What a ripoff. What a media ripoff. Disgust. Reparations?
Aside from being scarred with shortsighted vision compared with 20/20 vision of higher aptitude that monetary privilege allows, 40 acres and a mule is one thing, but there is another kind of reparation I think more serious. These past two weeks, I've been bombarded with something phenomenal.
Oblivious, I had been accustomed to stepping over pieces of worn ivory thrown in my path, but this time a piece clunked me on the head hard enough to get my attention. (It sure is good to become educated.) Wow, the rich, smooth and curling tusks of the elephant pilfered and sold to the minds of the nations in the form of metaphoric symbols called words. I find this ivory stored in the banks of a masked oligarchy, transformed into perpetual lies and falsehood.
Fair recompense isn't appeasing a people with something they didn't ask for, as Native Americans were. Instead of being handed "reservations," as fellowmen, they should have been allowed the free choice of land to own and given civil negotiation for the measure of it.
Truth has more value than money in being capable of restoring a people, just as Nelson Mandela was assisted by enlightened governments in supplanting the European-controlled South African government.
Truth would be sufficient to exonerate the guilty nations that burrowed themselves into the gold and diamond nests of their African hosts, because then what was "pillaged" would naturally have to be restored. France is the only nation thus far to admit wrongdoing for colonizing much of West Africa and to discuss the prospect of compensation. Other nations continue to shut their eyes and stop their ears to the haunting of millions of voiceless slaves and their stolen children, victims of pathogen injections (for experiments and/or genocide), and now the political chaos of bereft and impoverished African countries -- "imperialism?" More fitting is barbarism-tyranny. Yet history books ironically give false images of a people by calling their customs savagery.
As a just reparation, African Americans should purge their minds of the ivory dust of subtle propaganda that still lingers. For instance, political terms like "minority" and "black" should be resisted because they have become too generalized. These words have become inaccurate descriptions. The word minority is now used out of its original context of referring to population comparisons to allude; it now also and too prevalently alludes to social status. The term now follows the third definition in the 10th edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary: "a part of a population differing from others in some characteristics and often subjected to differential treatment." It's a term that has marginalized all others who don't fit the skin-color cast of the "white majority." Using the word promotes an avenue for segregation to an oppressive end -- even women are now categorized into this hell-hold (and for what?). A systematic paradigm of oppression can be noticed, as during the minstrel days, when the "black" person was declared "three-fifths" of a person in order for white domination to persist.
The term black has become tantamount to "minority" as white to "majority" -- and "as a man thinketh, so is he." It's derogated by slang: blackballed, black Friday, etc. The "sympathetic" term minority also becomes belittling.
People should no longer concur with this hierarchical labeling by not checking the absurd racial boxes that monitor them like a hidden camera. Curiously, the Hispanic box is even divided into black and white. People should instead be classified as men, women and children, and according to demographics and nationalities if necessary (i.e. Puerto Rican, Australian -- regardless of skin color).
African Americans should protest and take control of media misrepresentations because one subject of the circus on the political regime (media) is prejudice. There's a perpetual psychological abjection of Africanism, like altering the Nubian faces of ancient Egyptians who -- contrary to media assertions -- were an African people varying in skin color from bronze to ebony. There is a constant comparison of blacks and whites in one-sided statistics, with white always being favored. This undermining device is wrong -- poor health, obesity or crime are ethnically indiscriminate, but might be influenced by social class. Specifically, in the film industry, an opportunist PBS-produced film from a Euro-centric viewpoint on the history of jazz, in a roundabout way, discredited African Americans with having created it. But America needs to be acknowledged as a multicultural nation. For example, added to European ballroom dancing were variations of popular African-American dances of the Ragtime era such as the Charleston and Lindy Hop swing dances. Also there was Spanish Flamenco dancing and the Mamba, coordinated to the gleeful fast-paced shrill of Hispanic music.
Truth will restore what money cannot in gathering the lost ivory and placing it back on the tusks of the elephants of time past.
Reparations? More than money is gaining control of the media in narrating oneself and one's history. We should not only -- in the words of a Black Panther from the '60s -- knock the legs off of the table where we are unjustly not welcome to sit. But I say we also should build another and establish equality. If I were to stand by a mother whose 2-year-old ran off, I wouldn't just stand there. I'd fetch the child and swoop it up in my arms. Likewise, responsibility belongs to us all.
