FOREVER MINE

The O'Jays - Forever Mine - YouTube The O'Jays - Forever Mine - YouTube "FOREVER MINE " The African American experience has usually been viewed as averse to the interests of African peoples , because of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the near-extermination of many indigenous peoples already here. For those African people, our amazingly adaptable forbears who were directly affected by slavery's terrorism, displacement, or death, there can be little doubt about its perversion, subversion, aversion . But there was also a "conversion" factor to consider. For from many tribes of Africans with thousands of tongues, there are now fifty million African Americans with one tongue, English, the global lingual Franca . These same Africans, now African Americans, since 1865, have nobly contributed to the founding and sustentation of the United States of America, a global super powered empire, unlike any other people! But for Africans, there would be, there could not have been, United States of America. We cleared the land. We were its free, 265 years of labor, enslaved African-powered- engine that built the homes, roads, railroads . We planted, tended, harvested , threshed, winnowed, baled, loaded the crops of tobacco, corn, wheat , rice, indigo, cotton. We are implied in Article I, Section 2 of the United States Constitution as "3/5s," after having been totally edited out of the "Declaration of Independence." That was progress! We are the primordial bloodstream of America. Not just in it; we are it! Africans look at us with pride and wonder, as they should; for we are they and they are we sanguinely. As does Europe view us sanguinely going back to its prehistory into its earlier Greek, Macedonian, Roman, Constantinople mythology, rituals, religious adaptations of the African. The upshot is that nature updates itself, naturally, divinely , continuously, mysteriously . By virtue of which we African Americans are the "new creatures" advertised, foretold in the Bible. I say these things with all due respect to, for all the other creeds, our global kindred, genealogical, archaeological, epistemological fruit, who are not mentioned here. We love you all, too, with the same love of our lord and savior Jesus Christ's "Sermon on the Mount." As our culturally iconic "O'Jays" have now sung you are "forever mine!"