Their Fault, My Responsibility
Often times when we look back on our lives, we will identify certain experiences of pain and trauma. Even more often, we will find that those experiences were out of our control and in turn the pain and trauma that we endured was not our fault. We can look at ourselves as a community and say the same. We did not choose to be molested, assaulted, or beaten. We did not choose to watch our loved ones be molested, assaulted, or beaten either. We did not choose for our parents to get so caught up in work that they would leave us with whoever, whenever, and wherever they could find someone to keep an eye on us while they earned a living. It was no choice of ours to lose our brothers, sisters, mothers, or our fathers. I'm all but certain that we would have elected to keep our aunties, uncles, grandmas, and grandpas too.
As a people, we would have chosen to remain free from tyranny, brutality, and oppression. We would have never willingly decided to diminish our humanity in the eyes of other races and demographics of people, causing them to see us as no more than servants to this cause or the next. I have faith that each and every individual is born into the world with the most purest of hearts, minds, and spirits. I believe that if we were all allowed, that we would choose what is truly best for ourselves and in turn what is best for our neighbors. Because we are asked to be other than ourselves and even moreso conditioned to be, it is not our fault that we say things that are impure, we should not take the blame for the art created for our entertainment, and we should take no fault in the way that society was when we were born into it.
Whether we look at our individual or our collective condition, we would benefit from taking responsibility for the rectification of our condition. Your mother and father may have already shown the same resistance to having certain conversations about mistakes that they have made throughout your minority or underage stages. While I disagree that they should be resistant, I would be a fool to lead you to believe that they have no right to be. After all, our parents were born into a condition, asked to be other than themselves in order to fit the norm, and then they had you before they could crack the code. I make no excuses for this parent or the next, the DeadBeat Mom/Dad or the Mother/Father that influenced Parental Alienation. What I will say is this, there is a connection between the traumas that we faced as individuals and the traumas that we face in the Black Community.
Do you think that it is coincidental that many Black Parents gave their children very similar experiences? I don't. Reason being, our parents lived through very similar conditions to the ones that they imposed onto us. I believe that the belt as a disciplinary tool is associated with a deeply rooted connection to the whips that we were disciplined with throughout slavery. I believe that our affinity for cheaper goods and unhealthier foods are tied in matrimony with us being forced to eat scraps during slavery and even the times that our communities were reduced to rubble after White Americans dropped bombs on us. I am under the impression that none of those things are our communities' doing. I know history good and well, and I know that much of what we have endured has stemmed from behaviors perpetuated by other demographics. We can discuss "Black On Black" crime another time, and I can provide information as it pertains to how the direction of what is called a gang today was rerouted.
Digressing back to the main focus. Whose responsibility is it for us to rectify our traumas as individuals? If Moms and Pops ain't coming to do the job, then who? If we have been voting, marching, and crying out for years, then whose responsibility is it truly for us to rectify our condition and our position on this planet? If you answered mine, me, and ours, then we are on the same page. We should embrace our opportunities to make things right within ourselves and for ourselves as well. I realize that Justice has been an outcry in our community as well. So i'll say this, there are two different forms of justice just as their are two different forms of forgiveness. You can provide yourself forgiveness for what you put yourself through, and you can also forgive others for their transgressions against you as well. In turn, you can seek justice from your transgressors, and you can seek justice from yourself. Sometimes we have to accept that the apology is not coming and that we must provide reparations to ourselves. Our transgressors refusal to make amends with us should never influence us to refuse ourselves amends. Not for what we have caused ourselves, or for what others have caused.
We have the opportunity to take control of the justice system within and amongst ourselves and provide for ourselves everything that we have ever asked of our transgressors and then some. We can seek counseling and therapy, and we can also seek a foreign alliance for ourselves as the Black Community. Counseling and therapy provides us an opportunity to engage in a partnership with someone who is separate and also foreign to our pain and trauma and a foreign partner for Black Americans will allow us to have realistic expectations of those that we seek assistance from. White America has shown that she has no desire as a collective to agree to terms that would allow us a true seat at the table through equitable educational, employment, and residential opportunities.
At this point in our sojourn here in this nation, it is unrealistic to believe that there is a desire to do right by us. Just as your mother, father, sister, or brother may have failed to do right by you by providing a simple apology and even sometimes not sticking up for you when it counted. It is unrealistic for us to believe that we have time to wait for them to do right by us before we do right by ourselves. We should seek counseling and peer support from those who have experienced a similar treatment, and the Black Community should seek an ally that is other than one that benefits from our dysfunction.
These are my ideas on how to be accountable for my own healing.
That's That, That's Facts. And Remember My People, We Didn't Come To Be Defeated.
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