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Why Not Us?

Why Not Us?

 

The u.s. is a nation of immigrants, from the landing of the first convicts, to the Africans, euros and middle-easterners of today. Each group comes here with a plan, they know what city and neighborhood they will live in, and they know what schools or business they will become involved in and where it will be established. They share common history and tradition, they have the same or similar diet, their mode of dress is familiar and they speak the same language, but most importantly… they share the indigenous spirituality, and spirituality to a human being is one of the most important motivating and unifying forces.

 

Every immigrant, whether they wish to hold on or not, came here with these and other traditions from their homeland that makes them unique and keeps them ‘related’, and no matter how far the succeeding offspring may drift from the mores and customs of the ‘Old World’, they will always have a safe haven to retreat to should times get really tough.

 

In order to cure a disease, you must first understand how the virus infects and affects the body it attacks. In order to reverse the affects of colonialism on the psyche of kidnapped and enslaved Afrikans, you have to understand how this system of colonialism works. Most of us, in the early stages of our awakening learned that the first step to colonizing a people is to upset the spiritual harmony of the people. In Afrika, the Muslims did it, the Catholics did it, and now every denomination of the Christian religion is doing it.

 

We are not immigrants; we did not seek entry into this country bringing the flavor and culture of our homeland with us to contribute to the ‘melting pot’. We are descendents of those kidnapped and forced to assimilate into this society, and prohibited to retain any of our original culture. So when you ask “Why don’t Blacks stick together like other immigrants?” The answer: is 400 years of slavery successfully eradicated the glue of commonality that all immigrants brought with them to this land. …Madu

 

 

Once in place, they target the children; they target the children so they can produce the types of subjects they can control. They bleach out the culture, self-esteem, national pride and nationhood and replace it with the mores and values of the new dominant culture. The children are taken away from the family and placed in institutions, where they are institutionalized into a type of hybrid being. They are forbidden to speak the native language, wear native clothing, observe the spirituality or practice the cultural things necessary to preserving a heritage. They are taught to fear and revere the colonialists, they desire to mate with them, they produce mixed children, and the more mixed the better.

 

The older people are also isolated; they are forced to live in misery below poverty level as an example of what not to aspire to. Their communities are oppressed and foreign vices are introduced, as a result, crime increases and is allowed to run rampant, Anyone not willing to assimilate gets relegated to this status, while certain limited opportunities are granted the institutional graduates. These communities are labeled ‘Ghetto’ ‘depressed areas’ ‘projects’ and these negative labels are accepted, and thus actualized and perpetuated by the inhabitants. You have now produced the perfect self-hating being that will do anything to be included in the dominant culture. You have created the house Negro. 

 

Self-hate, the colonial hatred transferred from dominant culture to dependent culture keeps us from coming together, and keeps us seeking to fulfill the oppressor’s mission of destroying our own people. And when we seek to fall back on our commonalities, the only recourse we have is to revert to the culture and spirituality of an oppressor.

 

Our folk have long echoed, “Education is the solution”, and they are and always have been right. But the difference between education and institutionalization must be understood before we can truly free our minds. We must educate ourselves about the systems we seek to overturn. And no matter how you call it, what we seek will overturn the current systems. We must know where the poison came from, when it was applied, how it works before we can produce and administer an antidote. We must know who we were before we were poisoned. We must understand our role in the maintenance of the colonial system before we can plan a way to extricate our families and ourselves. We must understand that we may never again as a people share a common spirituality, and keep our dogma and religious arguments to ourselves while we work myopically for psychological and organizational unity. That is the only way we can ever hope to reach the level of power promised by each of our individual spiritualities.

 

Copyright © 2009 G. R. Adams

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  • Chicago-Midwest
    I agree with these 3 points that were put forward in this article.

    1. Every immigrant, whether they wish to hold on or not, came here with these and other traditions from their homeland that makes them unique and keeps them ‘related’, and no matter how far the succeeding offspring may drift from the mores and customs of the ‘Old World’, they will always have a safe haven to retreat to should times get really tough.

    2. We are not immigrants; we did not seek entry into this country bringing the flavor and culture of our homeland with us to contribute to the ‘melting pot’. We are descendents of those kidnapped and forced to assimilate into this society, and prohibited to retain any of our original culture. So when you ask “Why don’t Blacks stick together like other immigrants?” The answer: is 400 years of slavery successfully eradicated the glue of commonality that all immigrants brought with them to this land. …Madu

    3. Our folk have long echoed, “Education is the solution”, and they are and always have been right. But the difference between education and institutionalization must be understood before we can truly free our minds. We must educate ourselves about the systems we seek to overturn. And no matter how you call it, what we seek will overturn the current systems. We must know where the poison came from, when it was applied, how it works before we can produce and administer an antidote. We must know who we were before we were poisoned. We must understand our role in the maintenance of the colonial system before we can plan a way to extricate our families and ourselves. We must understand that we may never again as a people share a common spirituality, and keep our dogma and religious arguments to ourselves while we work myopically for psychological and organizational unity. That is the only way we can ever hope to reach the level of power promised by each of our individual spiritualities.

    What puzzles me is that Black leaders have been putting forward variations on these themes since the end of slavery. The closest we have come to unity of purpose was the Civil Rights movement of the 50's and 60's. I grew up in the 50's in the South. Our Black schools were named after Black leaders -- in education, science, literature, and antiquity. Our communities were poor and deprived, but we knew clearly who the enemy was -- and when the opportunity presented itself, we came together to support Thurgood marshall and the advocates in the Brown v. Board of Education case. We knew that education was the key to our upward mobility; our grandparents knew; the uneducated blue collar and domestic working parents knew. We stood firm in our pursuit of "knolwedge with equal access to resources to learn all that we desired." Integration was not a desire to be white.

    In answer to the question "Why Not Us?" The author has correctly identified the root of the problem. There is one element in the assimilation that seems to be more deeply rooted -- self-hatred. In the dual objectives, expressed by W.E.B. Du Bois, to seek self esteem, and succeed in the mainstream society, Blacks must negotiate a balancing act between approval and acceptance, and direct confrontation of obstacles to secure our equal place in this society. Our oppressors have leveraged the self-hatred to create class divisions among Blacks to prevent unified progress. Those individuals who personally overcome self-hatred and achieve a measure of progress in the mainstream are accused of "acting white" by those who haven't. This subdivision of Black have-nots and haves prevents much of our progress.

    Those progressives and conscious Blacks who often speak about the masses, are speaking about the large number among us who are still suffering from self-hatred. They say, we can't learn using Eurocentric methods. They say tests are culturally biased (of course they are, but that is no reason we cannot pass them). Some of them speak about "Afrikan soveriegnty" as a goal.

    This is where we were born and will die. The measure of our achievement is NOT some imagined sovereign place that does not exist. We must unify to achieve our equal place at the table of opportunity within this system. Those who advocate destroying the system to produce something more akin to our liking are delusional in my opinion. Other immigrants come here, adapt, achieve, and then affect changes within the system. As the once largest minority group, we have failed to understand such a strategic approach.

    Why do other immigrants do better? Two reasons: one, those who reach our shores are usually the brightest and the best among their ethnic group. They may be dirt poor when they get here, but they are not without the will and intellectual means to excell while clinging to their culture during times of struggle. The other reason is that their culture remains intact throughout their struggle.

    Since the Civil Rights movement and the "Great Society Programs" many Blacks were set adrift following the death of Malcolm, Medgar, and Martin in a sea of entitlement programs that provided a false safety net -- public housing, child welfare programs, set aside business programs, affirmative action programs. We have always depended on the handouts of the massa. Most of us have never fully understood the meaning of freedom. This was paralleled by a mass exodus of upwardly mobile Blacks away from our unified communities. This second Diaspora, introduced a new assimilation of Blacks into the Middle Class. Unfortunately, this exodus was financed by the entitlement programs, and the lessons of struggle that our grandparents of the first half of the 20th century taught us were lost. They understaood the price of freedom. the generation that followed the 60's did not. They were self-indulged in the gifts of the "Great Society."

    Our culture in the USA is a made-up culture that is comprised of our forgotten African Roots, and the dual lies of inferiority and promise imposed upon us by our oppressors in the first 400 years of our sojourn here. Our challenge today is to connect the dots of excellence among us, and build bridges for the following generations to cross over into greater economic and social progress. The structural barriers that remain are mostly inside our heads. We have demonstrated that we can overcome most of the visible barriers -- housing redlining, educational access, equal employment, athletic excellence, success in entertainment, and entreprenurial success. Barack Obama has demonstrated that a Black man can achieve the highest office in the land.

    Unfortunately, the dots of excellence are farther apart, and fewer, as each successive generation since the 60's becomes poorer (more living in poverty), less educated (based on recent increases in dropouts), greater fragmentation of families (too many single family households headed by women), and so many of our young men are crippled econmically for life by prison sentences. The one remaining berrier we need to work harder on is the treatment our young men receive in the Justice system.

    We have a rebuilding process to reconstruct the sense of unity that we had 100 years ago. Those were times that spawned Black wall Street, the Urban League and NAACP, Madam C. J. Walker, Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter G. Woodson and others. Sadly, we don't have the unity of families where the lessons of progress can be reinforced. All activity is in the public square and on Facebook (horrors).

    I am worried that the current fragmentation may be taking us to a point of no return. A point where there will only be individual successes. "The Masses" of uneducated and unemployed Black poor are growing at an accelerated rate in this 21st century -- the knowledge century, the information age, the global society. Those who get left behind are forever lost.

    Why not us? It was not our decision to come here. It was not our decision to end slavery. It was not our decision to end segregation. It was not our decision to enact the voting rights bill. We have become accustomed to relying on the generosity of people of goodwill among our oppressors for significant measures of progress. We do not have control of our destiny in the 21st century because we have not taken control where we can. When more of us stop begging for more handouts, take advantage of the opportunites that emerge from the barriers that have been removed, and using the resources we have to build stronger families, schools, communities, and become engaged advocates for our self-interests in the political process -- then we won't have to ask, Why not us?
  • South
    This is my issue with the problem of illegal immigrants from Mexico. Everyone is demanding special rights for them and amnesty for any illegal. Yet, no one will ever address how African-Americans are treated. It is an evil. Liberals will look to "protect" anyone else but forget about Black people in the United States.
  • South
    This is awesome. Every descendant of Mother Africa should read, meditate on, and digest this a thousand times!!! It should be read, studied, and discussed in open forums across this nation wherever Blacks gather, especially in the Black Church. It should become an integral part of every Black Sunday School lesson so that our children (who are otherwise destroying themselves with drugs, gangs, alcohol--and just plain old self-hate) can know who we truly were, how we got in the pitiable state we are in, and how we can unite to get ourselves out of it and chart a new, productive course for the future. More than anything else (though I know from past experience we won't do it) we need to chart a new SPIRITUAL course for ourselves that is uniquely our own. Too many of us live and die amid a system of self-hate, worshipping and believing in a god sold to us by the oppressor...a religious system of control over the intellect that gives no real, realistic hope to neither us or our progeny. It is a religion, too, specifically, intentionally and strategically designed to excite us emotionally while doing nothing for us psychologically, realistically, and not even spiritually. It transfers all of our hopes and aspirations into a future SO DISTANT that it cannot be seen by us or even aspired to by our offspring: a counterfeit realm called "heaven" which none of us have any realistic hope of ever truly seeing. And yet we spend our entire lives "in waiting": as the movie "The Titanic" says..."for an absolution that will never come". Thus, we are the only race of people I know of who--generation after generation--resist unity (even in our churches where we 'claim' to share a common 'hope' and 'goal' and belief, however unrealistic) and building up a formidable, realistic life here on earth: the only group who consistently insist on "waiting" for heaven or "Jesus" to return and claim us or take us to some far off heavenly fantasy where we'll "sit on clouds with harps of gold" and "walk around heaven all day". What a dreary, non-realistic existence for all of eternity! After all, isn't that the only 'hope' that the white man's religion gives us to "lie in wait" for; that for which many of us surrender a fulfilled, rich life here, only to die in hopes of awakening in some fantasy heaven while our oppressors enjoy their realistic 'heaven' right here in our midst? Even our so-called preachers have jumped on the oppressors' bandwagon of affirming and reaffirming in--and programming into our psyche each week--how we must await the return of this "White" Messiah (whose supposed picture hangs on the wall of many a black church with white skin, blond/brown fine hair and blue/green eyes as a constant reminder "to whom we belong" as 'slaves' and never forget who is our 'Master') and his transporting us magically to this fantasy heaven where we will spend eternity "ever with the Lord". And we keep falling for this historical/religious lie hook, line, and sinker--at the mouth of our own black preachers who, like the white oppressor, makes a living off of us with these biblical lies, and enjoys his 'heaven' right here and now at the expense of the flock, many of whom are heads of single-parent homes, struggling in this recession to make ends meet and put food on the table. But so long as they profess to be doing so "in the name of the Lord" that makes it palatable and acceptable to us. It's a real shame. This, however, is why the Bible likens people (especially in the churches) to "sheep"--because sheep are such docile animals, easily lead by the shepherd's staff, regardless of who that shepherd is or where he is leading them. Our adults, too many of them, are filling the jails while too many of our youth are filling the street gangs with the end result too often being the grave. They know not who they are, where they come from, nor where they are going--and it does not even behoove these so-called spiritual leaders to tell them, because--truth be told--many of them don't know. Dispensing critical knowledge to the masses, of self-love, self-respect, and cultural knowledge is not the reason they went into the ministry, but for self-edification, greed, and the power to control the mind of the masses for their own (tax-exempt) monetary gain.
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