A culture as old, deep, and diverse as African culture can manifest in many ways and serve many purposes.
In the US, we who embrace our Africanity generally use our Culture as
an escape, as a place of shelter or retreat from the dominate culture,
it inflates and sustains our egos and identities while serving as an Analgesic that reduces the pain of oppression.
We’ve failed to Revolutionize our culture, to weaponize it, to apply it and practice it in such a way to serve as a direct threat and challenge to White Domination.
That’s why we have well paid African-Centered Scholars who fit
comfortably within the halls of White Academic Institutions, that’s why
Hallmark makes Kwanzaa cards, why there is no real ongoing confrontation
between the African-Centered population and the many populations who
exploit our people.
The Pan-African, Conscious, African-Centered
community is very good at breaking down the problems with Global White
Domination, Capitalism, and especially with the Self-Rejecting,
Self-Hating, Integrationist New Negros; but we have an aversion to self
criticism and critique. We don’t have to feel a special shame for this
because most ideologies and formations have this same issue with self
critique and criticism.
We need to examine, refine, and strengthen our movement and the ideology that feeds it.
There are many people who’ve been invaded, conquered, and enslaved
while fully immersed and fully practicing their culture; some from a
massive invasion, others, like our ancestors over centuries of erosive
invasions and infiltrations. Either way, the culture was intact when the
attacks started, so knowing and practicing ones culture is not
“INHERENTLY” protective or liberating; that was my point, and it’s
historically provable.
The element that protects a people from
conquest, or allows them to get free from oppression is flexibility,
rigid cultures break and die. African Culture is a living organism, we
are all cells within that organism, living things are animated, they
move, they expand, they contract, they learn, they are able to adapt and
overcome.
African culture is inadequate in this time, we need Revolutionary African Culture.
