Let No One Tell You Hatred is in the Past
There was nothing nice about the institution of slavery in America. The historical slander about slavery was invented by those who wanted to preserve slavery, and now by those who desire a continuation of white privilege and false American history. In extending the importance of uncovering historical truths, more research is needed to uncover the barriers of fabrication about slave rebellions in opposition to the hideous institution of white supremacy. We need more honest research about the important role of abolitionists, Harriet Tubman, Gabriel Prosser, and the revolts on the slave ship Creole and the Amistad. These revolts and leaders were not inspired by madness, but by the power of the human spirit to oppose brutal injustice. Slavery was an institution of mass insanity approved by barbarous law and uncivilized nightmarish tradition. Slave owners should have been executed. We need to penetrate the wall of informed ignorance that has dominated American history for centuries.
The human spirit seeks a better world. We should endeavor to struggle and battle for the dignity of humankind at every level. This is required for the moral arc to bend toward real justice. We should always fight for those marginalized and left in vulnerable positions. As a teenager there were times when I had little to eat, but a sympathetic cafeteria worker at my high school provided me with food. I returned that love when I organized with others the first free breakfast program for school children, a Black Panther Party Program, in 1969 as a member of SNCC in San Antonio.
This is our responsibility; to make the world anew with thoughts and actions that fortify freedom, and overcome those who seek to return us to a Jim Crow hell. We live in an era where racism has risen from the dust of the past to haunt us once again. Let no one tell you that slavery happened a long time ago, when its child, white supremacy, is still alive and at work. Let no one tell you segregation happened a long time ago, when those that experienced it are still alive. Ignorance never disappears, and has never ceased to control the unwitting thoughts of people to numb them into accepting invented explanations for social and political differences polarizing them with hate-filled ideological lies. White supremacy and other forms of hatred can grow in an environment that belittles human dignity. In any given population, the uneducated, those lacking the education of diversity, can be manipulated into consuming the poison fruits of hatred. The logical end result of such manipulation is racial violence, hatred, disregard for the poor, violence against women, and all other hatreds that can be made to stew in the minds of ignorant people.
There is always hope, and there are those trying to the push us toward more polarized racist thoughts. Unlike past generations, especially people who still identify themselves as “white,” an invented category dating to the 1700s, many continue to throw off the yoke of white supremacy. There are now hundreds of thousands of people who may have identified themselves by the invented unscientific category of “race,” but have refused to limit their social relationships on the basis of the social construction of “race.” It stands to reason, that because white supremacy is under massive siege in the social and educational arenas, those who have been manipulated by white supremacists are resorting to more violence and more lies. However, this will not secure for them the permanent support they once enjoyed in bigoted America.
