As if Oya and Shango had a black American baby - delivered on a stormy Saturday -- at Harlem hospital.
Imagine being born on the day, the day Hannibal defeats the Roman Empire.
Standing there effortlessly dismantling the claims of The Monster. As if the ancestors were talking to him...
Weaponized by momma Africa 🌍 with the right tools, used at the right time -- delivered with force.
— James Baldwin vs. William F. Buckley
-- The Entire Debate --
"What we are not facing is the result of what we've done. What one begs the American people to do, for all our fates, is simply to accept our history."
— James Baldwin, in debate with William F. Buckley" @Cambridge_Uni, 1965
Dismantling Colorblind Racism
“You want me to make an act of faith, risking myself, my wife, my woman, my sister, my children on some idealism which you assure me exists in America, which I have never seen.”
"I Am Not Your Negro"
: "...in 1948 I left this country for one reason only" ... The years I lived in Paris did one thing for me: they released me from that particular social terror, which was not the paranoia of my own mind, but a real social danger visible
...in the face of every cop, every boss, everybody. ... "
“… If I'm not a nigger and you invented him -- you, the white people, invented him -- then you've got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it's able to ask that question."
— James Baldwin
“But if I walk into your nightmare, and react to what you see, I become what you say I am.
And then you’ve won, or in any case I’ve lost.”
"I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will EVER forgive them,
... that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.
#BlackWallStreet is a very serious reminder of the dissimilar history African American businesses had to endure, endured, things, that most of "The Newly Arrived" would've never survived. And, despite our history: Today, they ask "Why can't you just be like the good Asians".
You could have built to the moon 🌚 and watch it all disappear, all in one night, all in one night! The legal beneficiaries of our pain, being falsely compared to us. Centuries of working for free; due to slavery,
And, now, this. After all that — and we were supposedly "free".
2020 Update: Roland Fryer is wrong: There is racial bias in shootings by police
"The specific flaws of Roland Fryer's paper have now been characterized in two studies (by other scholars, not myself). Knox, Lowe, and Mummolo (2019) ...." nytimes.com/2016/07/12/ups…
What's fascinating to me about The Republican Party and #CriticalRaceTheory: The Republican Party was created to free people from a White Supremacist institution.
The Democrats used to mock it by calling it "The Black Party".
Using Diversity for White Supremacy: The Lily-White Movement
"To avoid criticism, one or two blacks were usually seated with lily-white delegations to the national gatherings. ...
'To avoid criticism, one or two blacks were usually seated with lily-white delegations to the national gatherings. The lily-whites gained new momentum with the adoption of the poll tax and the passage of the Terrell Election Law (see ELECTION LAWS).'
"A rule without exceptions is an instrument capable of doing mischief to the innocent and bringing grief - as well as injustice - to those who should gain exemptions from the rule's functioning."
— Derrick Bell
"The system of racialised perpetual hereditary chattel slavery that was developed in the New World by Europeans has NO EQUIVALENT IN HISTORY."
NO EQUIVALENT IN HISTORY.
NO EQUIVALENT IN HISTORY.
NO EQUIVALENT IN HISTORY.