Black is beautiful meant being proud of skins and hair, proud of an African heritage. Four years of learning to be proud of my African heritage. Of learning to recognize and understand that as a people without land and native language, it was all the more imperative that we engage in resistance until liberation is accomplished! And this liberation of Black people included the Blacks of the Caribbean and of the continent, Africa. We would resist as a people who suffered inhumanity of slavery and colonialism.

Whenever I remember my first days of college, wearing my natural and dashikis, I recall the painful silence, the heads averted, the complete apartheid-like relationship of my African-born classmates. They were Africans and they did not want to speak to us or acknowledge our presence. Our presence embarrassed them - or rather - it was the fact that we had been enslaved. No longer was our ingenuity featured as a crucial aspect of our survival nor our practices of resistance honored. From the colonial educators, Africans learned to despise the once enslaved.

Conqueror and divide - a tactic of importance since so many young Africans were now leaving for college campuses in America - in the late 1960s and 1970s. The natural-wearing, Black Power generation, reading their Diop and Fanon, Cleaver and Walter Rodney, will encounter the African alright! The African students, in time, were rewarded for deferring to white students and faculty and ignoring Black American students and faculty. It was 1972. Times were changing - alright!

Despite the number of countries and peoples of color instrumental in the world today, we are nevertheless faced with the continued domination of Euro-American rule that is so prevalent as to seem the natural order of human relations. This supremacy of Euro-Americans includes tactics to maintain this social, political, cultural, and economic control. One tactic of inoculating people of color with the authority to exercise power in relations with their own people has worked well in ultimately promoting white control. Blacks, particularly those “educated” in the ways of the “mainstream,” which means “whitestream,” and those who come to value middle class values and beliefs, are enablers of white supremacy. It is not just the Colin Powells or Clarence Thomases but some Blacks on campuses or some who work in city hall. It is the neighbor, the family member, and pastor. It is the police officer who frantically tasers the fellow Blacks behind the fence in New Orleans or the young Black man who shoots down another Black for the drugs brought to the Black community or the material item advertised on television. This tactic eases the movement of resistance. It assures that organizing Blacks will be long and difficult.

I will not even discuss how class difference has created a “them” and “us” among Black Americans. We have accepted the values of the whitestream and those with money or who become “successful” by white standards are honored in the Black community. Usually, these are individuals designated by white society as the “acceptable” ones - what Malcolm called the house Negroes. They come close to the life style of the “rich and famous” - and this means that these house Negroes will not be “trouble” for the white community. That is what really matters. We have come to measure Black success by the number of Black bodies we step over on our way to whiteness. It is racial because, in the process, there is a relinquishing of communal values for the values of liberal individualism if not out and out neo-conservativism.

So I have had my experience with the Black yielding “Black power” in the tradition of the slave driver and the Black too-high-up-to-eat-liver or get somewhere by foot or public transportation. I remember those Blacks, all drama and so very Black that they questioned my right to even have brown skin! They were sooo Black. They lived there and I always lived somewhere else.

I remember someone telling me that she did not want to step on African soil while standing next to a white person. She wanted to experience this return home, return to the motherland without commentary from a white person, particularly an American - all the way in Africa! Peace for once. Unity with the African and Mother Africa for once. So when I stepped on African soil, I thought of this comment and what I had thought then. I stepped out to the front door of the Ethiopian airport, standing next to my Ethiopian supervisor. I was overwhelmed. I looked up and saw the people across the way, separated by a fence. But I was looking down at my feet. I was remembering myself as someone from a poor working class family. I was remembering my mother and father, my grandparents - wondering if they were there with me, standing with me - me of all people - with no real money or financial assets. I was no longer straining to see the map of Africa in the dimly lit Timbuktu bookstore in Chicago back in the late 1960s. I am here now on African soil. I was in Ethiopia - crying. Until I looked at the face of the woman supervisor. Ethiopian. She was a generation older. Someone who had been educated in the U.S. I stepped outside myself and could see how I looked to her. Worse than n----r!

Worse than a white American standing next to me, commenting on my experience of stepping foot on African soil, was that look. If I continued to cry, it was not because I was in Africa, in Ethiopia, but because I was encountering white supremacy with that familiar Black face - in Africa. I caught my breath and remembered that I am from a proud Black heritage of opposition within the Western hemisphere and therefore human!

The imperialist back home lied! But now, we can’t even say they have lied and are continuing to lie. They’ve disseminated “false statements” about WMDs in Iraq. According to the Center for Public Integrity, the U.S. imperialists gave 935 false statements (imagine how many “false statements” have been made against Black Americans!) as “part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses” (Study: False Statements Preceded War). They aren’t “lies,” no - just false statements - exemplary of an effective campaign to galvanize public opinion, once again.

I am at Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. I am in the faculty lounge one day. Fellow expatriates are Nigerian and I am the lone Black American. We are talking about U.S. aggression, and I, after more than six months, thought the Ethiopian staffers and Nigerian expatriates understood I am Black as in was once a full-bloodied African back in the days. But still Black nonetheless. I am not “the U.S. imperialism” planning to bomb Iraq with the “shock and awe” I have experienced as a Black American for hundreds of years! Condi Rice is just one person who lost her way before she left Alabama! Colin Powell saw in the photos the WMDs King George and Darth Vader wanted him to see.

One Nigerian colleague sitting across from me leaned forward and asked: “Why are you so violent?” Two or three days before, I was the one “picking on” Saddam Hussein. Now, I was violent. It was a long time before I said anything.

“Where did you hear this?”

“On CNN.”

Why, yes, of course. Orchestrated campaigns of imperialism. Effective galvanization of opinions.

“And they say things about you,” I said. Thinking about all I had been told about Africans by my teachers in elementary school. Africans, like Tarzan, swung from trees, 24/7. Africans now, particularly Nigerians, Congolese, South Africans in the past, Rwandans, Ugandans, AFRICANS - we all violent!

Imperialism tells them that they are “civilized” compared with Black Americans and we are told that Africans are a hopeless lot. Lucky to be an American! Imperialism is at work. We have seen the likes of Condi Rice, the native Black American, House Negro, shopping for the precious shoes, declared precious by the market she so worships. We have seen Colin Powell, African Caribbean, loyal militarist servant of the Empire, and now they have tried to give us the young and brash Barack Obama, of African immigrant background, who doesn’t remind the American Master and Mistress of American slavery. (If in your mind’s eye, you are “educated” in the history of America’s relationship with slavery, you recognize the Clinton team, Master and Mistress, white womanhood preserved and protected against the Black Beast.) When Cynthia McKinney came under attack from white men, who would stand for her?

Anyway, the Master can’t select the leadership for rebels! The stand-ins are in limbo land. not free to claim the liberation narrative and the spirit of Toussaint, Harriet Tubman, or the Mau Maus. That’s the beauty of being Black, particularly a Black American. We can draw all the rebels near and nurture them as they have nurtured us. That’s the beauty of being Black, even in the face of ignorance that camouflages itself as Black. We are not fooled! What did Malcolm say already: “This tokenism, this tokenism was a problem that was designed to protect the benefits of only a handful of handpicked Negroes. And these handpicked Negroes were given big positions, and then they were used to open up their mouths to tell the world, ‘Look at how much progress we’re making.’”

We know our encounter with slavery and colonialism happened and it has given us Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and Ida B. Wells. Collectively, we have not capitulated to the whims of imperialism. Let’s not forget the efforts of Mary Church Terrell and Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin “The National Association of Colored Women” or W.E.B. DuBois and the Niagara Movement or Marcus Garvey and “An Appeal to the Conscience of the Black Race to See Itself.” Let’s not forget Angelo Herndon, “You Cannot Kill the Working Class,” Langston Hughes, and Claudia Jones. Our struggle brought us Ella Baker’s “We Need Group-Centered Leadership” and Malcolm X’s “Statement of the Organization of the Afro-American Unity,” and Fannie Lou Hammer. Remember Kwame Ture, “What we Want,” Fred Hampton, “The People Have to Have Power,” and “Our Thing is DRUM!” from the Revolutionary Black Workers. “Attica: The Fury of Those Who Are Oppressed,” Assata Shakur’s “Women in Prison: How We Are,” and Mumia Abu-Jamal’s “A Voice from Death Row” should ring in out ears because we have been the call for human rights!

We are opposition with a long running liberation narrative. We have every right to be - and to be proud to be Black and not allow the agenda of imperialism to talk us away from ourselves with destructive colorblind dialogue. I’d like to think that we are what Salvador Dali had in mind when he painted swans reflecting elephants, beautiful and strong. We are that everyday and must see ourselves less and less dependent on imperialism. Let the Obama, Clinton, and Clinton Inc. scheme for the benefit of white interests. White America, white corporations will not let it be any other way.

At issue is this - improving the conditions of Black Americans is not the concern of Washington D.C.; it never has been and it never will be. As Tony Thomas writes, American capitalism can’t solve the “basic problems facing the Black community: unemployment, poverty, drug, police brutality, political repression, and the lack of decent educational, health, recreational, and cultural facilities.” A government shifting from a slave market, one that helped established the industrial boom for the U.S, to an imperialist Empire has no consideration for the people it never really intended to “free”! “…No one else is going to represent our interests but ourselves. The society we seek cannot come unless Black people organize to advance its coming.”

Until the day comes around again when we as Blacks are not blinded by white supremacy and engage in power relations that divide us along lines of class and cultural differences, we who are concerned about the survival of Black Americans in the belly of imperialism need to re-consider a Black Agenda for a Movement. Referring to the Black Agenda drawn up in 1972 and presented at the Gary, Indiana Convention, it calls for “self-reliance” (Thomas). “WE NEED A PERMANENT POLITICAL MOVEMENT THAT ADDRESSES ITSELF TO THE BASIC CONTROL AND RESHAPING OF AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS THAT CURRENTLY EXPLOIT BLACK AMERICA AND THREATEN THE WHOLE SOCIETY.”

I would urge you to look at texts above or The National Black Political Convention Agenda quoted above. With the Gary Convention, some 8000 people came together from such organizations like CORE, NAACP, The Black Panthers, CAP (Congress of the African People), The Student Organization for Black Unity (SOBU), Black People’s Union Party, The D.C. Black United Front, Operation PUSH, and others. Those willing to envision the change we want must come together.

We first came together in the Clearing. We were of different tribes and ethnicity; we spoke with different dialects and in different languages. But we united, organized and educated to resist!

“‘She told them [Baby Suggs did] that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they couldn’t see it, they would not have it…Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don’t love your eyes; they’d just as soon as pick ‘em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch other with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ‘cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it, you!” Beloved. This is the meaning of Black is Beautiful!

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer, for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.