What’s Really At Stake in America and All Over The World
By BaBa Omowale Eng
As you know, our story as Black people, African Americans, did not start in America. We started in Civilizations that spanned the entire planet, understanding all that the word Civilization brings to mind in terms of achievement, technology and civil advancement that lifted all human beings to higher levels of social engagement than each generation found itself in.
We, Black people, descendants of Africa, are indigenous to earth. Our forced immigration here to North America was not a trip that we planned but one which was orchestrated by European people, particularly Spaniards, Portuguese and English who had no intention but to exploit, oppress and eventually annihilate the beingness of Black people in the world. Our exploitation had to do with both our personhood and the lands from which we came. The exploitation of our persons had to do with the theft of the labor of our Ancestors on plantations and the exploitation of our land has to do with the theft of resources from the land in Africa.
Our oppression had to do with cutting our ties to each other and destroying, stripping us of every vestige of our past, our culture, a culture that included language, traditions and spirituality/our ways of worshipping our Creator from whom we get all power. Africans peopled most of the the lands on this planet from the continent of Africa to the Andies, bringing and developing civilization at each stage. That was the mandate of our Creator. The Civilized man and woman were charged with civilizing the uncivilized.
This years Kwanzaa celebration and Observance is geared Remembering Black Excellence as we begin to commit to studying the values of our traditions, our rituals, our languages and the full import of our culture to all generations, in a way that they can understand and identify with. This years Kwanzaa celebration will highlight the never ending bond between generations of Black men and women so that we know that it is our commitment to each other that will save us from the onslaught and never ending attacks on our people in ways that impact every level of our lives from books being banned in our schools that teach the truth of our real story in America, to the inequities in our health care systems and the threat to take back all the gains that our people , all good people have fought for, like voting rights and even the right to descent. And Preparing to Repair the damage that has been done by the intentional erasure of the truth of our story from the books that are being presented to our generations in pubic educational institutions that push the lie of White superiority and Black inferiority. The lies about the experience of our Ancestors on the plantations here in America where their labor was brutally stolen and Black people were terrorized into an obedience that perpetuated those systems of hate and oppression even while resistance continued throughout this Country and on the continent of Africa.
These are the issues that will be presented and talked about as we celebrate our culture in Kwanzaa, with music and dancing and highlighting the talent of our young people to not only entertain each other and the world but also commit to developing all that is needed for us to actually be each others medicine as we move into a future that challenges us to our very core as human beings.
So, please come out and join us for this years Kwanzaa celebration and bring your pride in being Black and African American, so that it heals all of us as it is intended to do by a Creator that created us in His/Her Image.