A standard Western education does not equip us with the language, skills, nor even the concepts, to fluently move between hierarchical and heterarchical perspectives and to understand them in coherent relationship to one another. Instead, we do what we have been taught to do: we mechanically abstract, extract, and reduce, and present these two inter-embedded perspectives as irreconcilable opposites that we must choose between, and in so doing, defend the one against “the other” at all costs.
The Tuskeegee Airmen, in more ways than one, were directly responsible for the fact that I had a seat in the theater. They fought for the rights that I take for granted: the right to be an American Airman; the right to be a full and free citizen of my own country; the right to simply sit wherever I want in a movie theater.
All too often, the Black Freedom Tradition in our nation is ignored, distorted, and misappropriated for reasons that range from silly and shallow to dangerous and vile, despite the fact that our nation’s survival has often depended upon it. Still, the tradition endures, in reverent memory, in deep ancestral bonds, and in day-to-day practice.
On December 5, 1791, Benjamin Banneker wrote the following entry in his dream journal: On the night of the fifth of December 1791, Being a deep Sleep, I dreamed that I was in a public Company, one of them demanded of me the limits of Rassanah Crandolph’s Soul had to display itself in, after it departed from her Body and…
In April of 1866, Walter A. Bookram, a civic leader in the Black community of the town of Franklinton, North Carolina, wrote to the editors of the A.M.E. Church’s newsletter, The Christian Recorder, to inform them that a school for the town’s free and newly-freed Black residents had been established. The school in question was a night school housed in…
“Slavery and freedom are incommensurable qualities, the difference between them an existential matter touching the dignity and worth of human life. People suffer, certainly, in freedom as well as in slavery (and, for that matter, in every known condition of human existence). But that unquestionable truth does not license anyone to tote up the suffering of one–in dollars of gold,…
This is how I see America: Maritime, African, Indigenous, and European, with the Greater Caribbean at its heart (h/t to Elizabeth Eaton’s map of the Atlantic arc of colonial British America for bringing this thought to the forefront). Edit: the Google Earth version of the same perspective.