I consider myself very blessed to have grown up in an era when the global political consciousness of Black people was much keener than it appears, to me, to be today. There was a prevalent consciousness among the leadership and the general population that it was everyone’s responsibility to end discrimination, resist marginalization and improve opportunities for the race.
In fact we had “race men and women” in our midst, and the title was a sort of badge of honor. Jim Crow had to go. During World War II, I remember my mother returning home from the beauty parlor, proudly displaying the double “V” for victory hair style. The double stood for victory at home and victory abroad. We could be patriotic citizens and do so without sacrificing the interests and integrity of our own community interests.
The essential contributions that young Black men and women who lived in very different parts of a world dominated by notions of White supremacy and White skinned privilege were becoming patently clear. An alliance formed by this experience and association between Black people from the United States, Africa and the Caribbean was the seed bed for what eventually would evolve into a Pan African Consciousness. Before long, this spirit was reciting expectations and demands for post war racial justice and the end to the systemic racial abuses being universally experienced by Black people.
It was a time when our conscious response to injustice was much less patient and arguably much less accommodating than it has become over time.
I remember that the brutal murder of Emmett Till, in 1955, evoked more outrage and concern among all strata of Black folk than the current pattern of near daily killings of Black people by police and assorted vigilantes evokes today. Have we become so successful until we are numbed and desensitized by the routine injustices that currently frame Black life? Perhaps the better question is whether we have become so sensitized to the injustice encountered in our quest for progress until we have forgotten the importance of preserving the highest regard for “our collective success.”
Recently, I watched, on television, the first African American President of the United States and a public celebrity laugh at an “N-word” joke while participating in a major media event that was given worldwide exposure. I read news stories of the leaders of African nations ceremoniously burning hundreds of millions of dollars of ivory and rhino horn as a statement regarding the evils of poaching. The greater evil for me was that there was no accompanying concern recited for the development of plans to improve their economies and eliminate poverty and thus creating a life line as an alternative to poaching. So the impression stands that the elephant and the rhinoceros are more important than the existence of the creation and maintenance of an opportunity structure to sustain the life and development of our people.
That experience was followed by the story of the organization and the successful effort to fly lions from South America to South Africa where the lions would be maintained in preserves and thus escape the terrible conditions of their previous zoo environment. While the lion is getting all the attention, there are student demonstrations and protests going on in South Africa, where students are protesting to have access to educational opportunities that will enable them to led meaningful 21st century lives. This is not the old South Africa; this is “our South Africa.”
