BF,

I spent a good portion of last night at a hospital with some friends who's daughter/neice/sister was shot outside a Dollar General Store. Two brothers who had a 'beef' fired at each other and one slug went in under her arm and exited out her back damaging her left lung.

There is an uncle who is just under 40 who was just coming to realize that life is about passing it on to the next generation and having fun doing it. He has two sons who are great athletes with great potential. He is an from the cusp of the OGs and has been incited to revenge his neice. The boy is incarcerated, picked up this a.m.

I spent three hours trying to keep him focused on the two boys and allowing the system to work. The gangster in him is still very strong and thus there is a great potential for a nasty settlement from this unfortunate situation where in an instant lives can be changed for the worst.

I live in a world where I set priorities about what I can do. To even get ready for this thread treats as a possibility we has to work a new mind set into our kids. I don't have all the answers but I am down her on the ground having to side step the puddles of blood to go help. And getting dissed by peeps who are reading stuff about 3500 years ago and sipping Expresso in a gated community.

Don't get me wrong I choose to live this life. I am not at all complaining. This is where I belong as long as it is like it is.

the potential for whites attacking us does not scare me as much as the deterioration of our family structure....

Sorry to hear about that incident Meknow. Throughout the Diaspora, Africans are struggling with this same madness. I know this type of violence can easily just keep going on and on, with no apparent end or peaceful resolution.

This type of suicidal behaviour contrasts dramatically the genocide implied in this thread. Many try and convince me that this "suicide" is our culture and I always disagree.

When Africans were killed by the millions, only a few generations ago, the reality of The "new world" created by murderers, haunted our ancestors who in resistance to this alien culture always asked us to remember who we are and where we are from.

The european nationalist identification with Christopher Culumbus and europeans who's culture of rape, theft and genocide has created what kind of reality for our people today?

What kind of world do we really live in where Africa is soo rich yet our people beg citizendry in nations which have kept us as slaves, longer than as supposed free people??

Africans who have accepted that the American Diaspora turned innocent Africans into cotton/sugar producing machines with a life span of 10 years, have not looked for the plantocracy and their descendants to one day realise the error of their ways and practice the love their religion propagandised to those forced to listen. The reality is that genocide has not stopped and the suicidal behaviour of our people is not progress, will not bring about higher levels of consciousness in our people and the results of internal wars, will only result in bitter memories, waiting for a chance to manifest violence on our future dreams.

When knowledge of self was made culture, through our reverence of ancestors; when Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammed, Malcolm X asked us to acknowlege self, this was not a plea, steeped in some social vacuum. The coming out of slavery, to the reality of a people brutalised for centuries and then told to do for self, without any institutional power or safeguarded human right, was never supposed to be real freedom and our ancestors knew it!

Our former "owners" labelled our struggle to live in our way the "negro problem" ; A term now hidden within mainstream discussions around race, which are now considered a non issue because we currently live in "egalitarian" societies where Africans are led to believe, everyone can achieve if they work hard and forget about their history, race and culture.

Looking at our history Meknow, we know everyone, aint gonna make it.

The reality of an African president of the United States, has forced many Africans to truly identify who they are and what worldview they wish to try and cultivate and see as their future. If nationalism is for them, what type of nations do they wish to endorse and see as legitimate for themselves and their children and which environments will only continue the historic exploitation and denial of rights.


If they choose to follow or embrace:

The Western materialistic dream

Islam

Black Nationalism

Pan Africanism

Christianity

African traditional spirituality

Alternative life styles/choices

Drugs

Socialism

Repatriation

African centred ideology

To follow european ancestors

To follow African ancestors

To bury their heads in the sand

To bury their enemies

To bury African people......




whatever Africans choose now will both ally them with Africans and produce new African enemies, all at the same time. It will only be through debate and a coming together of African minds that any meaningful consensus will occur in the nations and lands we reside in and our future will look back and applaud those ancestors who created those spaces.

Suicide within an oppressed group is still genocide. No other people are going to liberate us and it's in the interest of our enemies to keep us confused, and if necessary, at war with ourselves.

Once enough of us realise we are at war, the killing of our own by our own, for no national profit, will seem as non-sensical as it really is. Our people can see, more of us need to act.

Peace




Stanley Tookie Williams III (December 29, 1953 – December 13, 2005), born in New Orleans, Louisiana, was an early leader of the Crips, a notorious American street gang which had its roots in South Central Los Angeles in 1971


“Throughout my life I was hoodwinked by South Central’s terminal conditions. ... From the beginning I was spoon-fed negative stereotypes that covertly positioned black people as genetic criminals—inferior, illiterate, shiftless, promiscuous. ... Having bought into the myth, I was shackled to the lowest socioeconomic rung where underprivileged citizens compete ruthlessly for morsels of the America pie—a pie theoretically served proportionately to all, based on their ambition, intelligence, and perseverance.”

“My rage was nourished by the hate I saw and felt from mainstream society and white people, a hate based on my black skin and my historical place at the nadir of America’s social caste. I was filled with hate for injustice. Yet my reaction to the hate was violence directed only toward blacks.”

Tookie Williams



To be an African American male in White America is to live with anger and hostility, to feel the need to attack, to violently retaliate, to even the score. These murderous feelings without appropriate catharsis, sublimation, channeling, or targets. ..yet in need of outward expression.. .are often turned inward resulting in self-annihilation. White racist American society, harboring a poorly concealed death-wish against its Black captives, generally leaves but a few outlets for the release of societally provoked Black male rage: all inappropriate!

They include the abject submission to oppression, narcosis by drugs or religion, deliberate ignorance, unending, unrewarding protests, futile sub rosa grumbling, over compensatory status striving, criminality, and homicidal attacks on other Black males or on himself (suicide). Having internalized white racist values and attitudes, having been possessed by his introjected white racist demon, the suicidal African American blames his victimized self. Identified with his implanted alien spirit, he harbors a death- wish against the victims of White racist oppression amongst whom he himself is numbered. Looking at the world through jaundiced white racist eyes, he sees the enemy: And the enemy is himself.


Amos Wilson

BF:

I feel what you are saying. I think what Tookie and those who filled the streets with acts of hatred is a show of weakness. It is also a expression of the structure of our society not being stable. No respect. No consciousness for the lives of others, our own to be specific.

I remember when I lived up north in Monterey. The street bosses up there were preying on the welfare mothers in the projects. That is where the sure money was and the objects of there lusts were satisfied. I immediately saw that this was evil. I was no where close to being a christian at the time. I saw kids running around in apartments roach infested, lights off and mothers out hustling to secure drugs first.

Monterey or Seaside was not a big place and the 'drug lords' would congregate in the park with their lackies while the projects festered.

I know that truth must be known and accepted. But is their a priority that needs to be meted out in the attempt to bring our people up. Does hatred belong in the mind of our people before knowledge of how to over come the bonds of a particular system?

Being proud to be an African is a no brainer to me. I don't care what anyone thinks of me and have not for many years because I have african blood in my veins. I understand the reasons for the conditions of my people.

*here is a thought*....do you think a simular thread is being discussed on white forums? like what would it take for *&^gers to rise up and "Nat Turner" us?

I whole heartedly agree that there needs to be dialogue on the matter of how to wake up the sleeping giant. If you startled a person asleep he can hurt himself as well as others.