Consider this…….I Cannot Breathe.. -“A riot is the language of the unheard,” MLK, Jr.

As a young college student activist protesting anything from equal rights, tuition hikes, and colorism to Iran-contra related offenses in Central America, my mantra was a party song this party girl loved. I woke up with it on replay in my mind this morning, and became motivated to write in light of the blatant Civil rights violations so pervasive in our society.. “THE ROOF, THE ROOF, IS ON FIRE, WE DONT NEED NO WATER, LET THE MOTHERFUCKER BURN, BURN MOTHERFUCKER, BURN.”

Well, America’s proverbial roof is on fire. Alit by the centuries of oppression, jim crowism, (lower case intended, in spite of word autocorrecting to title case), second class treatment, inequities, inequalities, covert and overt racism, classism, ethnocentrism, white privilege, white wealth and white legacy, built on the backs of black bodies, their strength drained to produce such wealth at the expense of their own american dream (lower case intentional). Black families broken and ripped apart by systematic programs administered so as to avoid real integration, real equal access, real education of the masses of black people, who were disenfranchised by statutory sanctioned non or ill education, peonage and the like. “No niggers allowed,” “no niggers, Mexicans or dogs,” “no government assistance if there is a man living in the household.”

Yet, we, both black and white, fail to open our minds to the poverty of knowledge that is our diagnoses. The real result of being educated under systems that systematically subjugate the majestic truth and reality of Black history, of African history, and replaced it with with ‘his’story of western civilizations that exist solely as a result of the success, civility, wealth and political prowess of the African civilizations that they looted from to prevent their extinction.

We fail to acknowledge the deficiencies in our own information bank and thought-forming processes, and instead, in arrogance, look down on those who spend their lives in pursuit of the enlightenment of their Africanness with pride. The enlightenment that causes them to FEEL oppressed by the denial of their valiant efforts to pursue good, then better, then best, simply because of the color of their skin.

Marcus Garvey was so accurate when he remarked that as a people we are doomed by our ignorance of our past, the truth of our African heritage, not ‘their’story deemed ‘his’story. As students of History and Political Science, we know all too well that history and maps are created by the winners on literal and proverbial battlefields, where the ends justify the means.

Just like the facts about the Greenwoods and Rosewoods communities in America and communities in post-colonial, now “economically strapped by colonial debt” countries globally, la(y) (id) concealed, buried, some hidden in confidential police files, government files, newspaper archives from generations past, etc.; and just like the witnesses and the victims of heinous violative acts of brutality were silenced by the devilish will of a vicious minority (over a complacent and passive majority who remained silent), with an agenda of the continued oppression of Black and Brown people in this country, around the world, so were the true regal, majestic histories of Black and Brown peoples hidden from the very histories and social science texts used to formally and informally educate us as a people. So don’t trust your thoughts, for they are scripted by the socialization that nurtured you, lulled you, into your current stupor, ignorance and sophomorism.

My African and Black Studies college Professor, Leonard Jeffries, a leader in the Black Studies movement in America, commenced our classes with an accusation of ignorance. He indicted us for being complacent in our ignorance. He challenged us to engage in our own self-indictment of knowing nothing. I hated it. I was brilliant after all. I read many unassigned texts in my quest for knowledge. I have a high IQ. How dare he? I would think. But, I learned that it was out of my own ignorance, that I was offended by his remarks. I learned lessons in those classes that continue to fuel my hunger to unearth the facts about the miseducation of Black and Brown people across the globe as a byproduct of Europe’s quest to underdevelop Africa, the cradle of civilization, and in the process, its human capital. I have continued to quench this thirst by being a constant learner, and a constant gardener over my thoughts, culling ignorance and fear, while cultivating enlightenment and love. I have found that by being fluid, maintaining a growth mindset and being critical in thinking about what are truths and what are facts, are essential to the living an examined life worth living. “An unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates.

It is because of this education and that fed into me by the many scholars who fed my intellectual development, that now in my critical thinking classes, I challenge students to identify the difference between truths and facts, and to assess how confusion of the two can be damning. I challenge them to assess how much of their day is a byproduct of their default settings, how much of what they do is what they want to do, a result of their own critical analysis and decision making, versus how much of their day is simply a series of reactive responses to conscious and unconscious conditioning by the forces at work in their lives, those agents of socialization.

The reality is, unless we become mindful and pay close and full attention to what we think, get used to asking why and how, we are mere robots in an Orwellian existence, merely puppets being manipulated by the same old archaic ignorance, the old narrative, systematic, centuries old, of stolen legacies and the lies to conceal the theft, as our puppet master. The mission, maintaining the status quo philosophy at work since the borders of Africa and Asia were opened to the infection of trade that would be the undoing of the legacies built by our forefathers, a pandemic, centuries old, a social disease, disease of society, we have yet to find a vaccine/cure for.

Please, I ask you, refrain from using trite fallacious analogies that will further infect your reasoning. Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, are all dead. The method used to bring about their demise is still at work. Their deaths were not as a result of a criminal act committed by them, but simply because so-called protests were deemed agitation, and they were deemed the terrorists who would dare attempt to topple the status quo system of their time.

These were philosophers, their rhetoric, sometimes beautiful, sometimes stinging, did not shuttle in civil rights, equal rights and change. It was the riots, the natural byproduct of unmet promises, of dreams deferred time and time again, of being left behind, left out to exist largely at the periphery of society, that exacted a response from the powers that be. In the case of the USA, Black and Brown people have been and certainly are peripheral to its global brand of being the land of the free and the brave. They are the ones whose promises have been reneged upon and whose dreams remain systematically deferred by the subliminal effects of the social and economic engineering of white privilege.

So, support those brave young men and women, risking their lives and freedom to protest. Those who are committed to vigilantly holding America accountable to uphold the promises America has made and keeps on making to Black American citizens who have been bamboozled by the farce that has been the promise of Lady Liberty to non-whites in this country. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” Sure, this promise is yours in America if you are white complexioned. For non-whites,these promises continue to be a dream deferred. There is no golden door for them, notwithstanding token successes that you are perhaps itching to rattle off as you read this. To that, I say, if Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama, Martin Luther King were indications that the dream was open to the rest of us, why are we still such a small percentage of the successes that are recounted in Forbes and such? Why this, why that, why all the innocent, unarmed dead, having committed no crime, threatened no one? Why underfunding in schools? Why resumes trashed after reading just a name? Why typecasted in only certain roles? Why the presumption of guilt, while whites enjoy the presumption of innocence? Why was Amy Cooper so comfortable calling 911 and telling a blatant lie on a black man? Why was she comfortable issuing an apology for this premeditated act? Why is she publicly complaining that her life is ruined after losing her job? As if she expected no real consequences? Why this? Why that? Consider this.