Friday, November 2, 2018

Salute the flag, sing the national anthem, stop complaining, and appreciate our kindness


The American flag

The Star Spangled Banner

Oh, say, can you see by the dawns early light,
What so proudly we hail'd at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thro' the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watch'd, were so gallantly streaming?

And the star spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!


A path was chosen for White folks by White males who controlled all seats of power in the 
U. S. government. From the start, Africans did not choose their path in life. It was chosen for them by a White dominated government, and local KKK terrorists, especially in southern states. Blacks are expected to follow the rules, and not deviate from their designated path without permission from White people.

Whenever African Americans depart from their chosen path, rightfully protesting against injustices and discrimination piled on their backs like sacks of cotton 24/7, White folks tend to write them off as a societal nuance. Collectively. They have no reason to complain or be angry, they say. Black folks cannot conceal who they are. They have to prepare for whatever troubles that comes their way. They are easy targets. Their skin tones greatly depreciates their value, their right to respect, and their humanness.

Nat Turner, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Black Lives Matter, Congressman John Lewis, Medgar Evers, Rosa Parks, Rev. Al Sharpton, and thousands more civil rights activists carry on their backs cotton sacks filled with mistreatment of African Americans. The desire for basic human rights goes all the way back to slavery, a time when helpless Africans in a strange land could not protest the inhospitable environment they were thrown into.

Black insurrectionists like Nat Turner understood this unnatural ownership of another human being. Called the “Nat Turner Rebellion” by historians and writers, Nat Turner was a slave, who in 1831, led a short insurrection against slave owners in South Hampton County, Virginia. Supposedly he and a number of slaves killed over 50 Whites in the county. Turner’s co-conspirators were caught and hanged. Turner managed to escape, but was caught and hanged. Turner’s deadly rebellion began with him killing his slave master and his wife. Turner deviated from his assigned path in a society that did not want him; would not accept him.

Now is not the right time

White folks have always talked with twisted tongues in reference to African Americans. Politicians said of the civil rights movement, “Now is not the right time.” Civil right activists were told that Black folks need to wait. They need to be patient. They would get their freedom at the right time. Had King listened to this bullshit Black folks would still be patiently waiting for freedom to wander into their neighborhoods, inviting them to register and vote. Civil rights would have remained packaged, sealed, and undelivered.
Jesse Jackson was told when he decided to run for president, “Now is not the right time”. He asked: “If not now, when”? Jackson ran for president in 1984 and 1988.  White folks rejected him because of his skin color and marching for civil rights. They called him a race baiter and a race hustler. They said even worse things about Al Sharpton when he ran for president.
Black and White politicians told Senator Barack Obama “now is not the right time” for a Black man to run for president of the United States. They felt he did not have a chance to win. It was best that he step aside and let one of his White opponents claim the prize. On the other hands, the time was certainly right for African Americans to get shot to death, harassed, stopped and frisked, and beat by White cops.
Martin Luther King said: “The daily life of the Negro is still lived in the basement of the Great Society. He is still at the bottom despite the few who have penetrated to slightly higher levels. Even where the door has been forced partially open, mobility for the Negro is still sharply restricted. There is often no bottom at which to start, and when there is, there is almost always no room at the top”.

Attempted banning of freed slaves

With the election of Donald Trump as president of the U.S., racism, and white supremacy have been repopularized. Calling cops on Black men, women and children is also common again, like during the era of “Black Codes”, created to keep newly emancipated slaves in their place.
Today, African Americans who have greatly veered from their designated path, can live in any section of town they can afford. But Whites cannot accept them invading “their” segregated, peaceful suburbs, no matter how famous or wealthy. Blacks moving into these upscale neighborhoods destroys all of those perpetrated myths. For instance: Black folks are on welfare, their children are fatherless, they are drug addicts and thieves, lazy, irresponsible, uneducated, and unemployed by choice.  They have no ambition to achieve.
Noted race baiter Republican Pat Buchanan says Black folks are not grateful enough to White folks. He wrote in 2008: “First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. . . 600,000 black people brought here from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 10 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.
“Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold millions have been spent since the ‘60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits, and poverty programs designed to bring the African American community into the mainstream. We hear the grievance. Where is the gratitude”?
Centuries earlier the newly elected governor of California, Peter Burnett, was more profound that Buchanan. The state’s first governor wanted California to be an all-White state. He did not want free Blacks coming to California, messing up his dream, colorizing his state. 
He said, addressing legislators: “It could be no favor and no kindness, to permit [free blacks] to settle in the state; while it would be a most serious injury to us.  . . . Had they been born here, and had acquired rights in consequence, I should not recommend any measures to expel them 
. . . the object is to keep them out”.
According to the History Channel, Burnett was not alone in “his vision of a California that banned Black people. Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, California citizens and legislators fought to insure that free Black people would be prohibited from immigrating to or living in California. And though their efforts eventually failed, they reflected this fear and racism faced by Black people in the American West”.
Newly emancipated slaves had to carry on their backs the burdens of rejection and isolation. They had no other point of reference, or no instructional how-to-books.
Donald Trump wants to ban all immigrants that are not of European descent. “Others” are deemed life’s scum crawling out of Central America, the Middle East and African countries for the sole purpose of destroying America. He called African countries “shitholes”. Trump said he preferred that people from Norway immigrate to America.

Stand for the flag and national anthem 
and be grateful to White Americans

White folks want all Black folks to stand, look patriotic, salute the flag, sing or mumble the Star Spangled Banner, because they do not have the right not to. Blacks should be grateful, catapulting fear and bigotry to a respected place in society. African Americans should not complain if they do not get a clear shot at achieving the American Dream.  
And when they are shouted down and told by White folks: “America is ours! We built it! Go back where you belong!” Black folks should not get angry at these God loving, country loving, flag waving, anthem singing folks. Their Christianity may be temporary out of order. You know . . .  like toilets. They get a little cranky when God is slow answering their calls. They want Him to tell Black folks to stop protesting, taking a knee and disrespecting the flag and America. Bless their patriotic hearts.
Accused by Fox talking heads of not being grateful to America for allowing him to earn millions of dollars playing football, Colin Kaepernick explains his reason for taking a knee rather than salute the flag, or stand for the national anthem. He made the decision in 2016.  His knees and heart were weighed down by a cotton sack filled with inequality, police brutality and discrimination. He dared not follow the long ago designated path for Black folks.
Kaepernick said, “I’m not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses Black people and people of color. To me this is bigger than football, and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street, and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder”.
Kaepernick related a story that tells of his a personal run-in with police. “One of my roommates was moving out of a house in college, and because we were the only Black people in the neighborhood, the cops got called, and all of us had guns drawn on us. I mean come in the house without knocking, guns drawn on one of my roommates. So I have experienced [mistreatment]. People close to me have experienced this”. (Slate magazine, 2016) 
The late 1960s civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer is noted for saying: “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired”. Hamer was burdened with carrying on her back the enslavement of Black slaves who never realized human or political power. They dreamed of freedom but had no way of acquiring it.
Ninety-nine years after Abe Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, Hamer dug her fingernails into the flesh of a Texas President Lyndon Baines Johnson. He did not want Black folks to be seated as delegates alongside the segregated delegation at the Democratic National Convention in 1964. Johnson did not want to buck White southerners who could hurt him politically.
Hamer and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee were in no mood for governmental rejection. A White flag saluting, national anthem mumbling president and a state of southern White folks were telling Black folks now is not your time to be recognized as citizens of the United States. We will give you permission when the time is right. Do not deviate from your designated path.

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