Coming to America?
13th March 2017 · 0 Comments
By Edmund W. Lewis
Editor
Sometimes it just doesn’t pay to turn on the TV. Such was the case one day last week when I mindlessly flipped on the so-called idiot box when I got home only to hear a “Black” member of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet of Deplorables making light of slavery.
Speaking to staffers for the first time last Monday, HUD Secretary Dr. Benjamin Carson compared enslaved Africans to immigrants.
“There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less,” Carson said. “But they too had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great-grandsons, great-granddaughters, might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.”
Considering the fact that he knows better, Carson’s remarks did little to quell concerns about his integrity, intelligence or suitability for his current government post.
To be honest, I was more miffed about this being another feeble attempt to distort or demean the history of Black people. We’ve seen some question whether our Black ancestors built pyramids in ancient Kemet, whether the first humans were born in eastern Africa and whether slavery was as bad as enslaved Africans said it was.
First we get publishing companies that print textbooks for public school systems in places like Texas completely leaving out the history of slavery in the United States as if it never happened. Now you get a retired brain surgeon spewing out gibberish that romanticizes the Atlantic slave trade and makes it look like our ancestors came to the “New World” on luxury cruise lines or had the right frame of mind to lie around in the belly of slave ships dreaming of better lives for their children and children’s children.
That was hardly the case. Our ancestors were dragged across the oceans and dragged to these shores after surviving raids on their villages, kidnappings and countless weeks and months languishing in slave fortresses before it was their turn to be placed in spoon-like fashion in the bellies of slave-trading vessels for a three-month, nightmarish voyage to an uncertain fate.
Many couldn’t handle the trauma of the ordeal. Others took their own lives and those of their children rather than submit to the will of a master. Still others starved to death, lost their minds or were thrown overboard by these ships’ crewmen when they were approached by anti-slavery authorities on the high seas or food supplies ran short.
The experience of coming to America on a slave ship was hardly a picnic or a cakewalk.
It is in tribute to these ancestors that the great WE.B. DuBois referred when he wrote in The Souls of Black Folks about “the bare bleached bones that line the lanes of seven seas.”
Given all that we have endured and sacrificed in the building of this nation, Black people have earned the right to be treated with reverence and recognized as free and equal human beings by this society.
For all the hoopla about his slavery remarks, Dr. Ben Carson has made a strong case for the need for quality public education that includes a generous helping of Black history.
At a time in this nation’s history when we need education like we have never needed it, public education and higher education are being slashed in favor of building state-of-the-art privatized prisons, football stadiums and shopping malls.
What we allow elected officials to spend our hard-earned tax dollars on speaks volumes about who we are as a nation and where our priorities lie.
Rather than deal openly and honestly with this nation’s history of genocide and human bondage, we would rather act like the enslavement of African men, women and children and the wholesale slaughter of Native Americans never existed.
So instead of owning up to what has been done in the name of “Manifest Destiny,” those who control this Christian republic opt instead to use religion to compel the miseducated and undereducated to vote for candidates who will do their bidding in local, statewide and federal government, attack anything and anyone who challenges the status quo and privatize everything from health care to recreation departments and public education.
Ironically, those who control the national economy, have the largest financial coffers and pay the least amount in local, state and federal taxes insist upon telling elected officials how to spend public dollars.
They see no intrinsic value in using public funds to help those at the bottom or the socioeconomic ladder to turn their lives around or in improving public education. Education, for them, is a means to an end. Controlling and privatizing public education means that the powers that be can control how public education contracts are doled out and controlling what is and isn’t taught in the classroom.
That is why the Koch brothers’ sudden interest in supporting the United Negro College Fund should have sounded the alarm for Black America.
The Koch brothers don’t have a long history of helping Black people or doing anything out of the kindness of their hearts.
None of this stuff is rocket science, my brothers and sisters. The so-called 1 percent aren’t losing a lot of sleep over the fact that the quality of education in the United States has been declining for quite some time and that many of the nations that once looked to the U.S. for inspiration and a sterling example are now doing a better job of educating their populations than this nation is.
Why don’t they care?
Because undereducated and uneducated people are easier to control, confuse, exploit, manipulate, enslave and oppress.
When you call all the shots and control what happens politically and economically, the last thing you want or need is an educated population questioning and challenging everything you do.
Regardless of what the Ben Carsons, Clarence Thomases and Omarosas of the world think, it is imperative that Black people and indeed all people, know their history.
History is both an anchor and a compass, telling us where we come from and the glorious heights to which we can aspire.
History helps us to understand not only how we got to this place Europeans have decided to rename after Amerigo Vespucci and why we were brought here. History also teaches us that the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was not the first time African people had reached the shores of what is now North, South and Central America and that many places in the world including Asia, the South Pacific, Australia and India were visited and inhabited by people of African descent long before the world ever heard of Christopher Columbus or Marco Polo.
History helps us to understand the link between our ancestors who built and ruled ancient Kemet for thousands of years and the achievements of Black inventors in the U.S. in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. History also teaches us the very real connection between what happened in places like Soweto and Sharpeville in apartheid-era South Africa and what is taking place today in cities like Ferguson, Missouri; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Baltimore, Maryland; and Chicago, Illinois.
If we want to understand why today’s business climate, even in majority-Black cities like New Orleans, is so hostile toward Black entrepreneurs, we need look no further than the history of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Rosewood, Florida.
Throughout the history of the United States, wealthy and powerful white business titans have divided and conquered the 99 percent, telling us, for example in the 19th century that Blacks had no rights that the white man was bound by law to respect. With the rise of the Tea Party and the election of President Donald Trump, we see that happening again as poor and working-class whites with no knowledge of their history or the long history of pitting those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder against one another are being used to maintain the status quo.
When we don’t know our history, we can’t sidestep the mistakes or pitfalls of the past. When we do know and understand that history, we can find inspiration, strength and guidance from the blueprints left behind by our Beloved Ancestors.
This article originally published in the March 13, 2017 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
