Give Us Free

The United States of America is the best example of what the word oxymoron means. It is anything but "united" and it was misnamed "America" by some fools who were trying to get to one place, got lost, and "discovered" a place that had been inhabited by people who they called Indians. As Don King says, only in America. The story of America for people of African descent is remarkably the story of survival. While the unfortunate truth is that more of us die than should, the good news is that many more of us survive and thrive. That is good news. We have the will to live within us that is so strong that no other people would be able to process the terrorism that we go through on a daily basis. We have adapted to our circumstances and our situations. Our challenge,however, at the very beginning of the 21st century is to not allow those adaptations to turn us on us. It is not too late to turn some of the BOB, i.e. Black on Black crimes around. It is very disheartening to continually hear what we are doing to us.

I have lived long enough to remember being a frightened child when my parents and their friends were talking about what "they" did to Emmitt Till. I also remember my personal sadness when Medgar was killed, and the 4 little Girls were killed, and Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney were killed, and Martin, and Malcolm. And let's not even mention the despair I felt when a President of the United States of America was killed-either by some who did not like his so called progressive domestic policy proposals or his foreign policy.

But the hope was that I also was captured by the poetry of strong sisters like Nikki Giovanni. And Sonia Sanchez. And the poems/rap of The Last Poets. And Gil Scott Heron. And strong sisters like Angela Davis who decided to commit class suicide and make decisions for the greater good. And Stokely. And Rap. And books by people like Alex Haley who illustrated and documented that we might have had our start in the United States as slaves, but in the motherland some of us truly did come from Kings and Queens.

So, despite what they want us to believe about ourselves, we truly are strong men and women and just have to keep telling the stories to ourselves about who and what we are.