One of the most effective hustles being run on people around the globe is to make “white” culture the standard of validation. It’s systemic, obviously, but it’s also insidious. As it progresses, it creeps deeper, quietly and subtly. Participating in American culture is a poison that makes you think that getting more poison is the cure. It’s a game that you lose by the very act of playing, like arguing with a fool. You can’t beat the beast at being the beast…and even if you can, your reward is that you’ve become the beast, but beastier.
What does freedom look like for maafa survivors? Barack Obama, right? Nah. His administration was white imperialism in blackface. It was under his watch that Ghadafi was killed and Libya destroyed. That was a major loss for African people globally. It happened because of what he was doing with the dinar, the United States of Africa, an African central bank, African satellites, etc. He was getting his people out of their adversaries’ traps.
For us to truly be a free people, it requires a separation from “America.” It requires us to step away from that identification and really comprehend who we are in the world. We will have to be reflective and creative. I don’t like any of the familiar names we go by: black, negro, colored, nigga, African American, etc. I didn’t want to just say African because that’s a continent, not a people, and I don’t have a particular culture I can claim. Plus we got melanin ancestors who were here before Europeans arrived. I tried to switch it up to American African, but nah. I’m pan-African, but that’s political science, not a cultural identity.
We are the people who lost familial, national, and historical affiliations. We’ve had to find something more intrinsic to connect on. We talk about a “Black card” in acknowledgment that we do have a shared cultural reality, though loosely defined. A clear and organized unity amongst us is the single most threatening thing to America — at least that was FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s professional opinion. The recurring response to a melanin unifier is to destroy and/or discredit, whether it’s a person or a group. The fact that it causes the height of their fear response should be assessed thoroughly and used as strategic information.
Why does Black unity threaten the American corporation on such a high level? The basic European economic model is this: take away what you have, repackage it, then sell it back to you. We had community, happiness, spirituality, health, love; now all of those things are monthly bills. Community has been parceled out as child care, education, elder care, restaurants, medical care, therapy, etc. Happiness has been relegated to material accumulation and over-consumption. And the government is a hustle to get money off of all that. The entire system is set up to capitalize on pain and feelings of separation. If we heal our pain and unite, that is, by default, the complete collapse of their system. That’s why it evokes in them hostility with extreme prejudice.
Their cultural psychological diseases provoke them to toss relentlessly from one fear to another. Rather than courage, they have historically turned to anger and violence to process fear. Because they see everything through the lens of fear, then all their actions are to be seen rightly as attacks. Therefore, even the societies they create attack the very people in them. As long as you’re inside the belly of the beast, it’s feeding on you, no matter what you do. An abusive relationship is still abusive on the “good” days.
The obvious question is: “where we gonna go?”
We don’t necessarily know where our ancestral homes were before the maafa. I’ve suggested that the only meaningful reparations the US could offer maafa survivors is to cede at least three southern states for us to self-govern, along with a financial contribution. Maybe there’s an African or Caribbean country that is willing to let us get a few hundred thousand acres to set up our new country.
Really though, it’s not about leaving America physically. The entire earth is our domain! The issue is that when we wake up in the morning, our thoughts start to participate with and empower the poisoners. It’s not that we need to “get out of America,” it’s that we need to get America out of us! We need to move to a different identity and worldview. The solution, I see, is to identify our bodies as the land that we are from, have loyalty to, and dominion over. From this, we have the authority to insist our culture be observed on our land. A nation can identify regions of land as their base, and name it, with governing practices to accompany. But without people to call it a country, the earth is just earthing. If we take off the cultural practices and names from ourselves, then what are we? Just some spirits spiriting around in earthships. We, “Black Americans,” as a group, are composed of many different people, from every continent. Therefore as a group, we are physically related to the whole earth.
I call “Black Americans” Earthiopians, because of the above explanations, and the extreme spiritual heights we’ve had to reach to avoid being destroyed. We can call it whatever we want; the important thing is for those of us who value self-determination and wholistic self-reliance, to have a clear identity and worldview, that is meaningful and inclusive to all of us. We can then retrieve our incredible resources, powers, and capacities from being funneled into an adversarial system, and reroute them to our homeland (ourselves). Then we’ll easily recognize how wealthy and capable Earthiopia already is. Your nation is not where your body lives, but where your heart lives. When we move like this as a group, then it is much easier to get those three states of land for our base, or just buy a few islands!
Photo by Peter Idowu
