"I pleaded with the group to abandon the Black Power slogan," King recounted. "It was my contention that a leader has to be concerned about the problems of semantics and not simply ignore the harmful connotations of his words." The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 1966 Bearing The Cross, pg.484.
I was thirteen years old in 1966 when the Reverend King spoke those words, and I certainly remember the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and it's out of control leader Stokely Carmichael -- object of the quote above. Anyone born after 1970 grew up in a world where colored people called themselves Black and were proud of it. In the previous three hundred and fifty years the word was used to describe a certain category of merchandise imported from Africa, considered by its purchaser as inferior to every other species of creatures on the face of this earth. Its only value was its usefulness as a tool for harsh labor. So for three hundred fifty years, when an Anglo-Saxon looked upon a woolly-headed, broad-nosed, broad-lipped, ebony-skinned being from the continent of Africa, the word Black was synonymous with nonhuman/slave, and it was certainly meant as an insult.
Stokely Carmichael convinced a lot of folks that it was good to be Black. Shortly thereafter in the years that followed, Black people also grew to embrace being called Niggers, Dogs, Bitches, and Shorties with equal pride.
With Black History month just around the corner, my previous two essays pretty much sum up the entire argument for ending the false ideology called Black Culture, masquerading as something to be lauded or proud of. Black History is American history. An entire generation of so-called Black teens are headed for an abyss, shackled by the negative, destructive forces of blackness.
The way out is in learning to break away from the group thought, and reprograming the heart and mind to embrace the dynamic individualism of the Higher Self. And exactly what is the Higher Self? The Reverend King summed it up perfectly with:
"I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."
The individual content of a human being's character, reveals much about the nature of their Higher Self. In this there can be no black, white, brown, yellow or green -- only service to self, or service to others with love.
