BLACK. LIBERATED. AMPLIFIED. CULTURED AND KEY
So what do we do now? The world is on fire, and people from one end of the earth to the other are screaming: Black Lives Matter!
But, what’s next? What now? Do we continue to put Breonna Taylor on a T-shirt, covers of magazines, make a Hulu special out of her story, and use her name for likes, propaganda, shits, and giggles? Or do we make tangible changes that are actually uplifting the black community and bringing justice to the lives lost?
At this time, many are looking to white people to put in work, asking them to check their privilege, actively practice anti-racism, and help build a more equitable society, but me, I’m not asking for any of that. We’ve been asking the same thing for centuries; the language has just changed over time. What makes you think white people will listen and do better now? White people are no better than their ancestors and are not interested in giving black people their reparations in any form. Not as a collective at least. And that’s the issue: collective action.
White people do not need to come together as a collective to educate themselves and make society more equitable for others; black people need to do that for themselves. Black people need to separate themselves from a society and a system that was never meant to support them nor accept them and never will. Black people need to create their own systems and institutions. It’s easier said than done, but a system built on white supremacy will never fully support black people. We’re constantly trying to build on top of a broken foundation, which leaves us where we started every single time, yet we wonder why history tends to repeat itself in different forms. The only way to fix a system with a broken foundation, is to destroy it and start from scratch.
With that being said, this is my opinion on some of the things the black community needs to do:
Stop appealing to white people. What they do is not going to change the black community. Even though white people are in a higher position of power than black people in society, black people cannot rely on them to release some of that power and share it. This society built on white supremacy will constantly make black people feel powerless; therefore, black people have to re empower themselves and take back the power that they thought society stole from them. At the end of the day, I believe white people will never understand black people’s pain, trauma, and struggles completely enough to devote themselves to allyship every day and permanently change the power structures of society.
Educate ourselves. There is so much black history our community doesn’t know. We don’t even know the depths of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade nor the slave trade that came before that: the Arab Slave Trade. We’re trying to educate white folks when we barely know our own history. We need to educate ourselves and educate each other so that we can break generational curses and heal intergenerational trauma.
Financial Freedom. Along with breaking generational curses, black people need to focus on building generational wealth. Instead of worrying about the designer brand names and the expensive cars, black people need to think about how they will build wealth for themselves and the generations that will come after them.
Separate ourselves. It has been done before, and it can be done again. Have you heard of the black wall streets and the all black towns? Black people need to come together to create their own systems and society instead of trying to fix the one in place because the system is not broken; it has always been this way. Even if the police are defunded and the criminal justice system is reformed, police will still kill black people and the criminal justice system will still be against us. This society is not for black people; therefore, we need to create our own society, made for us by us. More recently, black families in Georgia bought acres of land to create a safe city for black folks. This is something black people have been doing since the 1920s, a time when black people didn’t have nearly as many rights as they do today. This is nothing new, and it shouldn’t seem abnormal or impossible.
Black Collectivity. Black people need to start moving and thinking as a collective, and stop pulling each other down. The hierarchy and elitist behavior has to stop. It doesn’t matter what tax bracket you’re in or if you’re African, African-American or Caribbean; we’re all black. We are all a part of the African Diaspora. We need to eliminate the bias we have against each other and come together.
Give back to black communities. I see black people on social media talking about how they want to become millionaires and billionaires, but I don’t ever see any one of them talking about giving back to black communities. There are a lot of black people who have millions and billions but aren’t reinvesting their money into black communities or black people. Black people need to invest their wealth into black communities, as well as global black communities so that they can thrive.
Many of these ideas may seem radical, but they are real and possible. Enough is enough. Nothing is going to change if black people don’t take action for themselves. We can no longer depend on white people for our freedom.
“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”
― Assata Shakur
This is part four of the four-part B.L.A.C.K. Series. If you haven’t already, make sure you check out parts one through three to learn about the unheard stories of black women, unrelated fictive kinship, and black interracial relationships.