By Bashir Muhammad Akinyele
-Imamu Amiri Baraka
White supremacy and systematic racism left Black people as one of the most oppressed groups in America. Many Afrikan American leaders came forward to help liberate Black people from centuries of socioeconomic disparities caused by racial discrimination. During the high levels of the Black Liberation Movement in the 1950s to the early 1970s, Civil Rights and Black power became the world wide rallying call for social justice. We as Afrikan people in the United States have been in a protracted struggle to protect our blackness and our humanity ever since 1619. That is the year Black people arrived on the American shores in chains. Like millions of Afrikans before us, we were kidnapped in Afrika and forced into an European-American slave making system that totally disconnected us from our land, language, and culture for the sole purpose to be exploited by whiteness and capitalism. But Afrika’s children were not the only thing European
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Centuries of White supremacy and systematic racism left Black people in America in an oppressed condition. Many Afrikan American leaders came forward to help liberate Black people from racial discrimination. During the heightened conscious levels of the Black Liberation Movement in the 1950s to the early 1970s, Civil Rights and Black power became the worldwide rallying call for justice. We as Afrikan people in the United States have been left in a protracted struggle for blackness ever since 1619. In Afrika, and throughout the Afrikan diaspora, systematic racism made us believe that we have no history of being the very first people on the planet earth that initiated humanity, civilization, religion, and culture. But some Black leaders came forward to rebuild Afrikan Americans through Afrikan centered cultural empowerment and for Black political power. A respected Los Angeles, California community activist named Ronald McKinley Everett, an advocate for pan Afrikan self -det
By Bashir Muhammad Akinyele
“Culture is a weapon in the face of our enemies” – Amílcar Cabral (He was one of Afrika’s foremost anti-colonial leaders)
Some of us are still on the revolutionary path to liberated ourselves from White and Arab cultural domination. Therefore, some of us do not celebrate any European or Arab holidays. However, we know that many of us in the Afrikan world community celebrate European and Arab holidays. This is because of the centuries of slavery, colonialism, apartheid, and the invasions of the Afrkan world by non Afrikan people. Generations of Black people were forced to practice non Afrikan cultural holidays, such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, Halloween, and Valentine’s Day. Black life has been, and still is, culturally dominated by Europeans and Arabs in the new millennium.