What Happens to A Black Culture Deferred
Black History is under attack and it is strategic. The shortest month of the year is now considered anathema to those in power and is being called Critical Race Theory. But what is more far-reaching is that our historical past is systematically being challenged, whitewashed, and retold from the 1st person to the 3rd person’s perspective. And so, in the Texas McGraw Hill books, we are being called indentured servants as opposed to captured melanated people. The refurbished history does not punctuate the truth of how we were strategically dispersed through the Middle Passage for the pleasure of cultivating sugar for exponential growth to pour into one’s coffee and tea. We were the tobacco pickers for those who drew deeply from our lives and in a haze of smoke blew out and exhaled smooth rhetoric over their cigars of why we should not vote, be redlined in our communities, and remain the “Have Nots”.
Cotton homegrown in America is more than just Cotton Comes to Harlem, it’s a global stain of red droplets of blood from those brown and black fingers that globally sustained economies. Why is it shameful, unconscionable, sinful, and uncomfortable to now call a thing a thing (Slavery) of those things that were once considered the cat’s meow in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries? History shows how your forefathers shook their shoulders and buxom breast to it, shimmed and kicked a Charleston to it. Why are societal policymakers and certain mindsets offended for that which has passed as if we are holding the descendants personally responsible for their predecessor’s atrocious deed? Why were burning crosses, white hooded horsemen, lynching postcards, Jim Crow, and family dates around the hanging tree unabashedly celebrated in the 19th and 20th centuries without remorse or threat of being challenged? Why are we are being shadow-banned for being the bomb, being lit, and survivors of our past and the current Jim Crow 2.0? Who is the uncomfortable, the enslaved or the slave?
In this age of Jim Crow 2.0 where the death of Trayvon Martin is a decade in, George Floyd, Eric Gardner, Sandra Bland, and Breonna Taylor names are named and the list ever growing will be left unsaid. Critical Race Theory would bulldoze the newly passed holiday of Juneteenth, Quasi- Europeanized Maya Angelou’s image on a 25 piece coin or bury statistics of how Black people are killed by police according to a scientific report in The Lancet at nearly two and a half times the rate of other folks. Melanated people and their advocates must vehemently hold up the past so that the present can be shaped properly. The Jewish community has museums and federations that keep their history alive and at the forefront. It honors the fallen, the forefathers, their descendants, and we as melanated people have the same rights and mandate to preserve our history without apology. Our history must never be misrepresented or underrepresented. This mindset is based on Biblical principles.
Remember the days of old; consider the years of many generations; ask your father, and he will show you, your elders and they will tell you.
Deuteronomy 32:7
And critically speaking; I said what I said!