We Have Been Basically Persuaded That We

We Have To Talk About Liberating Minds As Well As Liberating Society.

We Have Inherited A Fear Of Memories Of Slavery. It Is As If To Remember And Acknowledge Slavery Would Amount To Our Being Consumed By It. As A Matter Of Fact, In The Popular Black Imagination, It Is Easier For Us To Construct Ourselves As Children Of Africa, As The Sons And Daughters Of Kings And Queens, And Thereby Ignore The Middle Passage And Centuries Of Enforced Servitude In The Americas. Although Some Of Us Might Indeed Be The Descendants Of African Royalty, Most Of Us Are Probably Descendants Of Their Subjects, The Daughters And Sons Of African Peasants Or Workers.

I Think The Importance Of Doing Activist Work Is Precisely Because It Allows You To Give Back And To Consider Yourself Not As A Single Individual Who May Have Achieved Whatever But To Be A Part Of An Ongoing Historical Movement.

There Is So Much History Of This Racist Violence That Simply To Bring One Person To Justice Is Not Going To Disturb The Whole Racist Edifice.

Racism Is A Much More Clandestine, Much More Hidden Kind Of Phenomenon, But At The Same Time It's Perhaps Far More Terrible Than It's Ever Been.