When Haji Malcolm is asked the question, “What are Black people to wake up to?” he replies in summary that they are to “wake up to their humanity, to their own worth and to their heritage”. This means to wake up in depthful and life-enhancing ways to our status as bearers of dignity and divinity, worthy of the highest respect; to the ancient and instructive history and creative culture which grounds and defines us; and to the need to continue to struggle righteously and relentlessly to create and sustain conditions of freedom and flourishing that enable us to come into the fullness of our African and human selves. It is this remembrance and rightful representation of critical consciousness, the radical awareness of being woke, that the right-wing and its open and complicit supporters, handmaidens and hirelings have sought to distort, discredit and destroy. And it is a legacy we must lift up, live, defend and advance in the most ethical, effective and expansive ways in the inte
If we are to rightfully remember Min. Malcolm, we must seriously grasp and practice what he so meticulously taught us about valuing our lives, our work and our struggle. Here I use grasp to mean take in hand and heart his legacy, study and understand it, and hold it firmly as a valuable heritage and framework for continuing forward.
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Min. Malcolm cites the police violence approved by the White public; the educational system that savages the mind and breaks the spirit of our children and youth; the political system that suppresses our voice and vote; the media that distorts and criminalizes our identity and interests; an economy that exploits and deprives us of a life of dignity and decency; and the churches which abandon their moral responsibility to support and ally in radical struggle with the downtrodden, poor and disempowered. He speaks too of not only the domestic problem and oppression posed by racism, but also its reach abroad as imperialism and colonialism and the damage and devastation this imposes on the lives and lands of the people, whether in brutally occupied Haiti, Palestine or Uighur land (Xijiang) in China.
Reaffirming Our Africanness and Radical Tradition, 1960s: Liberation Coming From a Black Thing
By Dr. Maulana Karenga
Dr. Maulana Karenga (File Photo)
Part I. The Reaffirmation of the 1960s stands, after the Classical Period of Kemetic civilization and the Holocaust of Enslavement, as a third modal or decisive and defining period in our history. This period of our most ancient and ongoing history was a reaffirmation of our commitment to our Africanness and our radical tradition, that is to say, our liberation tradition. It was a self-conscious struggle to be ourselves and to free ourselves. We strove and struggled to be our beautiful Black selves without doubt and degradation, without restriction, constraint, penalty or oppression. And we struggled to free ourselves internally and externally from White racist oppression.