Amen!!! Let the church say "Amen!!!" Sometimes, you just got to tell like it is. No matter who it may hurt, who it may offend. The truth makes no apologies. Will y'all pray with me tonight. I got something boiling up inside and I just got to let it out. Amen? Lawd, lawd.. My god. I won't be long, but I got to let it out. Now... if you will.... (wiping my face with my hankerchief), get out your Bibles and turn with me to the Book of Maafa, chapter Middle Passage - years 1505 through 1859. Amen? And it reads.... "The trauma our people had to endure began when our mothers and fathers were torn from their kinship groups via war, kidnapping and deceit. Whatever the pretense, a great disservice was done to acquire them. From there more wrong was heaped on those first peoples' shoulders as they were subjected to dehumanizing conditions of bondage, lying in each other's excrements, placed in predicaments that allow the ships' vermin to feast on their bodies and forced to witness cool blooded murders and mercy suicides. The men and the women were violated by the sick perversions of the ships' crew. Women forcibly penetrated and the men forcibly sodomized. Loved ones to frail to survive the Middle Passage's third month horror trip tossed over to become bonemeal for trailing hammerheads, mako and great whites. That first generation of "slaves" in our families endured the living hell of ghoulish sub-humans. Life becomes a meaningless pit of torture, misfortune, tragedy and, most importantly, uncertainty." Can you imagine if this happened to you? Torn from your family and given to some strange people. And it says, I repeat, "Life becomes a meaningless pit of torture, misfortune, tragedy and, most importantly, uncertainty." Most importantly, uncertainty. People are social animals. We like the interaction we have with each other. We need it, that is what makes us people. One of the main things, we derive from these relationships, if their healthy, is stability, certainty. We need stability. We need to know when we come home from school, work or where ever, that our loved ones are going to there. That's why when someone dies, it's hard on us. Because we are in a time of uncertainty. You say, "Well, where are you going with this, Brother Blackbird?" When someone dies, guess what you have just experienced? A loss. Well, yes. You have just experienced trauma. Amen?
Now let's go a little further.... Trauma as an event is a situation that causes great distress or disruption. So when we experience a loss that had an emotional connection, the event is traumatic. Trauma, itself, is an emotional wound that creates substantial lasting damage to the psychological development of a person, often leading to neurosis. Hmmm. So a traumatic event, such as slavery, can bring about trauma in the individual which in term stifles the psychological development of the trauma victim. So we have established the first people experienced a traumatic event, that in its breadth and intensity, created a traumatized condition for those that endured it. Let's move forward.
As we continue, in the Middle Passage chapter, we see where the people were eventually taken off the ships, paraded in front of slave buyers. Each one of them, man, woman and child were all inspected like horses from the top of their crown to bottom of their feet. Can you imagine, someone with know right to touch you and whom you gave no permission to, putting their filthy hands all in your mouth, around your eyes, on your breast and gentialia. They even examined their rectal area. Every inch of their body was examined. This happened to your foreparents, your people. How dehumanizing was that? Here was a situation where you would want to escape. Let's make it real. Amen?
Such wrongs can only be righted through the most violent forms of retribution. Anybody got an Nganga?