The Future of Blackness
by William Lowman
When the hunter tells the story the lion never wins. (African proverb)
In order to adequately explore our future as a people we must first look at the contemporary and historical contexts so as to provide a broad enough base for construction. Using the very broadest of brushes we will explore this story from the lion’s perspective. We must not fail to admit to a fair degree of irony when the lion telling this victorious story does so from the confines of the zoo. This ironic context serves to illustrate a key feature of the African survival thrust. A negative outcome can also be utilized as fuel for future positive experience. Never give up. (when people give you lemons make lemonade, if they throw stones use them to build your castle)
Currently African descendent people in America are connected by both culture, and technology to the rest of our people all over the globe. We are now traveling, communicating, and sharing cultural products back and forth as never before. As a result the last forty years has provided us with an unprecedented opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with one another. You can now find African Americans practicing traditional African religions, dance, drumming, and languages in all its many formations and transformations. We are relocating, and living with relocated Africans from around the globe. The idea of Blackness is expanding and finding roots back to Africa and the diaspora with great vigor and interest. This natural connection between us is helping to diffuse our unnatural tendency to look in White peoples faces / places for our own image. Contemporary Blackness is on the verge of great things if we don’t drop dead in the mean time. As has been the case for the last two thousand seasons we continue to be under great pressure from White peoples need to dominate the planet. While it is true to form that the White man is his own worse enemy; as the Last Poets said ‘Whitey is dying and his fucking ghost is killing us’. We have a critical need to establish as many divergent and viable lifestyles as possible if we are to survive as a people. No one religion, ideology, philosophy, or culture will get the job done. Diversity is good when your staring death in the face every day. African descendent people in America are in big trouble and this has not been news since we got off the first boat. We have developed a ‘trouble’ mind. We need to take what we have today and reframe it and make it work for our benefit. There is no need to recite the litany of horrors that confront us as a people; most of us can tick them off in our heads with very little effort. The challenge for Blackness today is to get back to talking shit. From a traditional African cultural perspective this is known as speaking things into existence. As a people we have always known that some people have the ability to make things happen with their words. Blackness in America has a long and beautiful history of oratorical greatness and transformation. Today we need to concentrate on ‘marketing’ Blackness for what it really represents; that is strength, tenacity, endurance, and intelligence. Any lesser group of people would have fallen over dead long ago given what we have endured. Blackness in America staring death in the face all along the way comes up with James Brown, Otis Redding, Koko Taylor, and Satchmo all saying ‘GOOD GOD I CAN’T HELP MYSELF’ Blackness is awesome. Blackness is what happens when you give Africans ‘lemons’ for five hundred years. Yeah we’re a little puckered around the lips at times, but damn it we’re still here. Not only are we still here we are producing multi-billion dollar worldwide industries out of practically nothing. Our creativity alone is worth billions if not trillions of dollars. John Kassandra said long ago we need to stop working with what’s wrong and start working with what’s right. Blackness has a lot going for it. If you look in the White man’s face / place for confirmation of that you won’t find it. Today Blackness needs an agent, a publicity agent, a shit talker extraordinaire. Now you know we have plenty of these people running around our community, many of them are unemployed and do this work for free already. While this may sound funny I am very serious. The time for whining and crying about what we suffer every day is over, not because it’s not true, but because we need to move to saying what we want to bring into existence in the world. We need to crank up our creative juices and get to work doing the JUJU that we do so well. I am not a Republican. I am not telling you that it’s going to be alright by and by. That Cracker is going to come for us regardless of what we do, I’m just saying lets get on with it. Bolekaja! (Come on down, let's fight.) What we produce has to look like, sound like and smell like us. Blackness as a brand has always been the most sought after, because it is the best.
PEACE
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