We are Black History
I appreciate February as Black History Month even though every day of my life is a celebration of black history.
I am my ancestors and my extended family and spiritual kinfolk who have passed beyond this realm of consciousness. I honor the Honorable Ones and am their continuance. I am their hope. I am the reason they did what they did and it was me they were thinking of when they did it.
It is my children they were looking to as the hope of the future, my students they dreamt of. It is us that history saw as the future and we are the history our children will look to as their inspiration.
What they did mattered. What we do matters. Every single time we hold a position, every single issue we speak on, every single stance we stand out front to highlight serves the purpose of creating an indelible record. A record that becomes the past as the future becomes the ever-present Now.
There is no time between Malcolm X, Martin, Mandela and me, Pharaoh Akhenaten, Queen Tiye and Heracles sleep in my DNA.
American blackness is continental, older than time and broader than the limits of slavery and minstrel shows, stereotypes and poverty. Jazz, the Blues, Rock and Roll and Hip Hop are the children of our pain, love and suffering. And the world knows it as the future turns and we arrive in the past to once again, as ever, end up present to the sheer wonder and perfection of it all.
The past was the future. The future becomes the past as time cycles in and out of consciousness.
Skin color matters little in the contemplation of eternity but in these days and this culture life is what it is and the epigenetics of our skinfolk and kinfolk gird our loins, straightening our path through the valley of the shadow of death, supporting our struggle with the very fact of their existence and accomplishments without which we would not be present, to the past and future Now.
We thank them with every breath. The promises they made, the world they saw coming is here; wherever we are present, it exists. The fear of it is the battle we fight every day of our lives and pass down to those who come next.
