EDUCATION, CIVIL RIGHTS & POWER

What have we created within our children?

I think the crack epidemic, and its deeper reasons lay behind the spiritual, and cultural decline of Black Americans, and it evolves from our failure to define power, and negotiate with and for power in the decades before 1970. I also hold the Black American community responsible for not re-evaluating the paradigms, belief systems, and teachings of the Black Church to discover and unearth the fundamental source of our dysfunction. We, as a community do not have that kind of collective wisdom, courage, or insight. Our strategy to be equal, by law, with White Americans came to a head and we died a death. Our lives, and our actions tell the story of our overwhelming desire to be accepted by White Americans, and to be more like our White folks.

Millions of Africans back home on the African continent thought the momentum of the Civil Rights Movement was going to jump across the Atlantic Ocean and African-Americans were going to physically, and emotionally, and spiritually, and intellectually be part of a larger movement to advance the causes in the African liberation movements, and for Mankind an effort towards reconciliation and World Peace would find its course, and set its rhythms. Our narrow view, and goals has birthed generations of dysfunction, rage, murder, alienation, greed, and a particular type of selfishness as we become more and more white and less and less African.

Our failure to become more African, to re-acquaint ourselves with our indigenous spirituality, and forever present determination not to view Christianity as an African religion has been the death of spirit, and the author of our new story that has birthed children, by our example, despised and neglected. Our disdain for our children is evident in our practice. Even White people can’t deal with their own dichotomies; their own contradictions sicken them. Their shit stinks so bad they are running by the thousands to the sweatlodge, the religions of people they have conquered, and have created a movement of self-discovery, and many of them are working hard to re-create themselves, and heal the Earth in the same process. They just don’t know how to ask for forgiveness.

But Black Americans? I can barely use the term African-American for our collective consciousness that both shuns, and despises the essence of Africa. So I often take the liberty to call us Black Americans, or Negroes because of our propensity to serve the need to become as white as possible. We don’t remove our children from an education system designed for their failure. We won’t, as parents, find alternative approaches to education, and parenting, and mentoring as out of our equations. The old storyteller of our stories, the historians, the true teachers cannot find their proper place, and we don’t initiate our children into adulthood. We just hope and pray and avoid the key issues of our existence. – Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories

What have we created within our children?