By Briana Booker

I have been doing much reading and thinking these days. I thought I lost that pleasure of thirst for true knowledge, wisdom and creativity years ago,when I started resenting society for its corruption,for its injustice.

As a child I loved to read. I could read a book of 1,000 pages in less than three days. I did it because I wanted to read. I wanted to imagine. I wanted to think.

But as school required readings of me of things that never interest me, my pleasure for discovery and willing thought went numb. I was learning what someone wanted me to learn. My learning was not triggered by natural curiosity and adventure. I was a walking zombie – a community member of the living dead.

Recently, I graduated college. No book or forced lecture could teach me what I am learning now. The streets are showing  more knowledge and truth to me than 18 years of formal education has ever done for me.

I am in my 20’s and only starting to skim the surface of my cultural history- the history formal education had cared less to show me.

Where am I from? Where is my homeland? Where is my community?

I have resented not being able to answer these questions. Some people would tell me, shit happens. Broken communities and shattered nuclear families will always be the make-up of the Black community. Is that statement true or false?

I have hit a low point in my life where I need answers about everything I have been told never to question. I do not need cover-ups or staged answers. I need the Black community to redeem itself.

I read some beautiful readings from a brother long forgotten. This brother was named Malcolm X. It is not his questioning of  the Caucasian race collective deeds to serve self-interest that made me want to learn about his thoughts. Most Black people have questioned or will eventually ask in their lives: why us?

Why have we always been given the shorter end of the stick?

It is not about the Caucasian race past mistakes and cruelty anymore. It is not about the Black race being enslaved for 400 years. Now, we are the victims from our own abuse. We are waiting for someone to give us a dignified identity. But to get that, we have to do what most minorities do, we have to revive our community not through the eyes and actions of external subjects and factors but through the eyes ,deeds, hopes, dreams and thoughts of the Black race. To find our real identity, we have to find our real beginning. Our real identity will not be found by the means of western teachings or culture.

Integration will only go so far if we have no skills or trade to bring  benefits to those at the table and to ourselves at the same time.

I have seen ghettos where drug dealers are praised for selling crack to pregnant Black women who will born the seeds of our future. I have seen children without fathers and mothers give up on love for themselves and for their people. I have seen children play the most intricate video games but can not read the sub-headlines on those same video games. These children can not read, write or do math adequately. We have failed them;waiting for someone to lend a hand to save us, to make us whole.

How about we save ourselves, for once? How about we think of ourselves for once instead of serving the advancement of all people but ourselves?We are so quick to turn our back on our own people. We are so quick to hate ourselves. We are so quick to judge our brothers and sisters. We are so quick to shed the blood of our brothers and sisters because we do not meet eye to eye.

Over the past 400 years we have embraced being sub-human. We have become comfortably numb in our deaf, blind and dumb state of nature. There is nothing natural about us. We are just the puppets of the puppeteer.

Why are we so appreciative and loyal to those that have given us crumbs? Why have not we mastered being appreciative and loyal to ourselves? How can we love the world when we have yet to learn to love ourselves?

Everyone else has a seat at the table feasting off our minerals and long lost human wealth. It is time to wake up.

Malcolm X in 1964 founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity(OAAU). OAAU was a Pan-Africanist movement that suggested Blacks in America should collaborate with Africans in Africa to fight for human rights and gain good quality living for the Black race and long-term for the whole of mankind.

The following were part of the OAAU Program:

• Restoration:  Blacks in America should restore communication with Africa, our homeland to release us from the oppression we suffer in America and Internationally.
• Reorientation: Read informative books about our culture, our people.
• Education: Form our own system of education to liberate our children’s minds. Get our Black men and women to write and publish textbooks needed to free us from a slaves mentality.
• Economic security: Black people have a common origin. Black people have a common group experience of pain and struggle. We need to be more economically and politically active to obtain our freedom,our human rights, our dignity, our true identity. We need to establish our own businesses in our own community. We need to put away some of the money we make from these businesses to advance our community’s development.

If every year at least 22 million blacks in America gave $1 to the Black community to build self-owned establishments in the black community, we can uplift the Black man in America. It only takes a $1 every year to make beneficial change. But here we are too brainwashed and too selfish to be unified.

I want  to start a program designed to rid the political oppression, economic exploitation & social degradation of the black community. But I can not do it alone. I want to reinstate OAAU. – Briana Booker, Founder of Fromgirltogirl.

 

 

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