Where do we start with the police?
We could list their never-ending crimes, brutality, and abuse against our people including our children, but you know that all too well already.
We could talk about their endless broken promises to “learn the lessons” of all the racist outrages they have committed against us, but you’ve heard all that before.
We could talk about the countless reviews, reports, and inquiries that point to a culture that can’t be reformed – but we’ve all been inquiried-out.
We’re all exhausted with talking about the police and their bottomless racism
So, where do we go from here? It couldn’t be more clear that our traditional forms of protest are simply not working. Instead, we march from one outrage to another like impotent fire service, always chasing the next scandal, always at the beck and call of their agenda to drain and exhaust and defeat us. We’ve got to be smarter than this.
“As all of our greatest leaders have died trying to tell us, the solution lies with us”
The police are the overseers of the modern-day enslavement plantation, the foot soldiers on the front-line of White supremacy who see Black people, especially Black youth, as the only real threat and danger to their social order – what sociologists have called “social dynamite.”
The war that started with slavery had not stopped with abolition – it changed form. The problem is that too many of our people do not recognize this fact and rely on our enemies to declare a truce, to declare they are tired of oppressing us. Bizarrely we expect those who hate us to develop a moral conscience and come up with solutions to end their highly profitable social and economic exploitation of us and our motherlands. It will never happen.
As all of our greatest leaders have died trying to tell us, the solution lies with us.
We have to build self-sustaining institutions and resources, as Malcolm and Marcus Garvey urged us to do for so long: we have to build our own schools, our own banks, and various businesses to provide for and set an example to our young. We must reconnect to and reclaim and unite Afrika from the neo-colonialists and their stooges. Afrika remains the richest continent in the world, so if Afrika becomes strong, then so do we. We must build and become a self-conscious global Black nation with the ideological tools Marcus and Malcolm have already left us.
“You can’t hate your origin and not end up hating yourself. You can’t hate Afrika and not hate yourself”
Malcolm X, Ford Auditorium,1965
We have also to rebuild ourselves spiritually – our enemies made God in their image so we would worship them. We can no longer afford this distraction, and we can no longer see our ancestors disgraced. Wasn’t destroying our spiritual systems, and thus our unity and link to our ancestors, the first thing they did when landing on our shores? They feared our spiritual power then and now but have corralled and kettled our frustrations into harmless protests. What if we combined Pan-Afrikan nation-building with meditations and rituals that called on the assistance of our ancestors? We would see transformative changes we would never have thought possible.
Our enemies have taught us to hate, fear, and have contempt for the very things that would free us – our greatest leaders, our ancient spiritual culture, and the fearlessness of our fore-parents, who even now still stretch forth their hands.
Let’s reach up to them – and seize the time!