Know Thyself -- Love Your Family

I am unmarried, without children so I always assumed that I loved my mother, siblings, nieces, and nephews. That is something that you are not supposed to question. However, when it came down to it, I didn't treat my family as if I loved them. I was mean and oh so surly. My family was my last consideration.

When I began to study metaphysics, I found that love was a big part of it. During a huge argument with one of my sisters, I had to admit to both of us that I did not love her. In fact, I realized that I could not define love. I was shocked at this because I never question what love meant. I just thought it was a feeling.

I created a definition -- to want the best for someone else and to want them to reach their full potential. I still, however, did not put my family higher on my list of priorities. It wasn't until I gave a talk, one Kwanzaa, on Umoja -- Unity -- that I realized the truth spoken by Dr. John Henrik Clarke during a Q&A session at one of his lectures.

A young man, showing off his prowess as a black revolutionary, asked Dr. Clarke what he could do to help awaken the black community to its heritage. Dr. Clarke told the young man to start with his own family. He said to make sure that his children, wife, nieces, nephews, cousins, etc. knew who they were. The young man was very disappointed in this answer. He seemed to want a broader source of recognition, but he had no choice but to accept what was given to him.

During my Umoja talk, I understood that I had not taken Dr. Clarke's advice. All of the problems that we "conscious folks" see that need to be corrected in the community, almost always exist in our own family who some of us (I had included myself) designate as unworthy.

Now, I'm learning to place among my own healing, the healing of my family as my top priority through teaching and acts of love, generosity, patience, and compassion. Ashe, Ma'at!

Know Thyself -- Juneteenth and the Struggle for Justice

I come from Field Negro stock. This means that my parents were survivors of segregation and descendants of African slaves who were kidnapped from Africa and forced to work in the fields as sources of free labor. Field work was the most brutal. Frederick Douglass gives a detailed description of the differences between slaves who worked in the Big House and those who worked in the fields in his slave narrative, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. In either case, there was no guarantee of justice. A slave could be killed or maimed without provocation or redress. This type of beastliness extended itself to segregation, although, news of a particularly fiendish murder could be reported in the black newspapers with a demand for an investigation. The results were almost always the same -- impunity.

Today, so little African-American history is taught that such claims would seem ridiculous or, at best, told as if the occurrences were rare when in fact they were probably as frequent as gang violence is today. Certainly, this is an ironic analogy, since for hundreds of years, whites killed us or forced other blacks to do the job for them. Now, we blacks kill one another voluntarily and whites wonder why we do it.

Being the daughter of parents who grew up picking cotton in the fields, I am the recipient of many legacies of slavery, one of which is having things taken from me, specifically, things that I had worked for. My mother had no problem taking my money and material possessions and giving them to family members who she thought needed them more. After all, so many things had been taken from her and she felt her cause was worthy. Unfortunately, this taught me that other people were more worthy than I and it has subsequently caused a great deal of conflict within the family.

After my siblings and I grew up, my mother began counseling and made it her mission in life to bring us all into counseling in order to heal the family. We're still working on this. However, concerning my own issues from a lack of self-worth, I first had to learn that this belief in my lack of worth was why I made certain decisions in my life. Being described as lazy, fearful, unmotivated, etc. has been an injustice to the quality of my life as measured by the source -- lack of self-worth, taught to me by my mother, who inherited this belief from slavery.

Thanks to my mother's efforts to bring the family closer together through counseling and my knowledge of black history, my mother and I are making great strides at healing and redemption. Unfortunately for the United States as a whole, there can be no redemption, no justice, as long as it denies and dismisses its responsibility for what happened to African-Americans during slavery.