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The following is almost entirely quoted or paraphrased from Dr. John Henrik Clarke's lecture given sometime between 1989 to 1993 on
Education: The Highest Form of Struggle.”
“The major factor for Europeans is class and economics. The major factor in the rest of the world is culture and religion.” *
During the period of physical enslavement, our struggle in the United States, in the Caribbean Islands and in South America was to look at ourselves through our eyes and through our basic culture and our own spirituality. This struggle against the odds against us was really a form of education. This struggle might be the highest form of education because with all of the murder, with all of the change and with all of the control of the media images, to survive in this environment is a miracle.
The American Melting Crockpot
One thing Africans have failed to recognize is that in the American melting pot, we didn't melt. The symbol of the melting pot could well be wrong. Symbolically, America should have been called the salad bowl. In a salad bowl, the relish doesn't have to become a tomato and the lettuce doesn't have to become a cucumber, yet, each one is essential to the salad.
We must remember, America was not originally designed for Africans or for anybody other than Protestant Whites. Once you look at the design of this nation and look at the design of the world beginning in the 15th and 16th centuries, a lot of things that look like contradictions are no longer contradictions.
Here's the design of the United States, that's still intact no matter what kind of words they use.
This country was designed for free White Protestant males, middle class and up, who agreed with the prevailing status quo and owned property.
When they said “liberty and justice for all,” that was the all they were talking about.
So once we're clear about that, we will then know educationally what we have to do and we will know information-wise what we have to do.
The Struggle For The Real Self
There is a continuous struggle of people who've lived under the domination of other people to get back to their real self and their real traditions. This is the natural course of events. This struggle is not one of Africans alone.
We Africans are people taken out of our cultural incubator, placed into someone else's cultural incubator. Imagine being placed into something not designed to nurture you but designed to hurt you. Our soul is rejecting the climate of the incubator. Africa is the cultural incubator that produced us. America and many other societies are designed to harm Africans. This is obvious and an understatement.
Most of our education has been trying to teach us to be live within a cultural incubator created for our containment and not our liberation. In such a challenging environment, yes we have struggled for our physical health, emotional health, mental health and spiritual health as would any group of people. People all over the world who have not undergone our Maafa, struggle with the same things, including the overwhelming majority of the people who are the main perpetrators of injustice in the world. It is not possible to constantly spread a lot of sickness without getting a lot on you.
Now that we have more understanding of the nature of the struggle, we can self-educate ourselves back to health.
