Wednesday, February 01, 2012

Open Sourced Black History Month

We take a break in the normal push to acknowledge and comment on the thing known as Black History Month. My bone to pick is when other cultures in this conglomerate of immigrants called the US display their heritage, there is a recall of ancient times and the unbroken trail to get here. When US Black folks do the same we only talk of the boat that brought us and what we did since we got here. There are no ancient times, but then again we weren't immigrants either. Much has happened to wipe the memory of our past from our knowledge banks, common conversation and replace them with disconnected snippets of truth, half-truths and out right lies. At first the idea was to make us slaves, then subservient citizens, then reluctantly allow us to blend in till we don't care anymore. I know, I have a blended family, it is a good deterrent from seeking the truth.

Truth seeking is a hard game, names and times change so often it is easy to get confused.  Academic ego poisoning has turned fact researchers into racist dogs. Imagine discarding truth because it doesn't support what you arrogantly and erroneously believe. They find it more glorious to say we invented it rather than we learned from others and developed it further.

Fact finding takes a thousand eyes from many sources. Common threads abound and what was recorded in one country is also recorded in a different way in other involved countries. Sometimes it a cultural link, a language, a practice, or an event, a series of events. For me it is backward questions. How did we get to the boat, the field from where I was captured? What was I doing there? Where was I before that? Was I indigenous or migrant? Were we fleeing war, persecution, drought, on trade routes? Were we carrying products or were we the products? Who were we in every exchange and name change? What did we encounter along the way and what did we leave behind when we moved on? What is the span of time these things took place? Can a people still be considered a people after such a long span of time? We are talking 2000 years and multiple generations, blending with other peoples, us and others forgetting who we were/are.

It started with the very thing I was supposed to be ashamed of, my skin, and a picture from the Bible. Moses put his hand into his bosom, pulled it out and it was leprously chocolate brown. No, it was already brown and turned leprous, as white as snow. I also found the famous De Vinci and Michaelangelo competed for a commission to paint Roman (white) faces on religious artwork (the Renaissance). No animosity toward anyone today, we've all been lied to. Many believe the lies, live out the lies, regard the lies as truth. No need to check it out, right!? And when the truth is revealed, there is rage, the change is monumental and how dare you challenge what we all have accepted as true, you are lying and cursed and deserve to be killed, blasphemy, blasphemy!! The white guys in the Bible were really brown guys!? I could be a Hebrew, the pieces seem to fit. The world history and biblical prophecies concerning the descendants of the Children of Israel seem to fit. It is a prophecy that we would be enslaved, forget and be forgotten and our ID would be assumed by others.

Yeah, we invented the oil jiggy, the hair curler upper and the electric traffic cop.

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