BLOGS

It is Black History Month. We tend to focus on Martin Luther King, Malcom X and those men and women who stood out in the fight for acceptance and equality. We conveniently focus on them. The truth of our black culture lies in the true history — slavery. The black Americans did not come to America for freedom and a chosen new beginning in life. They were forced out of their magical homeland and used for the gain of their owners. They went from being human beings living in honor of the land and life to objects of someone else’s gain and intent. This is the core of our Black culture and we are choosing to ignore it when we continue to condemn, judge, blame, and isolate its people.

Holocaust. That time brings up an empathy in most people in our country. We have museums and monuments, and more, to honor those who were brutally destroyed in the holocaust. We have done research that shows the survivors of the holocaust carry with them a post traumatic stress disorder complex that is passed forward in the lineage of holocaust survivors.

Slavery. That word elicits what image or thought in you? How much do you know about the suffering, terror, brutality and destruction of the slaves, our people. It is the basis to our black culture and its people! It is no different than the holocaust. Yet, we do not honor our own people and how that time in our own history has a definite affect on today’s culture and its people. We quietly talk about it but do not experience the truth of the existence of the people who were the slaves. In other words, we keep ourselves disconnected by cognitively talking about that time rather than experiencing the lives of the people.

I am honoring Black History Month this year to do my part to honor the people who gave their lives and families to the beginnings of this land. We fought to free them but we never really did. It is the white man who defined the black slaves. It was the white man who defined the “savage” Native Indian. We destroyed both cultures. Both live in a silent prison of space within this culture, a culture they should be able to call their’s. How do we truly open our doors to diversity within our homeland? Let’s all begin by taking the history of our fellow Americans to heart. Let’s honor the history of the black people.

I invite you all to visit Whitney Plantation in Wallace, Louisiana. It is the only museum honoring slavery in the country. We have 35,000 museums and not one (until a few years ago) was in honor of slavery. This museum was created and funded by one man, John Cummings, just a few years ago. It is laden with exhibits and memorial artwork among and within restored buildings and hundreds of first-person slave narratives.