In 2023, a candidate running to become president of the United States said some of the dumbest “stuff” in the history of this country – which is really saying something. Florida governor Ron DeSantis pushed the poisonous position that the enslavement of African people, one of, if not the most brutal crimes against humanity ever, wasn’t so bad. His reasoning? Because slavery taught the enslaved much-needed skills that they later used to become successful Americans.
Another presidential hopeful, Nimarata Randhawa, or as she prefers to be called, Nikki Haley, has recently reiterated what she and other blissfully ignorant beings (or purposefully dishonest thugs) have pushed over the years – that slavery had little or nothing to do with the Civil War.
When you add the potential damage these two asinine positions can have on the intellectual, civic, and humanitarian capacities of today’s adult citizenry and their children (i.e. tomorrow’s leaders) with the all-out attack on Black history, Black social commentary, Black research, Black authors, etc., there’s an all-out call for us to take action.
We who care about our community can’t stand idly by.
WE MUST TAKE LEARNING SERIOUSLY
Way, way back in the day, “keepin’ it real’ or ‘keepin’ it Black’ meant keeping it educated, keeping it committed to the betterment of our people, keeping it respectful – not respectful as in acting in ways white society would see us as human and stop mistreating us as if we were animals, but rather honoring our family names, our ancestors, etc. by being the best version of Blackness we could possibly be.
And foundational to that effort was taking education and learning seriously.
Our story and our storytellers throughout the centuries are being marginalized and discredited by folk who are either too stupid to know any better or too insidious to want to do anything different.
With just a little bit of reading/research, anyone who cares to know can learn that those folk who enslaved, human trafficked, kidnapped, raped, tortured, mutilated, and extracted forced and stolen labor from our ancestors, didn’t just capture African human beings willy-nilly, and then transport them over to the islands and the US, and then teach them skills. That is the absolute ass-backward telling of history.
It has been highly documented, verified, and proven that those enslavers targeted specific African nations for their specific knowledge and skillsets – knowledge and skillsets that the colonizers sorely lacked. Certain African nations from what is modern-day Cameroon were experts at iron smelting. Several African communities were prodigious rice growers and were preferred by enslavers in South Carolina who ended up “producing” America’s first edible cash crop. Other African folk were experts at husbandry and thus possessed the ability to herd cattle, tame wild horses, raise hogs, etc.
DeSantis’s claim that slavery was a job training program just furthers the lie that enslaved Africans were ignorant savages lifted up out of their intellectual darkness and into the light of European “civilization” by their enslavers.
And you don’t even have to do 1/100th of the research done to debunk DeSatan’s lie to “discover” that Haley is really “on one” when she pushes that tired claim that the Civil War was really about states’ rights, not slavery. Just read the constitutions written by those Confederate traitors. The states’ rights they wanted to protect were the ones that allowed them to continue enslaving Black people. Their entire agenda rested on maintaining their illusion of white “supremacy” by maintaining the institution of slavery.
DON’T FALL FOR THE BANANA IN THE TAILPIPE
Sadly, more and more of us (Blackfolk) are falling for this modern-day “banana in the tailpipe,” which is why getting our “knowledge on” in 2024 is of utmost importance.
Our history, our sanity, our ability to stay in tune with our mother wit, and the wisdom of our ancestors are being undermined by the wholesale dumbing down of not just society to our story, but to just about everything.
The late, great Ada Edwards was fond of saying “The world is run by those who show up.” In other words, you can have the best intentions, but if you’re not out there getting involved in attempting to make things better, your contributions to society add up to zero. Those who show up at school board meetings, city council sessions, voting booths, civil club meetings, etc. are the ones who help guide policy, laws, and thus society. But what happens if the only people who “show up” are ignorant as hell, or those who know better but push ignorant-as-hell misinformation to keep folk in the dark?
What happens is what we’re seeing now on the state and national political scene – the slow, steady destruction of democracy, the majority of one political party being publicly cool with violence as a political tool, and the denial of voting rights to citizens they disagree with. More GOP elected officials by the day are not only refusing to speak out against white nationalist Nazi groups, but they’re attending their conferences, headlining their events, and accepting their funding, and seeking their votes.
We need to know what time it is now more than ever – about our history, about current and future tech, about everything. That means reading, researching, questioning, and investing in the process of lifelong learning. If we don’t, we’ll find ourselves agreeing with the madness that seeks to push us back into the 1700s.
