By Birgit Mondesir
I’m not here to intellectualize the conditions under which this country was founded, formed and still exist. As my sister Iyanla Vanzant so appropriately said, “I’m here to call a thing, a thing!”
Juneteenth, June 19, 1865, the day white people could no longer keep our emancipation a secret, should be memorialized as Emancipation Day for all Americans, and assigned at least the same importance as the 4th of July. However, most white people, and some Black people, have never even heard of Juneteenth, until now.
That’s because the history of America has been usurped and arrested, much like the lives of its black people. Shame is the silencer of truth and the distortion of history. Shame diminishes both the victim and the victimizer, so you won’t readily find it in our textbooks. Now consider, that 155 years after finally emancipating the last slaves, we’re faced with someone, who in the midst of a pandemic, was literally rallying his base of white supremacists, and the ignorant of all races, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 19th, 2020, until recently changed. It begs the question, why Tulsa and why on this day? Let me help you understand.
In 1921, the Greenwood District of Tulsa, OK was the sight of the worst domestic terrorist acts, directed against black people, after America’s failed reconstruction, following the Civil War. Greenwood was a place where black people had actually managed to build a thriving town of black businesses and black professionals in a self-sufficient society of prosperity and growing wealth. Booker T. Washington even called it The Black Wall Street. So, what did white supremacist people do? They burned the entire town to the ground, a massacre of over 300 descendants of slaves, destroying black lives, families and property. It left thousands homeless, and survivors to tell the story of black bodies put on trains and dumped off bridges into the Arkansas River or tossed into mass graves.
Now juxtapose these events with the proposed rally, on the date of the emancipation of enslaved black people, and it lays bare the oxymoron of black people in America. There is no mistaking the slap in the collective faces of African Amer- icans. It’s particularly painful, given the present revolution, of what it means to be black in America. Let’s call a thing, a thing!
Still, the misguided and delusional say, “all lives matter,” in a dismissive attempt to ignore the truth.
Did you know that genocide and apartheid had a welcomed seat at the American table? We just called it Tulsa, OK, Rosewood, Florida, and The Great Migration that’s when millions of Blacks fled the South from 1915-1970, running from the domestic terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan. And yes, they too are still here, now better known as nationalists. What better way to legitimize evil, than equate it with patriotism. Just calling a thing, a thing!
If all lives matter, black people would not been enslaved, sold, beaten, lynched, constitutionally considered threefifths human, marginalized and segregated. We’ve been denied access to proper education, housing, jobs, ownership and healthcare, resulting in disproportionate deaths, as this pandemic so clearly demonstrates. Conservatively speaking, at least 16 generations of wealth and prosperity have been irreversibly stolen. If all lives matter, black people would not continue to be incarcerated for profit as a solution to all that ails us. If all lives matter, we would not be sacrificed to drug epidemics that saturate our neighborhoods. Yet, when the same drug epidemic hit white communities, efforts are immediately instituted to rehabilitate “a social illness,” instead of the jail time routinely received by Blacks. Let’s just call a thing, a thing!
Black children in devalued, treated more harshly for the same offenses as white children, resulting in higher expulsion and suspensions rates, filling the school-to-prison pipeline. Did you know that where you live often determines the outcome of your life, not your ability or content of your character? That’s because the education of children in America is directly tied to wealth. Rich neighborhood, rich school. Poor neighborhood, poor school. How can America educate its children in such an inequitable way? Yet we do, because more often than not, poor children are disproportionately Black and Brown. Read about Bordentown, an elite school for Black children, which was actually later converted into a juvenile facility, for Black children. Do all lives really matter?
When Colin Kaepernick – I’ll say his name, even if Roger Goodell in his hypocrisy did not Colin Kaepernick! When he took a knee during the national anthem to protest Black lives being lost to police brutality, someone called him a son of a bitch and vilified him and others, as un-American! This resulted in him being professionally ostracized and jobless. What unadulterated arrogance and audacity, to imply that Black people don’t care about America!
To that person I say, ‘How dare you accuse black people of being the very thing you are?’ You, who have never fought for anything other than yourself! Black folks fought for America when we weren’t even considered Americans! We fought in the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, WWI & II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and every war since. We fought for America, even when we were segregated in order to do so. Have you heard of the Tuskegee Airmen? We fought for America, when we weren’t even allowed to vote.
This should all be the headline in our history books, but it’s not, because that history was written by those who controlled it; corrupted by those who refuse to acknowledge America’s sins against humanity. Instead, some Americans readily accept the ridiculous jabbering of a fool, instead of facing the truth. Black people are more American than the most American of us! We fight every day to be American. That’s why Black Lives Matter!
We fight the Amy Coopers, the Central Park poster child for the weaponization of white privilege; those who secretly feel that America only belongs to white people and use their privilege to determine the outcome for people of color. We hear her voice when we’re told, “so sorry we chose someone else for that job”; “oh, you just missed the criteria for that business loan” or “we just rented that apartment.
It’s voices like hers that tells Lebron James to “shut up and dribble,” undermining his intellect and reminding him of his place in this white world. Her kind often reverts to the “go back to where you came from” attack, just on the presumption that your skin is not white. You see, like any good DNA, the DNA of racism remains with us and manifest itself in very many ways. We have to shout “Black Lives Matters!” because America tries to tell us every day that we don’t. Just calling a thing, a thing!
Now let’s talk racism and religion. America prides itself on being a God-fearing nation. “One nation under God” and “in God we trust.” Do you know that the worst atrocities have been committed in the name of religion? Almost every form of racial separatists will point to a holy book for validation of their abomination. So, to Evangelicals, who have highjacked the word of God in support of an idiot who uses the bible as a prop for his shameless, narcissistic, single-minded, self-promotion, know this… Gal 6:7 says “be not deceived, God is not mocked; For whatsoever a man soweth, that he also reaps.” Here’s another, just for free: Proverbs 1 says: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction. Out in the open, wisdom calls aloud, she raises her voice in the public square; on top of the wall she cries out, at the city gate she makes her speech: How long will you who are simple, love your simple ways? How long, will mockers delight in mockery, and fools hate knowledge? Preach that to your followers and stop misleading God’s people to their own demise.
To some politicians who have led their constituents to follow the Pied Piper like rats into the sea, there is a reckoning for you, too, and it goes far beyond a vote suppressed. You’re more concerned with keeping Americans armed with guns than with knowledge. Some have completely abandoned your duties, praising the emperor in his new clothes, even as he stands ignorantly naked to the eyes of a child. This nation, and our position in the world, will be the ultimate sacrifice. We’ve heard time and again from those who actually have knowledge and wisdom, yet we close our eyes, ears, and mouths to the ways of truth, justice and equality. Just calling a thing, a thing!
In this new-found consciousness for Black lives lies our collective redemption. It’s time to unearth the truth, correct and relearn our history, shed the hypocrisy and shame, make restoration, restitution and reparations for every institutional atrocity. It’s past time to tear down those confederate monuments of American genocide. As Prof. Britney Cooper of Rutgers University said, “they are not a heritage, they are a heritage of hatred.”
Can we ever truly be the United States of America. Will we “lift every voice and sing?” Can we “crown thy good with brotherhood.” Will we commit ourselves to “liberty and jus- tice for all?” Can this be a thing, that’s not just a thing?
Birgit Mondesir is a board member of the T. Thomas Fortune Foundation in Red Bank.
The article originally appeared in the June 25 – July 1, 2020 print edition of The Two River Times.
