Slavery was the breeding ground for the legacy of today’s societal ills. Enslaved Africans were denied their culture, heritage, history, language, religion, family, way of life, education, right to make decisions, right to provide for themselves….., everything. They were forced to labor tirelessly. They were psychologically, physically and mentally abused. They adapted to their environment. Conversely, white people had no problem administering punishments and abuses. White people were not denied education and were the financial beneficiaries of slave labor. White people were allowed to “develop” emotionally, receive the benefit of education and luxury of freedom. The progression of white people was not halted or hindered in any way. So you have the recipe for modern racism. Take Africans and deny them every right of human decency and self-respect, and add white people with an inordinate and diseased sense of superiority and advantage, and bake for three hundred years. Fast forward to emancipation. Slaves are set free. Free to what, is the question. So subjected to the horrors of slavery, we do not even remember or know that we are humans. We have internalized the beliefs that we are animals. White people still think of Black people as inferior and have had hundreds of years of reinforcement and education to that fact. Mind sets do not change overnight. Especially without any action to trigger such a reaction. Proclamation does not social change beget. We move forward to the early 1900’s. Black people are sharecroppers and maids and factory workers and laborers. The same as in slavery, just they receive a small pittance in exchange for their labor. Remember that at no point do white people have a spiritual awakening and realize that they were wrong and unjust for subjecting Black people to slavery. And at this point, Black people can not just stand up and say that they are equal because they have been robbed of their self-esteem and history. If you continually tell a man that he is nothing, that he is less than human, tell him to get to the back, then you give him freedom without the proper tools to survive, that man is going to naturally gravitate towards the back. That is where he is “comfortable.” That is where he has been all of his life, all he has ever known. Then came the sixties. The Civil Rights Movement. With the dawn of the civil rights movement, black people began to assert themselves and demand their rights. Battle ensued. The slave was beginning to rage up against the massa. Black people began to think that they did deserve equal rights, that they had been treated unfairly. Then April 4th, the movement died. All that energy and forward momentum just was left to remain stagnant and die. People who had been motivated to see themselves in a new vision, with passion and zeal for change, painfully slipped back into their old roles of complacency and comfort. Conversely, during that time, white people were not ready to give up their position of superiority. They couldn’t understand why Black people wanted change. They were happy with the status quo. They didn’t see any reason for change. On that fateful day in Memphis, TN, white people were able to breathe a sigh of relief. Things could go back to normal. And that is just what happened. Which brings us to the year 2G. White people continued to raise their children in much the same way. That they were entitled to education and wealth and comfort, just because of whom they are. We are repeating history. White people passed down their inheritance of privilege. The messages passed down through the generations to white children, in school and in society, are still the same as during slavery, they just stopped using the N word publicly. Now in this country, white hate groups abound (with little or no interference from the government). We are lynched, shot, and/or attacked by white supremacists, talk show disc jockeys, right wing politicians and the police. On the other end of the spectrum, descendants of slaves did not have a healthy position to raise their children in because they were the victims of systematic abuse and violation. They did not understand the natural structure of family because they did not have families. The slave master divided families at will. They did not understand the power of their own mind because education for the slave was a crime. They did not understand their place in society because they were seen as vile beasts within this one. The message passed down subconsciously, and consciously, to black children is that the white person is the one in charge, that they are better. The same dramas played out on the plantation replicate themselves in the rearing of our children. The concept that “lighter is better” remains in tact to this very day. We see scores of forums on every Black site on the Internet extolling the perils of Black men who only date light or white and so on. We ‘wonder’ why this is the case and we fail to blame the true culprit. Rather than seeing the obvious correlation to the implications of slavery, we waste precious time and energy arguing over this far reaching, deep, emotional wound. Instead of admitting that deep down, we think Black is ugly, and that is what we have been taught, we lash out at those who are only manifesting the horrors of the reality. In this country, everyone is quick to say slavery was in the past, let it go. No one wants to address the issues that the psychological wounds that were inflicted on slaves are still with us. Think about it.
Posted on: Sat, 20 Jul 2013 02:04:32 +0000
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