Extemporaneous musings, occasionally poetic, about life in its richly varied dimensions, especially as relates to history, theology, law, literature, science, by one who is an attorney, ordained minister, historian, writer, and African American.
Wednesday, January 20, 2016
MOCKING ASCRIPTIONS
MOCKING ASCRIPTIONS
There is no black government in the United States of America , yet one is ascribed to us implicitly .
There is no black economy in America , yet one is ascribed to us, tacitly.
There is no one black church in America, yet one is ascribed to us, theologically.
There is no black education in America , but it is ascribed to us, scholastically .
These ascriptions of government, of economy, church, and education , are used to mock us by omission.
They are straw horses, scarecrows, false representations.
We are involuntary Americans, who were dragged here, sold as slaves; then, by plebiscite of the whites, we were made "citizens" here by ratification of the 13th and 14th Amendments to the United States Constitution.
These acts all occurred before we were given the power to deliberate upon them, much less to vote upon them, under the 15th Amendment .
Whenever we have dutifully tried to establish governments, economies, churches or education, as we were repeatedly forced to do to survive, and to advance as human beings, whether in so-called "Contraband Camps," during the Civil War; or in separate-but-equal communities thereafter, our efforts were frustrated by laws or by the terrorist destruction occasioned by scofflaw cops or by crazed lynch mobs, who were immune from suit, and/or exempted by their "whiteness" from prosecution.
Yet, these illusory ascriptions remain to mock us, in news stories, in political debates, in funded studies, all of such being mythological, but treated as real!
The saddest part of all is that all that we ever really wanted to be was Americans in fact, in law, indeed. When oh when?