I just can’t deal with the absolute bull anymore that Christopher Columbus founded the USA. It is stuffed down our throats, celebrated. The USA actually celebrates a man coming and ravaging a native population then claiming he found a land! Yesterday’s celebration of Thanksgiving pretty much does the same thing! Seriously what is this?

Our storied past is undermined by one big thing. S L A V E R Y! It is slammed down our throats since birth, Blacks were slaves, Blacks came from nothing, Blacks were INSERT NEGATIVITY AGAIN AND AGAIN! Anndddd even when talking about the amazing women and men of the Civil Right’s movement we are also reminded of the horror that led to the birth of that movement.

But we didn’t just pop up here out of nothing, did we? We were not born as a people enslaved since the beginning of eternity? In fact, as science will tell you, we were the birth of humanity, the birth of the first humans! The first humans were BLACK! And since that moment that we starred into a puddle and thought “I need a haircut” rather than “Who is that, should I kill them?” we have been INNOVATING, we have been at the front of every field developing the future that we have arrived to today.

Our youth NEED to know where they came from, they need to know about the interruption known as slavery but we must build their confidence with the truth about their past.

The Sankofa symbol loosely means that we should look to the past to move forward, we should know our history and feel proud of who we were to help us know who we are to become.

So let’s stop starting and ending with slavery and look far beyond. Look to the earliest humans, to great African empires, to the beginnings of writing, coffee, language itself! Let’s look PRE-1492 and celebrate!

To help with that we have just released our new deck of Black History Flashcards! Volume 4 explores Black History before 1492 with 52 amazing high quality cards.