Why do we consistently give up our greatest modern source of strength?  Why do we ignore a very important and critical part of our modern history in order to travel 3000 years in the past and guess what happened in a civilization that you may or may not have any ancestry in?  Why do we champion Jackie Robinson but ignore Rube Foster (the founder of the Negro League)?  Why is it that more people acknowledge W.E.B Du Bois as the first black person to earn a doctorate from Harvard than can recognize his actual contribution to Black Rights in America?    We could go on and on and on with this line of questioning and what is sad about it is that it follows the same line of reasoning that we like to attribute to America in general as a whole country.  I wrote a piece on America’s bad memory that can be found here, but there is no excuses for that same thing to be present in Black America, in short, slavery needs a facelift. 

While we debate the quality of the modern rush of slavery movies hitting the big screen with the common denominator being that they all have black slaves waiting for a white savior of some sort to come and rescue them (or at least to show them that all white people aren’t bad).  I believe and have verified it through a few people that black people are just as ashamed of slavery as white people are, maybe even more so.  We don’t like these movies because they are slave movies and they remind us of a horrific time in our history where we believe ourselves to have been weak and stupid.  We viciously attack anything that reminds us of our oppression and in doing so we disconnect ourselves from our greatest modern strength, our oppression.

When you look at culture on a global scale, it is largely created during times of suffering.  A lot modern traditions have roots in a time when they were needed to survive.  A lot of slang was derived from a time when codes were needed to talk about something out in the open without being understood.  A lot of the great works of art were created when the artist was connected to oppression or suffering of some sort.  Dr. Woodson explains this to us better than anyone I know in his book “The Mis-education of the Negro.” 

Stories of the Stono Rebellion in 1739 would match and surpass the greatest Greek Drama.  The story of the Great Conspiracy of 1741 would make an excellent addition to a building trilogy that would eclipse any known in modern or ancient times.  While we all know the story of Nat turner, what about the powerful story of Toussaint Louverture who converted the French Colony of Saint Domingue into the independent Nation of Haiti.  We could even create a movie on the art of Capoeira and how it was developed to maintain African culture right underneath the nose of white oppression.  The 25% of people in the Trail of Tears that where black freedmen forced to leave Florida would make a great story as well as the story of the underground railroad and how it went both north and south to freedom initially.

Oppression creates wonderful stories, and powerful art, but it also creates powerful music.  Jazz, blues, gospel, soul, rock, and rap where all created at different periods of oppression by oppressed people as an outlet.  These people expressed their contempt in a beautiful manner and changed the social and cultural landscape of America and the world at large through the power of the emotions and messages placed in this music.  These works of art gave hope, strength, and happiness to people all over the world. 

But as a people we choose to only acknowledge these things when whites acknowledge them and usually in a negative manner.  We see slaves as being weak because we are looking at it from the wrong vantage point, as with everything else, we view it from the perspective of the white dominant society.  No other formerly or currently oppressed peoples view the period of their oppression as a period or source of weakness with the exception of black people.  The mere fact that we constantly have to look to other people for validation of how we should view and treat ourselves is a testament to the fact that we need to sit back and really look at our modern history.

Slavery was something that happened to us, it really did happen.  But the fact that we made it through and continue to this day is a source of strength, we endured something that no other group on the planet has ever had to endure in both length and harshness.  We fought back at every turn from all out rebellions to more passive forms of resistance like destroying 1/10 of every harvest, working slower, overcooking or undercooking food, or misplacing valuables.  We learned to read ourselves even under the threat of death, we educated each other, supported each other, and within a few short decades of being free went from having nothing to building cities that rivaled those of any white neighborhood.  The last 400+ years are rich in black history, stop avoiding it and embrace it, because just like the history from 4000 years ago, it is who you are.