Learning: A very long story on a dead end highway

But I have never been persecuted for being black. And I have never been persecuted for being white because such a persecution is a vivid reimagining of white minds being modified to become persecutors by making them believe that unless they do persecute others they will be persecuted by others.

Now I have been accused of exactly what I accused Mr.. Sowell of, disliking my identity to such a degree that I excoriate myself against my own kind.

Well ‘my own kind’ do frequently exasperate me. There was a time in my life when I thought I could understand the black-American experience. Recently Dr. Elisabeth Glassco wrote to me this reply to a query:

“So, generally, among Black folks as a collective, there’s this belief in the people and in the capacity for change. But there’s also a realism that few others in America are willing to admit: that progress is nonlinear, often transactional, and it’s almost always partial. That for every advance, there’s a backlash. And that every law won must still be defended.

“Even now, optimism sustains Black folks. Not because it’s easy or because we’ve forgotten the betrayals. But because we know what it means to endure without losing sight of the distance. And because we know what it costs to believe—and what it costs not to. Optimism, for us, has never been a naïve hope. It’s been a matter of survival and the only way forward.”

Forty-one years ago I heard nearly the same words from another black-American woman. Every important event I have participated in had been with her and at her encouragement, but the protests and demonstrations always seem to me to accomplish nothing.

Women want me to oblige them and agree their protests got them the vote. Eighty years of protests does sound to me like the “protests” worked. I would probably question whether “civil” rights have yet been able to cross the Pettus Bridge; gay pride was never something anyone ever protested until they resisted imprisonment and it just kind of began. And then, sometimes, “they” just get tired of the prolonged protests or get embarrassed and just shoot the protestors.

It’s happened in America…over and over. But that’s a “me” thing…not a white thing, perhaps. Or perhaps not.

If it is true what these women claim,perhaps patience is not the way forward… it just doesn’t accomplish much. If someone has a need today it doesn’t seem to help him too much to fulfill that need tomorrow. If someone has a lack today, it will be more lacking tomorrow. ‘

A society holds together when it addresses a problem or crisis when it occurs. After it has festered it becomes much to repair. The black-white problem has festered and is terminally cancerous in America, hoping it will resolve itself and won't cut out the cancer.

Maybe Rome wasn’t built in a day, but maybe it should never have been built. If we build something only to watch it decay? that is a good thing?

Action delayed is mostly action never done. When you are laid off from your job it is generally not done in stages. When the store raises its price on an item it raises it, the store never invites anyone for their input.

But if they did, then what? Would everyone be heard? If there were some who didn’t want to pay the higher price would they be able to build a new store and pay less?

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, I’m not sure what path we are treading upon when we delay. A soap of life in a non-ending story. Patience wears thin, or it should. But perhaps when there is nothing else in the cupboard and it is bare, maybe then patience might be the only sustainable way to zag your way forward.

But my patience has become too threadbare with the individuals who would caution us that things will get better and return to normal.

Return to Normal?

Return to Normal?

What normal do you wish to return to? The one that just collapsed?

Or perhaps the one that never really had a foundation to begin with?

Does anyone really want to return to a propaganda that slits our minds into learning only that propaganda.

So let me return to Mr. Kenyatta’s questions of why he has not been taught his history. The answer is of course Mr. Sowell’s reply. It was not a reply out of the blue. Certainly in his life experiences Mr. Sowell was almost certainly plucked from the ghetto to inherit Milton Friedman’s Operant Conditioning Club. And yet he was, or at least he let himself be, and yet I can not fathom that growing up in Harlem, he was never treated niggardly. I can’t imagine he saw himself destined for much more than a sweet sweeper when he was forced from school; I really don’t see Korea—even though it is supposedly the first war where blacks and whites fought side by side in the same units—but even if Korea built comraderie with the white man how did it blow his mind into the officer behind the lines’s hands?

And yet Mr. Sowell says he had an awakening to conservatism. Not knowing exactly what such an awakening might have been unless someone offered him salve for an ego that despised itself but thereafter found a little bit of sugar in saying that every hurt ever done to him was because he was too lazy to step in and fetch it. No. It was the values his brain placed on him as a weaning child who saw no value in himself and had to cling to life only because of someone who forced his survival into utter dependence.

But of course, I don’t know exactly what occurred to Mr. Sowell. That’s a generality about Mr. Sowell.

But there is a generality in Mr. Kenyatta’s plea as well. A proclamation for the denial of his own history by the educational hierarchy in America. But not an abandonment of Mr. Kenyatta personally, unlike Mr. Sowell, he appears to have succeeded quite well in that system. No, Mr. Kenyatta is crying for what not he, but Alkebulans in general have been denied.

But Mr. Sowell is speaking in generalities as well, to me, to whites, the generality that if we think we need to embrace a future of not-lynching the black-American soul is to place an hypocrisy upon ourselves.

Well he doesn’t quite state it that way. What Sowell actually says is that,"The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state."

So I want to make my own white man’s plea now, I want to know why the educational system doesn’t tell us our fathers were almost all murdered and our mothers raped by white invaders from the steppes.

I want to know why it doesn’t tell us that when we trace our ancestry back we all find we were of royal blood but no more than 0.3 percent of Europeans were of royal blood, so why don’t we learn, just as Alex Haley learned, we are only tracing our ancestry to our Manor Lord and 99.7% of us were slaves (serfs.)

I want to know why when they thought they were cute by setting us free and giving us wages it was only to keep us in chains and shorten our lives?

I want to know why we are not allowed to learn who we are, really are, Alkebulans who had settled into Europe and then systematically (within only a few years) obliterated from our past, our ancestry. Our culture.

Well stupid me. I’m just vain enough to believe I know the answer. If they taught us our history, our lineage, our culture, then those Manor Lords who now sit on corporate boards or act as CEO’s, would see such an uproar and NOW would happen and they would all need to sing their lullabies in John Gault Land.

I don’t hate my race. My race just doesn’t have a clue who they are and have, in terms of generality, become a race of replicated Thomas Sowells, or more likely Thomas Sowell was simply permitted to be the latest mind-fucked Alkebulan admitted into the Lord’s choir, just as the rest of us Alkebulans gained our superiority the day after Bacon’s rebellion lulled us against those we had just been fighting side-by-side with.

And we, until we realize it, are stuck with our own self-diminishment that lead us to go into a supermarket and shoot closer cousins to us than those who raped our mommas six thousand years ago.

No, the educational system won't teach you…you’re going to have to learn for yourself.