defend ones self or sovereignty. Having the wool pulled over their eyes, the American Negro, the slave found themselves blindly, not fighting, but losing a war that had been declared against them for no cause, or fault of their own. The only thing they are guilty of is being caught off guard and not being aware of the destructive nature of the people who were carrying them away, to this country, that we now call the home of the brave and the land of the free.
To me, if the American Negro, or anyone else, are embracing today’s American social-psychological construct of what is socially normal, as a people, we should have our heads examined. This would mean that we have bought into the whitewashing of the American Negro slave’s history and are now tacitly approving of everything that has happened, during what I call the American Negro holocaust, the intentional and systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of the once African enslaved people, taken against their will, to this land where it happened. I know that these comments may seem to be anti-American, but they honestly are not. This is simply part of the history that is braided into the larger history of this country, that we have been socialized to forget. What I see is a country today who mentally, physically and spiritually, are in a state of crisis and need help.
The truth of the matter is that, because of the blood, sweat and tears shed by the American Negro, this country has been able to kickstart a global economic power that just would not have been possible with out the human resources that was the African slave. This kickstart launched a enabling economy, that far exceeded its elder nations from the old country, who purchased slave labor goods and in effect braids them into the history of madness. The New World American experiment became that band wagon that was so tempting that no one could seem to resist the temptation to jump onboard, no matter how shameful the ride was going to be, the whole ride long tacitly approving of all the wrongs happening around them. This is one of those times when the civility of the western world lost its balance of sanity and broke its moral compass. With no one around who was willing to hold them accountable, call them out, hold up the mirror, or bring them to task, the insanity ensued and morphed into the unhealthy state of being that we have today.
With eyes wide open, I believe that the American Negro should stake a claim to this date and time, that is ours alone. Only we carry the invoice in our pockets, on our bodies and in our minds, of everything that has been withdrawn forcibly from us in this country. Through it all however, we have overcome because we were meant to. We did what we had to do in order to survive. The American culture has never been kind to the American Negro. Almost every human indicator that can be found to compare the American Negro to other populations in this country, will show a blaring disparity that represent the years of systematic persecution of a people. Only the native American would find themselves having a worse experience, or outcome, because their experience was even more harshly destructive and it happened on their own land. How insane is it that one can be declared free by his captor, in a land that the capture also stole, and that capture, in a land of laws and so-called justice, would have no consequence for either, and we can still to this day celebrate this as bravery, freedom, liberty and justice. The dominant culture has great leaders, but only because they were able to pull off this tyrannical coo and get away with it, for as long as they have.
People are waking up, and the veil of lies are beginning to fall, scaring the captors and making them act even more insane. What is becoming obvious is that as much help that is needed by the enslaved and wrongfully occupied, is that the most broken of all are the captors, who may be the ones most in need of help. If the occupier-captors could just be honest with themselves, come clean and somehow genuinely act to reconcile all the wrongs that have been done, there could be a way forward with real reconciliation. We have young leaders today with a fresh set of eyes and hearts who are waiting, ready, willing and able, to lead us all forward together. Somehow, after all of this, it appears that we have emerged with capacity as a people, and the capabilities of a people who have endured this trauma-filled experience and not just survived, but, thrives, in spite of the negative stigmas the American Negro has had to carry. We’ve only gotten stronger and the only consequence so far is that, like diamonds, in the American Negro, we now have some of the strongest, brightest and most brilliant minds, bodies and spirits, you can find.
Because of our existence in a broken system, and because of the systematic efforts to keep us divided our success has been anecdotal at best, because we know that all around us the American Negro, in the aggregate, is hurting, and has been mentally, spiritually, physically and most of all economically in need of a lot of help. In many ways these are the indicators that diagnoses the extended case of slavery, which is the health condition that we find ourselves in. True freedom is still yet to come and when it comes we will know it because it will be marked by all of the various indicators being remedied and the past behaviors being mitigated. We have had so much taken away from us, but the one thing of ours that can not be taken away, appropriated or co-opted, is Juneteenth, which is a date that is meaningful and significant to us and only us, the American negro. Let’s acknowledge and declare this the day we establish, not as our independence, but a baseline, that can be used as a place holder as the beginning, or the origin as a population that we can come together around, in unity as a people, a unity, which is what we have needed for so long, to build our way forward to that healthy state of being that we so richly deserve.
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