alcalloway.jpgCivil rights leaders and organizations seem to be out of it, behind the times, in the caboose of the American political and economic train.

They are locked out of the dining car up front – unless summoned, like waiters, to get orders. And like waiters, these so-called leaders get tips or funding for comforting the powerful by doing their bidding.
But these black people who have pushed themselves out front as “leaders” will tell the rest of us that not only do they have the ear of the powerful, they have also won concessions from them. Are you satisfied with concessions, like crumbs from the table of plenty, or do you want the real deal, which is what white America has?

In case you have not noticed, this is the last year of the 21st Century’s first decade, and understanding that progress is measured by forward movement, ask yourself, are we as a people progressing?

Of course, if you count a snail’s pace as progress, your assessment has merit. But moving that slowly when we actually need warp speed to catch up negates meaningful progress.

An ancient African proverb by way of Haiti says, “The ax forgets, but not the tree.”

I bring this up because the question that must be answered is what happens to so-called black leaders that allows them to forget the tree? Psychologists call the phenomenon cognitive dissonance.

In his book The Falsification of Afrikan Consciousness, psychologist Amos N. Wilson writes: “There are so many of us who believe that fair housing laws, anti-discrimination laws, civil rights laws, voting laws and so forth, guarantee our freedom. That is an illusion. What a flight into fantasy!”

Do not allow black leaders who serve as shills for the politics of containment to persuade anyone of African descent to forget our holocaust, which was the Trans-Atlantic African Slave Trade.

Never forget the tree!

Teach the children that America’s “founding fathers” were slave masters. Teach the community that James Madison, who became the fourth president of these United States of America, framed our slave ancestors as part property and
part human.

There are three documents said to be “sacred writings of American political history.” They are the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and The Federalist Papers. Alexander Hamilton (the mulatto from Barbados), James Madison and John Jay wrote the essays compiled as The Federalist Papers that accompanied the struggle over ratification of the Constitution.

In essay No. 54 of the papers, James Madison solved a constitutional problem for America’s southern slave-based plantocracy with these words: “Let the case of the slaves be considered, as it is in truth a peculiar one. Let the compromising expedient of the Constitution be mutually adopted which regards them as inhabitants, but as debased by servitude below the equal level of free inhabitants; which regards the slave as divested of two fifths of the man.”

When viewing white supremacy clearly as the axis powers (the ax) calls attention to issues such as mis-education – conditioning the black mind to forget (cognitive dissonance) the holocaust horrors and a pre-slavery African past. The axis powers want the African mind to forget the cruelties of slavery, scientific and medical experimentation on blacks, eugenics, lynching, discrimination and police brutality. 

So-called black leaders throughout the Diaspora are making disastrous deals with white supremacists, resulting in retardation of grass roots efforts of empowerment and transformation. Liberation is not an issue to be compromised simply because such would be a contradiction. The fallacy of civil rights and human rights movements for black people is that they are built on external aid and not internal sacrifice.

Therefore, no muscle, no strength or power are ever realized. A psychology of dependency exudes from the leadership infesting followers like a rotten apple in a barrel.

Do not allow the roots to be destroyed, for ours is the tree of life. And though the blunting cutlass yet severs strands of Mother Lore, let all mankind know that the thing can never be done.

The seed and fertility of all that is will more than linger; it shall be. And know that we are the ONE from which all humanity arises.

Al_Calloway@Verizon.net