How history manages to repeat itself is astounding. Actually, it isn’t so astounding if you understand the number that has been done on the minds of African Americans in this country. Willie Lynch did, indeed, mastermind the perfect crime. We are now a people who sit and listen to the wind howl, feel the air grow cold, see the darkness fill the clouds, know that there is a storm brewing, but wait until the Hurricane Katrinas, in all their many forms, wipe out our populations before we do anything. Then, as always, we moan and whine and plead on slave’s knee for salvation from the very system that laid the groundwork for what could have remained a tropical depression to develop into a storm. The article, Advocate for C. Lee Turner Writes, written by Lonnie B. Davis, which appeared in the Oct. 19 issue of The Panther newspaper, is telling us nothing new. Mr. Davis is attempting to illustrate how the current charge against the drama professor is but a “weapon of mass destruction” being launched at historically black institutions and programs across the country that demonstrate excellence, elevate the minds of our young, and poise them for competition in global economics on all fronts, in all arenas and industries. This is not about C. Lee Turner; this is about the dissolution of any attempts toward institutional power on behalf of black people, people of color, poor people.
Mr. Davis’ endeavor in this article is much like that of author Aswad Walker in his book, Weapons of Mass Distraction, (note: Distraction not Destruction), where he attempts to enlighten African American people about the techniques and strategies used by government and corporate controlled media to distract our attention from issues relevant to the survival of our people. While none of this is new to the watchers on the wall, to those who keep their ears to the street, Mr. Davis is sounding the emergency broadcast; he is ringing the alarm bell; he is shouting at the top of his voice as Lawrence Fishburne did in Spike Lee’s, School Daze, to the masses of us, “Wake up!!!!!”
I am tempted to ask the question why is there no outcry; why is the Alumni Association not storming the Bastille; why aren’t HBCU drum lines across this country marching to PV; why isn’t this issue a headline of every black owned newspaper from Austin to Houston; why weren’t HBCU alumni, students, professors, administrators not on stage at the Millions More Movement informing and stirring up the masses on this aspect of the education issue; when the issue of education came up, why didn’t they “get on the bus?” I am tempted to ask, but I fully understand that the mere asking is an exercise in futility, for the answer is clear. We are still, in 2005, Willie Lynch negroes, something God didn’t create; unlike the Holocaust Jews, we neither healed nor repaired ourselves.
We refuse to see the evil that exists in high places and understand the lengths that evil is capable of going to, to further its own cause of wealth and power, of total domination over all that is good, which includes life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We sing about it on Sunday morning, but we don’t really understand it. We don’t want to admit that evil men in high places will move heaven and earth to achieve complete and absolute power over everything that might empower those who it is to their advantage to keep under their control. We read it from the Bible every Wednesday night in bible study; but we are afraid to say it out loud. We charge and convict the Pharisees and Sadducees, but we lock arms with the neo-cons, and the wealth and power elites, afraid of being called a conspiracy theorist, afraid of losing our cut from the tax collector’s purse. We have been brainwashed by media and miseducation into believing that to support that which empowers black people is “racist,” will segregate us, and will hurt the feelings of our white friends and co-workers who we don’t realize are just as disempowered as we are. We have been drugged by the illusion of paychecks and houses in the suburbs and really believe we are a part of American society, while ignorant to the fact that the United States is a corporation much like the Texas Medical Center is a corporation and not a physical location. We trade our children into slavery via apathy and ignorance for a piece of the American pie, for inclusion, for status, for comfort.
One day, the world will speak of us as it does hundreds of other races and cultures; they will ask: What happened to them; why did they give themselves away, their history and their culture, their institutions and their power? Did they not know who they were and why their very presence on the planet was a threat to evil men in high places? Alexis De’Toqueville prophesied it; Frederick Douglass expounded on it; Marcus Garvey tried to stop it; the National Black United Front, the Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, the Black Christian Nationalists fight it every day on all fronts.
But where are the masses? Where are the politicians and the preachers? Where are the toll takers and the teachers? Where are the cooks and the accountants? Where are the advocates of institutions of power that serve to release the generational curse of Willie Lynch on black people? Where are the advocates of PV and other HBCUs waiting in the wings to succumb to the same weapon of mass destruction?
The wind is howling; the air is growing cold; darkness fills the clouds. There is a storm brewing. Will we wait on the very power system that allowed the environment to decline to a place where would-be tropical storms become category five hurricanes to send us a life jacket? Will we wait until another Hurricane Katrina, disguised as “diversity,” disguised as “One America,” displaces another segment of our population, wipes out more of our history and culture before we do anything? Or will history repeat itself?
-By Norma J. Thomas
-Contributing writer for the Prophetic Voice