Dr. Conrad W. Worrill, PhD

It must be clear, at this point in history that African people need to determine for ourselves solutions to the many serious problems we face. We should realize going into this New Kwanzaa Season that no one will do for us what we really need to do for ourselves.

Kwanzaa is a way to help African people in America fulfill the need and desire to be a united people, with a common set of experiences that lead us toward a common set of goals and objectives for freedom, independence, and liberation.

Mr. Garvey understood that the foundation of our liberation was economic and educational independence based on racial solidarity. There are numerous lessons we can learn from the legacy of the Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey. Without economic independence tied to the acquisition of political power, African people in America and African people everywhere will continue to be the subjects of the whims of other people.

This issue has been at the core of European history, or better yet, European historiography (the science of how history is written) for more than two hundred years. This framework of European hegemony over the history of the world has had a devastating impact on African people and the African mind.

We must always remember Grenada and the words that Maurice Bishop spoke at Hunter College in New York on June 5, 1983. Maurice said, “Our people, therefore, have a greater and deeper understanding of what the revolution means and what it has brought them.”

As African people in the twenty-first-century, it is imperative that we collectively join and participate in the Reparations Movement as we seek to dismantle white supremacy.

Part of our internal repair is to consciously understand that “We Are Owed” and that we have a historic responsibility to demand reparations from those forces of white supremacy that continue to benefit from what they did to us and that lingers on as part of the vestiges of our enslavement.

International law supports the position that the enslavement of Africans was a crime against humanity. The Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal defined crimes against humanity in this manner: “Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population… whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetuated.”

very little discussion has taken place regarding the continued racism and white supremacy of American public school curriculums. The great movement of the 1960s and 70s put the issue of Black Studies on the American agenda, but like many issues of the 1960s, they have either fallen by the wayside or have been put on the back burner.