Reforming Black Life in America
The critical issue is how to restore the value of human life.
The black experience in America is a living monument to the enduring nature of the human spirit. A collective that exemplified the miraculous ability to adapt, survive and overcome under the most dehumanizing, subhuman conditions ever conceived.
The middle passage that began in Africa as a historical betrayal led to exile and evolved into a road leading to chains, shackles, auctions to the highest bidder in markets, hard work with no pay, rape, murder, name & language stripping and ultimately cultural annihilation. These atrocities committed were acts of cultural genocide and the complete stripping away of cultural identity.
These factual acts leave generational ramifications.
Slaves in other cultures were "NOT" stripped of their cultural identity.
They were allowed to keep their names, language, religion and social customs. Their humanity remained intact because their culture was not deposed and disposed.
The purpose of the aforementioned words was to create disruption in the mind and foster disunity in the thought processes of how American culture views its own history. Stripping away cultural identity destroys cultural bonds and creates a state of cultural oblivion. Then....the impossible seemed to arise; cultures came into existence when leaders applied tremendous intelligence to create systems of language, religion, justice, diet, economics, architecture, music, art, agriculture, medicine, education, self-defense and science. All of these were employed and deployed in developing African American culture. Perhaps, W.E.B. DuBois' words ring true: "There is nothing so indigenous, so completely made in America, as we."
Equality is not an external condition to fight for; it is an internal condition that can only be realized by those who value human life.
Slavery (as an economic force and theological framework) destroyed the value of life; there will be no liberation until that value is completely restored. To achieve this ideal of experiential reality,more is required than a new identity: a new civilization predicated on developing the totality of human potential.
What ideas do you have to reform Black humanity in America?