Do Not Acquit Them
As I revise the Towards Historicizing bookletine and prepare for its reissue I am sharing notes on the imperativeness of being acquainted with our history as Black people. In Western society a very specific atmosphere has been maintained throughout the centuries because we are formerly enslaved peoples coexisting with terrorists who never repented for their wrongs. We have been lulled away from a state if vigilance, entertained into a fantastical idea of “America”/ “democracy” and bought with fake money to making culturally compromising decisions that keep our Divine selves and gifts irreverently accessible to unconscionable, spiritless, soulless alt-beings. We create within the systems they set up where the best ends up in their hands and we are never encouraged to question the enormity of the injustice that creates the culture to which we contribute [enough to withdraw from it]—yet daily the contradiction wears on us.
The sacrifice of existing in Western culture’s “free” society is denying your history’s indicting implications, accepting their tainted, fragmented presentation of your identity while in your soul you know there is more to the story, and then your not rustling the feathers so you can have “opportunity” within its fascist, capitalist structure. It’s the stuff they don’t tell us that informs the tension we have learned to call “normal”. They bank on our ignorance, our desire for peace and a terror-less existence so much so that we’ll never check the records to see which of them did what to us and the restitution that must be made. We suppress the curiosity to know what we endured, invented, and achieved before, during, and after enslavement so they can have their frivolity. In the ignorance of our history we grant Western society an unworthy status. Yet, we’re essentially being blackmailed to not act on the truth of their violence, to accept their presentations, museum, and texts instead of amassing our thoughts in journals and researching the truth for ourselves, for our own conclusions to be made. I believe this era, this convergence of Black generations has the opportunity to share stories offline and reorient ourselves in a new wave of excellence and vigilsnce that the Western system is not privy to partake in. We can only get there, however, when we deprogram from their summation of our experience formed into social fact and research our history.
We don’t know how much has been stolen from us, and it’s a great dishonor to our ancestors and our descendants when we administer a socio-spiritual acquittal to violent beings without first learning the extent of the terrorism committed against us—without them ever having to apologize. This is a dystopian imbalance we have called “normal” for too long.
May our written records reflect our relentless vigilance—falsely categorized as “militancy” to disarm and domesticate our righteous anger—so that we live a life that restrains our goodness from demonic beings and administers the indictment our ancestors did not see in their day. We are not a people who coexist with violence, who experience terrorism and marries into its bloodlines to take on its name. We are not of those who attribute success to proficient dissonance to multigenerational abuse. And we certainly are not of those who will do our enemies the favor of never looking into our history so that they may feel comfortable around us, in vile and irreverent proximity to us and wrongfully at ease because we are ignorant of the depths, the reaches of their evils against us.
As you learn, write. We must keep the records as we properly live out the plot twist our ancestors hoped for. This means not fearing how learning your history will cause you to respond to yourself, this system, and your soulful journey. You cannot be afraid of how learning your history will awaken you or catalyze your unprecedented metamorphosis. Engage your history and become the protagonist your journal entries need to depart from being mere “journals” and head towards historical annals.
