Do you know where you live? You see, we have not been hoodwinked, bamboozled… we hoodwinked and bamboozled ourselves Black people!

In case you forgot:

This time the politicians gathered together and decided to take back their majority interests in a country becoming much more like gumbo than chowder in the great American melting pot… Plymouth Rock didn’t land on us, we forgot about it. We forgot that while America is Apple pie, baseball, democracy, and freedom… it is also chitlins and Jim Crow caught a nigger by the toe bondage meets a grabbing pu**y President and kids in dog cages. It is racism, sexism, inhumanity, and rape culture. The vestiges of slavery. Freedom for some.

It’s a tale as old as time, WE know all too well. Yet we didn’t exercise all of our rights, the real dream and the hope of slaves. Instead we sat out of the ultimate game, the greatest show on Earth, the Great American race… and kept our votes like movie tickets from our first date, locked away, too precious to see the light of day. The Black vote declined 7% in the 2016 Presidential election, the one with the greatest potential impact. 765,000 LESS Black people voted in 2016 than 2012. (1) That is an outrage!

It was the worst of times. And we set it in motion, the more you pledged you wouldn’t vote, the higher the stakes got. You think they don’t care about us, they do, but only in respect to how low they will go to beat us at a game they were sure they rigged against us. Slavery, capitalism, gerrymandering, elections, the electoral college, and everything in between was a part of the big plan put into place to strengthen the big lie. Everything their ancestors learned, they learned at the feet of Egyptians. Pythagoras, Thales, Socrates, Plato, Euclid, and Homer… all studied under Egyptian priests. Imhotep, an Egyptian architect, poet, mathematician, and astronomer was in fact one of the first philosophers and helped construct the pyramids based on mathematical formulas in 27B.C., long before Greece was thought of.  The underlying systems in this country are a big FU to that history. You dimply cannot be great if you are fighting to live, learn, eat, and have a drink of water. It was political prohibition. And the only way to dismantle it is to use the greatest tool of political power, the vote.

It was like we didn’t believe him. Like he was pulling our coattails.

“…they’re sending…drugs and rapists.” (Mexico)

“…she got schlonged.” (Clinton when beat by President Obama)

“…torture works…”

“The only card she has is the woman card.”

“Look at my African-American here!”

“He founded Isis” (regarding President Barack Obama)

“You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs…I will get over 95 percent of the African-American vote”

Why didn’t we believe him?

Our “representational government” has been 80% white, 80% male, and 92% Christian since 2015. (2) Furthermore that top 2% we hear about, well 66% of Senators were in the top 2% and 41% of Representatives in 2012. (3) The American Dream… that whole premise was a fallacy. Come here and be all you can be… not.  While a few of us have broken the code and learned the secret password, we don’t broadcast it because we too have been brainwashed to think elevation is for the few and not the many. Wealth for the privileged is a birthright that buys them a position. We have to work for ours, 10 times harder. Systematic oppression is written into the laws. The only way to change those laws is to put people in office who truly represent your interests. Vote.

We failed.

So in a little over 500 days, we have watched a man ban groups of people from entry, break down Unions, withdraw from the UN, set in motion a plan to get rid of key government agencies, promote HBCUs (hahahaha…. he wants us out of State colleges and universities and especially Ivy League institutions), and allowing companies to hire H1-B non immigrant workers with less red tape, blurred the lines between church and state. He will get a chance to nominate two Supreme Court judges in under two years, setting off a plan to build a moat around Ruth Bader Ginsburg filled with the fountain of youth… oh the Supreme Court. In just a few weeks they have set out to reinstitute the travel ban, opened all your cell phone data to police, crippled labor unions, set in motion an overturning of Roe v Wade, and allowed voter suppression and gerrymandering that disproportionately affect people of color. Yep… all of that!

So where do we go from here… I don’t know. We fix the Democratic Party? We help as many of us excel as possible? We EACH register to vote, and vote every single time? We build for our kids so they in turn build for their own? We claim our worth in a system that constantly claims us unworthy? We stop trying to mimic and we live in our truth? We learn from others and history so we don’t repeat it? I don’t have all the answers but I know this to be true: we are here!! Texas isn’t gonna succeed and give us our own state. We aren’t all going back to Africa, or even to Canada. We have to participate in the process, or we shouldn’t be surprised when there is an Ofdonald, wearing nun wings, Melania is in teal with a tight chignon and dreadful disposition, and Gilead is real life.

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References

1. Pew Research, 2017.
2. The Washington Post, 2015.
3. CBS News, 2012.