Beyond America to Our Ancestors – Represent Our Resistance

Our Ancestors — those Africans kidnapped, purchased, shipped, and enslaved in the Americas, who permitted this country, in particular, to flex its industrial muscles. The labor, ingenuity, creativity, suffering, and death of my ancestors contributed greatly to the imperialist development of this nation. Four hundred years of people unfree, people exploited, brutalized, raped, lynched — four hundred years of this violence — contributed to the development of the leisure life of wealth, to the development of the middle class.

It could also be said that the Ancestors have been a factor in unifying violence as a way to respond to difference, particularly racial difference. Yet, those millions of Ancestors, then, desired freedom from the pursuit of “white freedom.” Black people desired freedom — peace — from violence, but many were quite capable of defending themselves, their families and communities. They desired, in short, non-violence, and they documented this desire in countless slave narratives, speeches, sermons, essays, and novels. The Ancestors were visionaries who could envision the possibility of justice and equality for all of humanity.

The Ancestors who spoke from the experience of oppression are here, still active for some of us opposed to domestic and foreign aggression and the passively engaging of America’s desire for wealth and power in the Middle East. The whole nation now — from east to west, north to south — is devastated by economic policies that benefit the “entrappers,” merchants, shipbuilders, property moguls, and overseers. The Middle East, like Africa in the past, has something Americans want to possess — by any means necessary. In that case, I suppose the Ancestors are a shadowy people from which white Americans and some Black Americans want to separate, in order to forget.