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Surrounded by, and sometimes in, a swirling cesspool of greed, insanity, hypocrisy, and cynical racism, Black America is at a crossroads in the 21st century. The choices we collectively make and act upon will ultimately determine not only the cultural, economic, and political survival of us Black people but will enormously impact the course of the whole of America itself.   

Notwithstanding the blind, bullying arrogance of white America, it is Black America, in concert with our Red and Brown brothers and sisters that, like a rudder on a gigantic ship, will either change the bloody and ignoble course of America or break off on our own, in a tumultuous political sea. We are in pursuit of something entirely different and more representative of what real justice and real humanity is or can be.

White America would have us believe that nothing has changed — that she still has unfettered domination over the entire world. However, this is not true. The slaves are in revolt all over the planet and the revolt is intensifying. White America would have us believe that this revolt is strictly unshackled terrorism, when in reality, it is the terrorism of America’s own false democracy, economic exploitation, and the brutal oppression of the minority rich against the majority poor that is fostering this insanity that white America today calls “terrorism.”  

While it is certainly painfully accurate that there are still those mentally colonized negrodians in 21st century America who remain in service to their white American masters and mistresses, their days (believe it or not) are numbered. Despite its military power, plantation America has been derobed for all to see. The white sheets of Amerikkka are blowing in the wind, flapping, so that virtually every discerning person on the planet can see that the emperor and empire has no clothes, despite its viciousness.  

White America, inclusive of both liberals and conservatives alike, is akin to a cunning magician, a conjurer who engages in trickery to superficially please, control, and deceive the masses. Nevertheless, in this the 21st century, the conjuring act is coming to an unprecedented close, and CNN, FOX, CBS, ABC, or NBC (and those so-called “progressive” democracy programs) can mask but not stop or change this reality. 

While Black America, and our Red and Brown sisters and brothers have incredibly important choices to make in the 21st century, one thing is certain; we clearly know what choices we DO NOT and MUST NOT make if we are to survive and ultimately thrive. We must clearly distinguish ourselves, unequivocally, as being in clear and unswerving opposition to economic, cultural, and political subordination by white America, not only of us here in America, but on the rest of the planet. 

As African liberation fighter and the first president of Guinea Bissau, the late Amilcar Cabral, correctly noted, “When the African people say, in their plain language, that ‘no matter how hot the water from the well, it will not cook your rice’ they express with staggering simplicity a basic principle not only of physics but also of political science.” We politically conscious Black Americans, and our Red and Brown brothers and sisters in America know that no matter what nonsensical and hypocritical propaganda America spouts off about democracy, freedom, and justice, it will never, and is indeed incapable of, “cook[ing] the rice,” i.e. of ever being something other than what its foundation of slavery, genocide, and wholesale thievery continue to perpetrate and perpetuate.   

Black America has choices, urgent and important choices. Let us not shirk from making and fulfilling them. As the Black blues singers of America have belted out for so many decades, being at the bottom signifies but one thing: “There ain’t nowhere to go but up.” Extinction is simply not an option. This too is what keeping it real is all about.  

BlackCommentator.com Columnist Larry Pinkney is a veteran of the Black Panther Party, the former Minister of Interior of the Republic of New Africa, a former political prisoner and the only American to have successfully self-authored his civil/political rights case to the United Nations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Click here to contact Mr. Pinkney.