January is usually the time of year when many people (myself included) feel excited about a fresh start, a reset, sort of like rebooting your computer. Many people make New Year’s resolutions to lose weight, get back to regular workouts at the gym, meeting a new significant other, etc. And by the time January is over and certainly by February, those New Year’s resolutions are all but forgotten.
As I began thinking about what I want my 2023 to look like for Black people, I realize “community” is what I want for us. The key component to creating community is unity. Based on my research when writing my book series, Reverse the Slavery Curse, there have been many outside forces that have gone to great lengths to make sure that Black people were not able to unify. There have been laws passed in many states throughout the South that forbade Black people from congregating and creating groups and communities. Even worship services on slave plantations were highly regulated and were always overseen by someone white who was tasked with controlling what was said and making sure Black slaves did not create any meaningful unity.
We were officially off plantations beginning in the 1860s, but there have still been efforts by non-Black people to discourage us from unifying post slavery. In a March 1978 National Security Council Memorandum, the late Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote about strategies to prevent Black Americans & Black Africans from connecting and creating unity.
It’s been rumored that the late J. Edgar Hoover, the first Director of the FBI had said that the biggest threat to the security of the United States was negro unity.
And recently, there was a secretly leaked video recording that was taken during an Israeli American Council meeting where a panel member stated that, “the major problem with Israel is with the young generation of the Black community.” Isn’t that interesting? According to this Israeli panelist, their biggest fear isn’t nuclear threats from Iran, religious extremists in the Middle East or hostility in the West Bank, but the biggest threat is from young (foundational) Black Americans.
You can view this video excerpt in Professor Black Truth’s December 2022 YouTube video essay: “Why Intelligence Gathering Matters.“
If Black people truly are as inferior as many say we are so much so that we have been relegated to the bottom of every socioeconomic measure, then non-black people at the highest level of government seem to be unusually concerned with Black Americans unifying with one another and with other African nations.
Perhaps we as Black people should do the one thing so many are fearful of us doing and finally unify. Check back to this blog frequently as I unpack on how this can be done effectively.