A Freedom Movement Begins with a Black Agenda for Change! – Represent Our Resistance

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!

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.

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!

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.