What Are We Going To Do Now?
Junious Ricardo Stanton
“Basically, reconstruction is the next necessary phase in this process of learning how to educate ourselves. It is not sufficient to just point out what’s wrong in the miseducational system- it is necessary to do the research that begins to set the record straight.” Dr. Na’im Akbar from Know Thyself page 59
During Black History Month 2023 I have been sharing books, authors and Websites by Africans, people of African heritage and ancestry who have researched the facts, who are setting the record aright and are offering insights and suggestions on what we have to do to heal ourselves, tell ourstory to reconnect to our ancient African and modern Diasporan roots.
History is not just names, dates and places in the past; it is certainly not viewing events in a vacuum as isolated occurrences or through a myopic lens. History helps us learn lessons about life and living, discern patterns, history offers road maps, guideposts and wisdom along our journey on this physical plane we call life in this space we call earth.
A people who shun or eschew learning about their own history are a lost people a people devoid of meaning and purpose. A people whose history has been stripped from them, distorted, maligned and/or obfuscated are a people experiencing psychic trauma and pain, who are unconsciously disoriented and more easily malleable and manipulated by outside coercion and influence.
This is the state Africans find ourselves in today, whether we are residents on the continent or throughout the Diaspora. We have lost our history our culture (language, cosmology, family structure, social cohesion, values, science, art and ways of sustaining ourselves) and any self-determined vision of ourselves. This is why all around the world, we find ourselves on the bottom, victims of foreign colonization, imperialism and enslavement languishing in a state of impotence, disorganization and purposelessness. This was all deliberate! Our oppressors have a plan and their plan calls for us to remain in this state or worse!
We deserve better, we can do better, what are we going to do about it? The books I shared provide history, perspectives, information, strategies and tactics but that is only the beginning a starting point. We have to do the serious work to heal, restore and redeem ourselves. We cannot depend upon the charity, kindness and intentions of others; especially not those who have a vested interest in keeping us in this state of deliberate degradation, disorientation and malleability.
We have to engage in what has been called The Sankofa Movement. Sankofa is an Andinkra word and symbol of the Akan people of Ghana West Africa. It means to go back, fetch and bring forward. We have to go back to our African roots, our African history, traditions, recollect them, honor them, bring them forward and apply them to our modern lives. Why? Because it is essential in the arduous process of becoming whole, sane, reconnected, purposeful and intentional in our existence and being! We have to recapture and cultivate our minds. Our great intellectual warrior and educator Asa G. Hilliard put it this way, “When any people make a cognitive and spiritual shift to support the supremacy of their oppressors, in their own mind and soul that will be the end of those people.”
Unless we recognize our disconnectedness and alienation from ourselves, meaning not knowing or embracing who we are, where we come from and failing to bring forth the gifts and legacy of our ancestors and apply them to our present circumstances, we are done as a people! No other group on the planet seeks to erase their past, they may elect to blend that past into new places, spaces, surroundings and circumstance but they always retain their sense of self.
We must begin to think about ourselves in new ways, rethink what it means to be African from an African perspective and orientation, not as a caricature forcefully and cunningly imposed upon us by others via lies, miseducation, the media and “authority figures”.
Time is of the essence we have to begin the journey, the Sankofa Movement and our ancestors are calling on us to take decisive action to actualize and manifest the genius and gifts bestowed upon us from THE CREATOR through our ancestors. I have given some resources and offered the incentive of self-knowledge and self awareness. It’s on all of us now. What are we going to do? Only each and every one of us can answer that question.
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Posted By: Junious Stanton
Thursday, March 2nd 2023 at 9:47AM
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