By Salim Muwakkil
The historical victims of slavery’s legacy can’t reverse the process that plundered our collective wealth to enrich our captors (and their lineage) AND that socialized us for subservience. But we can alter it enough to ensure our progeny is less debilitated by those historical deprivations.
The dynamic necessary for that alteration requires a dispersal of resources capable of relieving the precarities of survival that chronically plague slavery’s children; precarities based on a plundered past.
Medical statistics charting our precarious life-spans, from obstetricians to gerontologists, are readily available; we are chronically closer to death. Economic and incarceration statistics chart even wider disparities and a bleaker reality.
We’re lodged so solidly into the bottom caste, even our cultural brilliance has failed to extricate us. Sure, we’ve produced amazing anomalies and they’ve motivated us with notions that “we too can make it ...” But our collective condition has failed to keep pace with the Oprahs, the Byron Allens, Jay-Zs, the Tyler Perrys, Robert Smiths, David Stewards, etc. Those successes may beguile and inspire us, but they have little impact on the structural dynamics that keep us perennially encased in the bottom caste.
Always keep in mind, no other ethnicity has endured (and been shaped by) centuries of enslavement. We've been damaged by a history burdened by a chronic lack of resources and crippled by accrued disadvantages that plundered our potential by preventing not only the accumulation of economic capital but also of the cultural capital necessary for social success. That double plunder is what leaves many of our communities suffering from a chronic lack of resources.
This absence of resources engenders predatory behavior unless mediated by culture. But the cultural coherence once supplied by the agrarian collectivism of the 'Negro Church' (what some might call a counterfeit capital) has faded into the 'analogue' past and no compelling, encompassing successor has arrived (the NOI seeks to fill that void, but resistance is strong); the A.I. revolution is likely to sharpen survivals edge, narrowing the space to reap cultural capital, hampering our recovery. I wish I could chart alternative destinations, but the most promising road leads directly to reparations.
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