Black People : What For Me Is The Fourth of July

sundiata

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May 31, 2003
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Another dawn awakening, in the mist of this relentless genocidal Amerikan war. A war that solicits my very soul, and that of the Spirits who walk beside me, into a lifetime of battle. Here at this noontide hour, I find myself, again and again awakening in the mist of what is for me, a relentless Amerikan nightmare. And, by this twilight hour, justice is sure to remain elusive. As simply by race and kind denied. Maximum force is used, and yet another brotha, in yet another township is maimed or murdered by a curious Amerikan resolve, steeped in Black blood, behind a blue wall of repression. Although we exist several generations removed from the initial captivity, the Maafa still continues its lustful purge of our numbers. To be born a Black man in Amerika, is to be born with a gun pointed directly at your head. Most likely it is a shotgun, leaving no possibility of tracing the bullet.

With the impassioned concern of a mother for her son, in a letter to the editor of the Seattle Medium, one sista would query in a poem entitled, ‘The Shoot Black Men Don’t They?’ -I constantly worry about my son---And hope he does not come in contact----with the racist gun. These words hover into the echo of nearly a century ago, when poet Claude McKay would write of the racist brutality and violence of Red Summer 1919: If we must die,-----O let us nobly die! And today, all across the Amerikan Empire the quiet war of Black repression continues its brutal reign into a new millennium. From township to township the dialogue of the reaffirmation of White Supremacy and White Skin Privilege upon the Amerikan landscape, exacts its ritualistic toll upon the lives of Black people. Ultimately, like the War On Crime, which produced the draconian Rockefeller drug laws, mandatory sentencing, and spurred a multi-billion dollar plantation prison industrial economy, that would embarrass any truly civilized nation. An economy that plays the host to the virus of Black male incarceration, and now trains its sights on our youth. Like the War On Drugs, which brokered a deal, so much prophesized throughout the sixties, to flood the Black community with a deadly, toxic, spirit-numbing form of cheap cocaine.* On the heals of drug laws conjured up to maximize the disparity, and of research by White firms on melanin and cocaine.* The War On Terrorism has quickly metamorphosis in like measure. From Seattle to New York, Chattanooga, Wisconsin, Cincinnati, and here, upon these rolling hills, the death toll rises.

Thus, while this may remain a time for many Amerikans White and Black, to mill about the barbeque grill in the festive ritual of picnic frivolity, my spirit has been selected for another witness. To this shameful history, where slavery remains a fixture in the still booming prison industrial complex, and lynching continues its unabated surge, behind a blue wall of repression. This pastime holds but bitter memories for me, of the many thousands gone, captured and dragged into the woods, tortured and mutilated, and then slowly roasted under a sycamore tree. Still today, as this enormous criminal history remains without repentance, and its perpetrators and their children have never had proper treatment for their maladies. I can still smell the stench of Amerika’s charred remains. And I hear the horrid cries of pain, and I can still hear the ecstatic cheers of the White multitudes, men woman, and their children, their faces contorted in an almost bizarre sexual glee, as they view the careful deliberate spectacle, in the hopes of capturing some trinket, a limb, a finger, a tooth, or perhaps one of the biggest prizes of them all, a Black man’s genitals, cut from his living witness, or an unborn child, ripped from its mothers stomach, something to fill some cherished spot upon some family’s mantle piece. Fredrick Douglass once said that ‘the struggle for freedom in America, is a struggle to free Black men’s bodies, and White men’s minds’. Today, often behind a blue wall, racism remains a virus unchecked in Amerika. How dare I say, that I am to celebrate an independence that was never truly meant for me or mine. Or boast of a freedom that today still eludes us. We know that true freedom is psychological and economic. Would it not make my Ancestors cringe? To this very day, when I see the faces of family and friends, contorted in horror and pain, at the senseless loss of yet another Black man at the hands of racist police, my eyes train on the view in the mirror of generations, and I remember the postcards that still a mornful day after, many of our Ancestors would receive: ‘We had a picnic last night, wish you were here!’
 
Beautifully put. As for me? I have no true concept of Independence Day. Our ancestors were given a sprinkling of freedom. Last I checked Independence is usually demanded, and if not given, it is almost certainly attained by force.

Not saying we didn't shed enough blood for our freedom, but even still, that freedom was, and to this day continues to be dictated to us and for us by the same institutions that go about their work according to fundamental principles of documents that were forged to exclude us.

So I guess my independence day will be when we, collectively as a people, can uplift ourselves without the guidance, insistance, or assistance of the oppressors.

Peace, Power, and Prosperity to all
 

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