HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS is the faculty that causes one's eyes to truly see. Without it one is virtually blind, and so, it is true to say that ...
WORTHWHILE OPINIONS CAN ONLY BE FORMED BY AN INFORMED PEOPLE
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TO KNOW GOD YOU MUST KNOW YOUR SELF
TO KNOW YOUR SELF YOU MUST KNOW YOUR HISTORY, for therein lie the seeds of ACUTE NEGRO PSYCHOSIS, the now widespread disease that prevents knowledge of self.
Some would ask, "But why do you have to draw so many analogies with THE PLANTATION, THE FIELD NEGRO, THE HOUSE NEGRO, THE SLAVEMASTER, AND THE SLAVE ?"
The answer is, that in Black life today there are too many similarities, and too many unchanged realities which indicate clearly that the names have changed but the drama remains the same.
One can only deny this if one has made a stubborn committment not to see the slave master's ghost that hovers menacingly over every institutional arrangement that governs Black life today ...or if one has become so accustomed to the way of the plantation, that long familiarity and long internalization have made it invisible to one's eyes.
YOU ARE ONLY FOOLING YOURSELF IF YOU SAY YOU KNOW YOURSELF BUT DO NOT KNOW YOUR HISTORY, and just hearing that "we were slaves" is not really KNOWING your history.
KNOWING must involve having an intimate knowledge of the historical circumstances that triggered our present-day MENTAL DISORDERS. With such knowledge, one would be able to look at a blonde haired black woman or a "PERMED" Black woman and make the connection with the days when Black people were forcibly made to believe that their lack of STRAIGHT HAIR AND WHITE SKIN is a curse from God. One would be able to trace the long ongoing psychosis that resulted from this belief, and one would understand why Blacks have struggled for so long to escape THEIR REAL HAIR AND THEIR REAL SKIN COLOR.
Many of these present day psychological disorders can only be explained and understood by taking into account the major roles that sexual abuse, terrorism, and brainwashing played in our slave experience.
KNOWING OURSELVES must therefore involve the recognition that violent RAPE on a day to day basis is the main factor that helped to make many of us look less like our African ancestors, and therefore when we show an inordiante preference for the slave master's race in any form whatsoever we are actually giving our back-dated consent to the rape of our fore-mothers.
TRUE KNOWING of our history will also not omit the fact that the Black male too was subjected to frequent rape by his degenerate Greco-Roman captors. This is an important element of our slave experience, which though shameful, cannot be be overlooked because it is responsible in large measure for much of the presently unquestioned homosexual frame of mind that has evolved in the Black community since then.
Too often we have failed to realize that continued domination and subjugation necessitated the continued EMASCULATION of the Black male. Either by castration as was the case with many of the publicly lynched victims, or by rape of Black youths, Black masculinity was constantly under attack.
When a Black male was lynched and castrated, all Black males were at the same time being psychologically emasculated by the terror and the helplessness that resulted from the spectacle.
Through a knowledge of these historical attacks on Black manhood, we are better able to understand that the inordiante incarceration of the Black male today, and the tacit encouragement of homosexualty in the prison system are part and parcel of the same scheme of BLACK EMASCULATION.
When we begin to understand that psychological phenomena can sometimes span many generations, it becomes less difficult to comprehend the relationship between past experiences and present behavorial manifestations. Therefore, true healing of ourselves can only come after a thorough examination of our slave history.
This is what KNOWING YOURSELF is all about. It necessarily involves knowing the source of one's thinking and one's actions, so that one can be better able to correct them. With such knowledge of our history one would be less apt to collaborate with THE RAPIST, and less likely to embrace the corruption that comes from long subjection under the weight of degenerate Greco-Roman pirates.
Most of us who are slave-descendants do not even have a memory that stretches as far back as our grandfather's father, and the little that we have heard about those that have gone before is only sketchy and vague. Why is so little really known about our foreparents other than that they were slaves? It is because up to this day they have been treated as history's "NO-PEOPLE." They were the anonymous tools that were used to create white wealth, and when they were worn out and useless to their white slave masters, they were then discarded with less dignity than was bestowed on the slave master's pet dog or horse.
Countless are the white ancestral slave masters who are commemorated up to this day, but the peoples of Africa who gave of their tears, sweat, and blood, are still considered as the invisible collateral damage of white nation building. As an Afrcan slave descendant, you were taught to be ashamed of your foreparents, and to treat them with the same lack of respect that the white man showed them. That is why today we so often shun the discussion of slavery and collaborate in maintaining the solid blanket of silence that continues to rob our foreparents of their humanity.
As a people we have consented to keep our foreparents buried in shame like so many nameless dogs, because we have been trained to proudly remember the white man's ancestors like Jefferson, Lincoln, Columbus, and Santa Klaus instead of our own.
So herein lies the reason for the continuation of Black self-hate, because any people whose ancestors are buried in shame and ignominy are themselves bound to live ignominiously under the spell of perpetual shame and self-hate.
To every generation is handed down a unique historical imperative. The imperative of this generation is to break the silence and restore dignity to our nameless, unrecognized, uncompensated, and dehumanized foreparents, upon whose ragged dead bodies great affluence now boasts itself. THE HEALING OF THE ANCESTORS IS THE HEALING OF ONE'S SELF.
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