POSITIVELY BLACK
Junious Ricardo Stanton


“Freedom is not a commodity which is given to the enslaved upon demand. It is a precious reward, the shining trophy of struggle and sacrifice.”- Kwame Nkrumah 1963

As we celebrate Black History Month, I am struck by the common thread of struggle that is woven throughout our existence on this planet. Our total existence as the descendants of the first humans has been fraught with challenges, obstacles and struggles. Think about how the first humans had to struggle to survive, to accommodate themselves to climatic variations, droughts, floods, threats from within and without, yet they persevered. Our being here today is a testament to our ancestors tenacity, resourcefulness and genius. The sands of time have covered most of what our ancestors accomplished even before they built the great Nile Valley civilizations. Ancient dust, shifting social paradigms and conditions cover what our ancestors created in East Africa, the numerous pyramids in the Sudan, the magnificence of Great Zimbabwe in Southern Africa or the great kingdoms of West Africa. Those achievements did not happen overnight and as far as we can discern no extra terrestrial settlers created them, our African ancestors did. Once while giving a talk to a group of young African-American males, I asked them what things did our African ancestors invent. They responded with ideas like musical instruments, weapons and the pyramids. I asked them to think deeper and consider things we take for granted. They were stymied and I offered the concept of marriage, a system of social arrangement that designates who is paired with whom and how the group sanctioned, recognized and honored that arrangement. I also told them we invented governance, social order through lineages mostly through the females and social relationships. I told them Africans created the first governing councils via the extended family, we created the idea of Chiefs, Queen Mothers and Kings. I shared with them Africans articulated the notion of a creator, an unseen sustaining power we call God. The youngsters were so used to the type of inventors they are usually presented with during Black History Month like: Lewis H Latimer, Elijah McCoy or Granville Woods; sharing with them the implications of us being the first humans who created important institutions was so different, I got the sense they did not get what I was attempting to get them to comprehend. It’s not just young folks. Most of us are so brainwashed by Eurocentric disinformation we have a hard time thinking in terms of Africans being creative or Africans being brilliant.
The struggle to overcome the fiction Europeans created everything of worth on the planet is our great challenge. For example whites take credit for creating something as mundane as “Rock and Roll” when in fact it was African musical creativity that brought that about is a case in point. Their need to plagiarize or deny the accomplishments of our African ancestors is an indication of deep seated inferiority and inadequacy on their part! It is our challenge not to make them feel worse by pointing out while their ancestors were living in caves practicing cannibalism, infanticide and incestuous inbreeding we had constructed advanced civilizations throughout Africa and Asia that were by then thousands of years old. Our primary challenge is to educate our people about not only our past greatness but how to actualize our present potential! Africans have always defined themselves as complex multi-faceted beings, not just physical entities. The Europeans to justify their own inferiority, laziness and abhorrent behaviors defined us as sub-human and used every institution in their society to re-enforce this notion. Like they have done all over the world (and they are doing now in Iraq), they use lofty ideas, words and symbols like “ freedom and Democracy” to justify their psychotic behavior. We are in a struggle for the hearts and minds of our people. We are rumbling to be free, free to think for ourselves, free to reject white supremacy, free to posit an alternative view of humanity and how the world should be run. We did it thousands of years ago, we can do it again.
The struggle is an inner one, the struggle is to reclaim our minds; to reject the self-negating ideation that leads to self-hatred, alienation, nihilism that results in depression, fratricide, suicide and self-destructive behaviors. Our struggle is to not play into the hands or the agenda of our enemies. For example if we genuinely loved ourselves so much that our main focus was discovering our life’s mission and actualizing our innate greatness and we refused to be deterred or discouraged by adversity, they could pump all the dope in the world in our communities and the effects would be minimal. We are just that powerful. Our being here is a testament to our resiliency, resourcefulness and deep reservoir of genius. Let us use it to our best advantage. The struggle intensifies.