The Importance of Salvaging the African American Legacy (1998 hits)
by: Samori Swygert
It’s imperative that we pick up the baton and carry the torch that was carried by our ancestors. Our posterity and future is completely dependent on what we do now. Our elders are dying, and our legacy, heritage, and tradition is dying with them.
Many people ask, “why does a lot of your writing revolve around Afrocentricity?”. First, the answer is because we need the most help right now. Secondly, all other cultures embrace all their cultural heritage without pushback from their own.
Dr. Claud Anderson says, “you can walk down the street of Chinatown, Little Italy, and Little Havana”. We can walk by synagogues and yeshivas. You can see America’s traditional representation by schools like: George Washington University, American University, or go to Manhattan and shop along Avenue of the Americas, or visit the Jefferson Memorial, Columbus Circle, the Washington Monument, see Mount Rushmore, Kennedy Space Center, visit the Lincoln Theatre, open an account with Bank of America, and we still have sections that fly the confederate flag with pride. I applaud these other cultures for the protection and preservation of their legacy, because you are supposed to!
What are we leaving as evidence for African Americans, and what will we do to foster a continuum of African American excellence?
Our communities and institutions are in disarray and disrepair. The important thing to remember is, this can be fixed! Why would any other race help us, if we are not actively trying to improve and ameliorate our situation?
President Barack Obama encouraged us to pull ourselves up by the bootstraps, and to stop moaning and groaning. This is why I assert an African American stance in my writings. Let me be clear! I’m not talking about developing racism, and hatred. This is about repairing, rehabilitation, and restoration.
My answer is simple and a reiteration of many that have gone before me. We must continue the focus on education with application, foster innovation, and have cultural loyalty. Our kids must focus on nothing else but learning and application.
The following are my reasons for this stance. We complained about the verdict of the Trayvon Martin case, and how officers are acquitted of offenses in cases like Rodney King, Oscar Grant, and countless other court cases. These illustrate the necessity of more African Americans in law school. This ensures that we have equal representation with our judges, defense and prosecuting attorneys. We also saw the makeup of the Zimmerman jury pool. This is why we need to avoid prison because we need more eligible blacks to preside on the jury of our peers. We’ve also seen how a Pennsylvania judge got busted for taking financial deals to railroad black defendants to jail.
Our children need education to fill positions in banking, real estate, and finance. This ensures that banking institutions are not conducting biased business and housing loan denials to qualified African Americans. This reassures fair hiring is being practiced. We’ve witnessed Bank of America being fined $ 2 million dollars for discriminatory hiring practices that resulted in the denial of over 1000 qualified African American job applicants.
We need our children to enter the political arena. The more mayors, governors, senators, representatives, supreme court justices, and etc, potentially increases the representation of our concerns and presence in the American political system. We need blacks that can filibuster the same way Ran Paul can for hours on end. We need influential black lobbyist and watchdog groups that can keep the community abreast of political issues of grave concern. This is best illustrated by laws like Stop and Frisk, cumbersome Voter ID laws, striking down sections of the Voting Rights act, the rolling back of Affirmative Action, and even the accessibility of funds for HBCUs. Yes, we need more African American politicians!
Our children need to continue seeking degrees in education. School after school is being closed all across America. The emergence of charter schools are ubiquitous. This implies that we need more African Americans as teachers, principals, chancellors, superintendents, and school board personnel. Dr. Juwanza Kunjufu has pointed out in several studies that more effective learning occurs when the student and teacher share the same ethnicity.
There are teachers of various ethnicities that are excellent, because I’ve had some in my educational experience. However, I feel that a more genuine interest is innately exhibited when a teacher can see themselves in the students they instruct.
A good movie to watch and serve as an illustration is the Dead Poets Society. You can see the passion Robin Williams’ character exudes in the education of his students. You can also see that there was no black child in that movie either! Moreover, you can see how positively this type of educational setting was received, because it won as Best Film and Best Screenplay in the USA and the UK. This illustrates how white America viewed culturally devoted educational instruction as positive. African American teachers may be more understanding of particular behaviors, whereas teachers of other ethnicities may attribute a child behavior to mental disorders and recommend a psych evaluation for your child.
We need more African Americans in the healthcare field. How would you fill knowing that your doctor is examining you with biased eyes? Of course not all physicians are bigots, but you would be a liar and fool to say there are none, when there are still open KKK rallies, Neo Nazis, and Skinheads. There is a bit more comfort in knowing that ideally your physician, nurse, pharmacist, and other healthcare practitioner is providing the best care possible uninfluenced by skin color. We also need more African Americans in the science and research fields, to produce more data and research on how new drugs and procedures work on our genotype and physiology. I won’t go into how the Tuskegee experiment was conjured.
Lastly, we need to control our entertainment. Once we gain control of entertainment, we will be navigating to a brighter future. This guarantees proper and positive representation in the media. Our commercials will have equal representation and advertising of our own businesses. The business owners decide upon the number and type of actors in their commercials and movies. We can control our image and depiction as movie characters, and control the content of our music. This creates positive imagery for our children to emulate and seek higher heights.
If America is so upset, tired, and concerned about the poor, uneducated, welfare, thug-like, baby momma blacks, then this is all the more reason to support salvaging a positive African American Legacy. This is all the reason bigots shouldn’t sabotage our decision to improve ourselves unless they want to see us fail. The more positively independent we become, the less we are the perceived burden. I feel it is timely and appropriate that we do for self and salvage our legacy via these means. What do you think?
