No Nation Can Rise Above The Level Of Its Women.0môwálé, Malcolm X They experimented on the mental states of our women, it is our duty as men to gain knowledge of our creator and self, so we can restore them. The slave maker knew that he couldnt make these people slaves until he first made them DUMB. And one of the best ways to make a man DUMB is to take his tongue, take his language. A man who cant talk, what do they call him? A DUMMY. Once your language is gone, you are a DUMMY. You cant communicate with people who are your relatives, you can never have access to information from your family—you just cant communicate. Also, if youll notice, the natural tongue that one speaks is referred to as ones MOTHER TONGUE—MOTHER TONGUE. And the natural intelligence that a person has before he goes to school is called mother wit. Not father wit—its called MOTHER wit because everything a child knows before it gets to school, it learns from its MOTHER, not its father. And if it never goes to school, whatever native intelligence it has, it got it primarily from its MOTHER, not its father; so its called mother wit. And the mother is also the one who teaches the child how to speak its language, so that the natural tongue is called the mother tongue. Whenever you find as many people as we who arent able to speak any mother tongue, why, thats evidence right there something was done to our mother. Something had to have happened to her. They had laws in those days that made it mandatory for a Black child to be taken from its mother as fast as that child was born. The mother never had a chance to rear it. The child would be brought up somewhere else away from the mother, so that the mother couldnt teach the child what she knew—about itself, about her past, about its heritage. It would have to grow up in complete darkness, knowing nothing about the land where it came from or the people that it came from. Not even about its own mother. There was no relationship between the Black child and its mother; it was against the law. And if the master would ever find any of those children who had any knowledge of its mother tongue, that child was put to death. They had to stamp out the language; they did it scientifically. If they found any one of them that could speak it, off went its head, or they would put it to death, they would kill it, in front of the mother, if necessary. This is history; this is how they took your language. You didnt lose it, it didnt evaporate—they took it with a scientific process, because they knew they had to take it to make you dumb, or into the dummy that you and I now are. I read in some books where it said that some of the slave mothers would try and get tricky. In order to teach their child, whod be off in another field somewhere, they themselves would be praying and theyd pray in a loud voice, and in their own language. The child in the distant field would hear his mothers voice, and hed learn how to pray in the same way; and in learning how to pray, hed pick up on some of the language. And the master found that this was being done, and immediately he stepped up his efforts to kill all the little children that were benefiting from this. And so it became against the law even for the slave to be caught praying in his tongue, if he knew it. It was against the law. Youve heard some of the people say they had to pray with their heads in a bucket. Well, they werent praying to the Jesus that theyre praying to now. The white man will let you call on that Jesus all day long; in fact hell make it possible for you to call on him. If you were calling on somebody else, then hed have more fear of it. Your calling on that somebody else in that other language—that causes him a bit of fear, a bit of fright.[...] For three hundred years we stayed at that level. Finally we got to where we had no language, no history, no name. The white man named us after himself—Jones, Smith, Johnson, Bunche, and names like those. [Laughter] We couldnt speak our own language; we had none. And he then began to teach us that we came from a jungle, where the people had no language. This was the crime that was committed—he convinced us that our people back home were savages and animals in the jungle, and the reason we couldnt talk was because we never had a language. And we grew up thinking that we never had one. Æmôwálé, Malcolm X reunionblackfamily/apps/blog/show/21570126-no-nation-can-rise-above-the-level-of-it-s-women-0mowale-malcolm-x
Posted on: Tue, 17 Jun 2014 17:26:25 +0000
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