A depiction of Bacon’s Rebellion, the 1676 event believed to usher the start of the racial caste system that legitimized the enslavement of African people in the United States./ http://www.history.com 

In most of the mature conversations about race I’ve participated in, both sides have acknowledged the U.S. racial caste system to be a farce, designed to keep the multi-ethnic, disenfranchised majority from uniting against the One Percent. At that point in the discussion, the party who’s determined to organize solely with Black people, myself in many cases, must answer the question of whether this fact changes how they fight for Black liberation.

After engaging in many discussions and deliberating in my private time, I would say no and yes.

Knowing that the Elites created the concept of race in the U.S. doesn’t discourage me from solely organizing with Black people on several fronts. The global Black race’s survival depends on our ability to do for self, whether that’s in Liberia against impeding foreign investors or in D.C. amid mass gentrification. As a reporter, if I want my people to survive, I must do my part by writing about and reporting on issues concerning Black people in D.C., the U.S., and abroad. As an educator, I must teach Black, and Latino, children about our common African heritage.

This mission for Black self-determination equally applies in the home. My beau is a Black woman. I will eventually become the head of a Black family. My life is beautifully Black, more so because of my passion for combating the all-out assault on Black people in this country and abroad.

This begs the question of whether, by overtly celebrating and protecting my Blackness, I’m becoming a prisoner of the very box that I’m trying to escape. By solely organizing with Black people, am I participating in the race war that the Elites are creating from afar? By echoing my warrior ancestors’ call for a united African nation, am I just as evil as the white people who want to exterminate my race? These are real questions that often come from friends, colleagues, strangers, and whoever else asks about what some would consider my obsession with living Black.

To them, I say that by affirming my African heritage in this pseudo-racial caste system, I redefine Blackness. Coming to terms with my precarious status as a so-called first-generation Black American helped me realize this. As a teenager in what was once called Chocolate City, I often felt that I had to choose between being a Liberian and being a Black American. At the George Washington University, I saw similar schisms between continental and diasporic Africans. Such experiences further compelled me to live an honestly Black live in this country and reject any temptation to let go of Mama Africa.

While not directly affected by the U.S.’ slave-holding history, by being born and raised in the United States, I’m subject to the laws, standards, and Eurocentric thinking created to impede African American progress. In my adolescent years, I had to decide between adhering to the cultural norms that my parents taught me, or following the way of life prescribed to my peers through BET videos and misinformation from malignant media sources and traumatized people. To be totally fair, the young African-American men I grew up with, many of whom came from loving homes despite what the media tried to tell my Liberian-born parents, had to make the same decisions despite their upbringing.

Making that connection between me and my friends showed me that as a young African man in the Babylon system, your home life didn’t matter to an extent if it wasn’t centered in an African cultural identity or a yearning for such. If the definition of Black as given by America has no positive semblance of Africa, both continental and diasporic Africans struggling to find their way will suffer in the end by strictly adhering to those values.

By stepping outside of the ethnocentric box that America created for Black people, we can tap into our African heritage and learn about a history beyond slavery that confirms our humanity and divinity. Our ancestors who walked this land during the rise of the American empire had similar goals, despite the Babylon system’s efforts to wipe away memories of those movements.

In recent years, I’ve gained a more globalized perspective, working alongside like-minded Black youth and learning about the African heritage I share with them and other Africans around the world – particularly the Caribbean and the African continent. Upon learning about some of our ancient history and struggle against the European minority, however I found more than enough reason to organize solely with Black people, despite knowing what I’ve come to find out in discussions — that this racial caste system thrives from division of non-wealthy white and Black people.

At a time when, as an aggregate, Black people in the United States are behind in many facets of living, I, nor other Black people, don’t have much time to convince white people of our humanity or to educate them about the fallacy of the racial caste system that continues to benefit them. Additionally, the very people who benefit from white supremacy are descendants of the Europeans that have committed numerous atrocities against African people and other melanated groups long before Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676, an event that marked the beginning of chattel slavery by inheritance. Though the American Elite created “white” and “black” to destroy any possibility that impoverished people would unite against them, the “white” people who enjoyed the benefits of the system were already well on their way to controlling the melanated people’s way of life.

Not too far from where Bacon’s Rebellion happened, the English unleashed physical and germ warfare against Indigenous Americans upon landing on their shores decades earlier. Christopher Columbus, the Italian explorer whose legacy the Babylon system celebrates every year, and his goons dealt a similar fate to the “Indians” they encountered in the 15th century. Columbus’ contribution to the cause kicked off a long period of Western imperialism and the Transatlantic slave trade, also known as Maafa, which means the African Holocaust.

Centuries earlier, the Greeks and then the Romans took over ancient Kemet after acquiring the vast wealth of knowledge that the Egyptians had. The Portuguese and other European groups took the system of wartime indentured servitude developed by Africans (the one often mentioned by white people in discussions about race) and turned it into an inter-generational marker of poverty and economic exploitation. The Industrial Revolution, a period of great economic growth for Western nation-states, paralleled the rape and plunder of the African continent and people. All the while across the Atlantic Ocean, the U.S. government ran Indigenous Americans off their land.

Despite coming from various pre-New World nations, we melanated people share a common oppressor, but more so a common spiritual energy. Long before the European left the caves and embarked on its centuries-long campaign of destruction, people of African descent laid the foundation for many of the technological advancements we see today. The land mass that was Pangea serves as a testament to this common heritage. Over the decades, several African scholars, including Runoko Rashidi, have been able to find elements of African cultural influence in paintings, sculptures, and writings from all over the world.

Racial classifications – Black, Latino/Hispanic, Native American, etc. – do nothing to highlight the complexity of our ethnic, tribal, and cultural origins. Those markers signify economic fortune and reinforce limited, poisonous ideas about melanated people that the oppressor developed. In the spectrum of race, Black and white fall on opposite sides. As Walter Rodney eloquently explained in Groundings with My Brothers, people all around the world, based on their current economic and social situation, have some latitude in choosing where they land on that scale. In many modern societies, the melanated people who attain all an institution offers don’t challenge persistent ideas of whiteness. By design, its melanated people who uphold the racial caste system by not challenging whiteness.

The Babylon system has gone above and beyond to maintain whiteness, a concept that always faces extinction, in other forms.  Irish and Italian immigrants, Ashkenazi Jews, Catholics, and other white outcasts have been absorbed into so-called white American family as melanated groups continuously broke institutional barriers throughout the years. In exchange, those groups would hold down melanated groups.

These days, white “Hispanics” are becoming the next group to enter the white race. Many of these “Hispanics” may have enjoyed similar privileges as the lighter members of their home nations. Anywhere in the world, it doesn’t gain anyone profit to go against the oppressor. To act as though that’s the case makes the assumption that the oppressor got everything in its possession through hard work rather than theft and trickery of the truly enlightened majority.

When looking at the creation of America’s racial caste system through that lens, the original intent to continue the global oppression of melanated people has become clearer to me, even if it has kept some poor whites at the bottom. If the oppressed melanated people who bring up this racial caste system in race discussions truly understood the true nature of the Western beast, they would combat it by self-classifying as Black in a manner that reveres their connection to the Most High and respects the struggles of Africans abroad.

From what I’ve seen and heard, not many of my sisters and brothers have done that, choosing instead to not connect with Africa. Unlike other oppressed groups, we have no direct connection to Mama Africa, due mainly to enslavement, but because many of us don’t want to know about it in the Age of Information. Sadly, we’ve been conditioned to not follow our predecessors in organizing with Africans abroad; we see our issues as separate from theirs.

In closing, for us to truly break out of this pseudo-racial system that critics of Pan-African ideology bring up time and time again in arguing against race consciousness, Black America must end its love affair with the white force that has oppressed its people globally long before Bacon’s Rebellion.

Unifying with the oppressor’s henchmen (middle and lower-class whites) with the hope that they will tear down Babylon with us is not the answer. The only unity this journalist and educator will unequivocally endorse is that among melanated people – including Africans, Indigenous Americans, and all those in between. In no way does this conflict with the call for Black unity as for this plan to truly come to fruition, Black unity must be examined through a global prism, where those who fight for Black self-determination in America think of themselves as Africans.

Having that common consciousness can lead us out of ignorance and into a situation where we can respect our common heritage with other Spirit Beings, eventually letting go of the Eurocentric ideas that perpetually destroy our souls. How’s that for destroying a racial caste system?