The BlackCommentator In Struggle Spotlight: Dr. Asa Hilliard

His life-long commitment to study focused primarily on the boundless history of his Ancestors and their descendants – the world’s first and oldest people and the people from whom all other people and civilization came – African (Black) people. By so doing, he wisely and dutifully fulfilled many of the precepts that were spelled out nearly twenty or more centuries before, by one of his ancestors, the ancient Egyptian Ptahhotep, whose book he co-edited with Nia Damali and Larry Williams in 1987. Entitled The Teachings of Ptahhotep: The Oldest Book in the World, this book contains thirty-seven precepts that its wiseman-author Ptah-hotep is attempting to pass on to his son.

All in all, I lovingly mention those things because it has been my personal experience that my and countless others’ mentor, Dr. Asa Hilliard, truly personified the first and, arguably, the best of Ptahhotep’s precepts. Combining various versions, I slightly paraphrase it as follows:

Now what is so shocking about that for me is the mere fact that both men, most recently Dr. Hilliard, of course, were, as they will continue to be, internationally-known, no doubt, for their die-hard dedication to the breaking of the multi-inch thick shackles of what Hilliard called “Mental bondage”, and which he described as “invisible slavery.” Here, Hilliard was a man who not only was a leader in the field of higher education but an expert in urban and overall public education, who lectured and traveled far and wide, teaching and writing about and taking his people on tours to Africa, to reclaim their “stolen legacy” of historical achievement, purpose, and possibilities that white and other forms of anti-African/Black supremacy – in the form of slavery and colonialism, neo-colonialism, racism and overall socio-political and religio-economic exploitation and cultural theft, among other things – had wrongfully denied and stolen from them. And, sadly, that continues strongly today.