JUDGE ME AS YOU WILL (It has to be said...)

I want to address two issues under the same umbrella. One that is fairly widely discussed, and one that seems as though it has never been thought of.

I was raised by slave people. I was probably 55 before I ever gave that a first thought.

My grand parents were haunted, in the truest sense of the word, by the notion that any bad behaviour would result in having to cut down my burnt body from a tree.

Some other examples of what it’s like when your heritage is one of oppression.

My mother’s husband’s family were staunch advocates of Howard University. However my mother told me repeatedly, when I was in the single digits, that she had no intention of supporting me or encouraging me to finish school, much less helping me go to college.

She simply didn’t care. My mother’s family’s complete lack of interest in education, was generational. We were all born here in the USA, and yet not one of us finished high school.

The legacy of slave people can be even more bleak, than is my sad little story.

Black children to this very minute, lead themselves to believe that obtaining an education is useless and weak - counter to the culture of the African American.

They actually feel as though ‘education is for white people’, a devastating blow to my heart every time I hear it.

I can’t even bring myself to discuss here, how that manifests itself, save to say, black children en masse frequently and erroneously find no value in attending school. And so they don’t.

Also mildly devastating to us....My family knew nothing about creating loving relationships. There was not one iota of positive information shared in our household, and no positive reinforcement, between any man and any woman in my family. Ever! I knew nothing about having a man or finding a man or keeping a man….. Nothing.

To extrapolate my life across the diaspora... The majority of the world creates, unites, propagates and grows, into recognizable family units.

Africans, unwillingly transplanted to America, have tendencies toward pridefully giving birth to multiple families, and historically, abandoning responsibility.

Here I need to say this. If you don’t see the correlations between these types of behaviors, and the common atrocities that comprise the whole slavery experience, let me help.

We were prevented from going to school, and we were prevented from forming families. Now we are terrible at both. Generally speaking.

That kind of trauma is passed down to each and every generation. An heirloom of dysfunction.

The legacy of American slavery lives on, to varying degrees, in basically all black people to whom this heritage belongs.

This cultural damage cannot be affected or ‘fixed’, outside of ourselves. No one can come along and do for us, what we need to be doing for ourselves. How can someone fix someone else’s generational trauma.

How would I go about repairing your life.

It isn’t happening.

The trauma continues.

No amount of money for ‘backpack giveaways’ is going to give black children, that which simply is dearth to our culture.

What we need to develop for ourselves, is an exuberance for education, a thirst for knowledge, and a respect for our selves and our families.

If you can put that into a back pack, please do.

And now to bring it home.

As a black woman and a descendant of slavery, it makes me very uncomfortable to hear current discussions on providing reparations to black people.

This is my attempt to provide us with a solution.

Please do not send out random reparation payment checks to descendants of slaves.

Please devise a modest reparations funding model, to implement educational programs nationwide, for the mandatory education of all black children.

No studies. No surveys. No exploratory panel of experts.

Educated children are not buying illegal guns, killing each other, and being systematically eliminated by law enforcement.

Educated black people are not incarcerated. They are not using social services, or choosing a life of crime.

Educated black people have made vital and extraordinary contributions to this world, and it would be to the advantage of this world if all black people had complete educations.

All problems solved!

What are we waiting for...?