Another Black History Month Drawing To A Close, What Exactly Has Changed?

Another Black History month is near its end, and the ques­tion from me is, what have we accom­plished as melanat­ed peo­ple, par­tic­u­lar­ly here in America?
Police the domes­tic army of white nation­al­ists con­tin­ue to injure and kill Black peo­ple with [increas­ing] feroc­i­ty, and the sys­tem is unwill­ing to hold them accountable. 
More impor­tant­ly, how­ev­er, is the sense of dor­man­cy that still engulfs the major­i­ty of Black America, a com­mu­ni­ty that seems to have not a care in the world out­side of fake wigs, fake hair and nails drink­ing, and las­civ­i­ous endeav­ors- a death spi­ral that is cen­tered on the desire to enter­tain and be entertained.
Whenever atroc­i­ties are com­mit­ted against our peo­ple, it is the minor­i­ty that takes to the streets while the major­i­ty sit and home and hope that the efforts of a few will bring change to the many; some don’t even hope at all.
Even with our best efforts, stay­ing informed, stay­ing alert, vot­ing, chal­leng­ing the sta­tus quo, elect­ing peo­ple we can bet­ter lob­by, there are no guar­an­tees that there will be pos­i­tive outcomes.
The fact is that even among those who say they are the least hos­tile, the least anti-black, lurks wolves in sheep­’s clothing.
Hello Joe Manchin & Kyrsten Senema, anti-black Democrats who were elect­ed on a pro­gres­sive agen­da but turned their backs on the agen­da to uphold white minor­i­ty rule.

Many African-Americans still sub­scribe to the irra­tional the­o­ry that race rela­tions will change for the bet­ter… Data do not sup­port that belief, nor is it sup­port­ed by events across America 54 Years after degen­er­ate ele­ments assas­si­nat­ed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr him­self warned against what he char­ac­ter­ized before his death as ‘the tran­quil drug of grad­u­al­ism’ as he elo­quent­ly spoke about ‘the fierce urgency of now. The idea of not suc­cumb­ing to the lies of those who say times have changed, things are bet­ter-the idea that giv­en time America will shed its igno­rant racist past and embrace moder­ni­ty. All lies, the fathers sucked the sour grapes of hatred and big­otry the teeth of the chil­dren are inex­orably set on edge.
The chil­dren of mur­der­ers, rapists, brutish col­o­niz­ers are not about to become good God-fear­ing cit­i­zens who believe in equal­i­ty for human­i­ty. It is insan­i­ty to expect the sons and daugh­ters of your oppres­sors to change and become your sud­den savior.
If it starts dirty, it ends dirty. On every issue ger­mane to the well­be­ing of peo­ple of col­or, ele­ments of the United States gov­ern­ment have been con­sis­tent­ly hos­tile. From the White House to the Supreme Court and mil­lions of homes all across the expanse of the fifty states, it is gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy to dis­crim­i­nate against peo­ple of col­or. The brutish indif­fer­ent dis­play of police act­ing with impuni­ty is the most vis­i­ble exam­ple of those dis­crim­i­na­tor poli­cies man­i­fest­ing themselves.

Redlining is no longer being writ­ten in the law, but Blacks are still exclud­ed from cer­tain neigh­bor­hoods. Blacks who have beat­en the odds and pur­chased homes have their homes under­val­ued by racist apprais­ers. Even when the old redlin­ing laws of the post-recon­struc­tion era are sup­pos­ed­ly not used any­more, the mind­set of the sons and daugh­ters of those who draft­ed those laws are the same and, in many cas­es, worse than their forebearers.
Laws are being passed all across the coun­try to make it expo­nen­tial­ly more dif­fi­cult to vote; how could this hap­pen, you ask?
The short answer is that the United States Supreme Court in 2013, for no valid rea­son oth­er than to make it easy to roll back vot­ing rights, evis­cer­at­ed the 1965 Voting Rights Act leav­ing it an emp­ty shell.
John Roberts, the Chief Justice and a for­mer Reagan Administration lawyer, is vehe­ment­ly hos­tile to the idea of one man one vote. Under Chief Justice John Roberts, a Bush Appointee, the 1965 Voting Rights Act was destroyed under the guise that it is no longer need­ed because times have changed.
Sure, times have changed, but peo­ple’s hatred has not. The John Roberts Supreme court with Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, the now-deceased Antonin Scalia, & Anthony Kennedy ensured that it destroyed set­tled law open­ing the gate for the present assault on vot­ing rights by those who would see Black peo­ple returned to the cot­ton plan­ta­tion and a place of abject servitude.

So what are we doing as a peo­ple to ensure that our chil­dren and grand­chil­dren do not become serfs to the chil­dren and grand­chil­dren of those who hate and oppress us? Is it just about com­mem­o­rat­ing the strug­gles of the past, or is it about embrac­ing a new kind of mil­i­tan­cy that demands equal space to breathe on God’s green earth?
How do we devel­op that mil­i­tan­cy if we refuse to edu­cate our­selves about who we real­ly are and not who they say we are?
How do we demand change if we con­tin­ue to believe the lie taught us by our birthright-appro­pri­a­tors that we are a gen­tile peo­ple instead of God’s Hebrew peo­ple cre­at­ed in his image? When will we rise to rec­og­nize the curse of the four hun­dred years is over, and it is a time of Black progress?
Are we going to get up off our rear ends and take what’s right­ful­ly ours, or are we going to con­tin­ue to be behold­en to the teach­ings of the slave Bible?
The idea that things are get­ting bet­ter or will be bet­ter giv­en time has been turned on its head over and over again. The scorched earth assault on crit­i­cal race the­o­ry by the fas­cist right is an attempt to white­wash his­to­ry. They want to super­im­pose a kind and gen­tle face onto the mon­ster of four hun­dred years of white geno­cide against our people.
If you are opposed to the truth of his­to­ry being told to chil­dren, your or ours, it is because you are on the wrong side of history.

There is no they, just us-no, they are not going to give me this or that. You’re damn right about that their fathers and four fathers stole from us. They will con­tin­ue to steal from us unless we rec­og­nize who we are, not infe­ri­or but supe­ri­or, not slaves but enslaved, not sav­ages but the ones who brought sav­ages into the light. We taught them his­to­ry, math­e­mat­ics, astron­o­my. We taught them that the earth was not flat, but round.
We are a peo­ple who cooked our meat when oth­ers were eat­ing their raw blood drip­ping from it. We are the peo­ple who cre­at­ed demo­c­ra­t­ic coun­cils (the sys­tem of gov­ern­ment we now claim to have) and cre­at­ed uni­ver­si­ties; yeah, we cre­at­ed those.
None of that his­to­ry has been taught to African-Americans chil­dren, nor has it been taught to Caucasian children.
For those rea­sons, Ron Desantis in Florida, Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, the imbe­cil­ic Cuban Ted Cruz, and oth­ers do not want that his­to­ry taught to young American children.
As I said ear­li­er, if you are afraid of the things you did in the past, it is because of what you did wrong. Now, of course, this does not apply to Ted Cruz or Clarence Thomas; they are still enslaved peo­ple who are quite com­fort­able on the plantation…

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.