Some perspective, in case anybody wants to insist on the delusion that black slaveowners, white slaves, or free blacks were some major phenomena:

"In 1860, 89 percent of the nation's African Americans were slaves,…." 

 Flash-forward, to my birth, 100 years after The Civil War (when, supposedly, all the bad stuff ended) and white society still hadn't come to it's senses - while claiming they were behaving normally. Whites still worked over-time, before "Say It Loud - I'm Black And I'm Proud!" trying to convince blacks like me we were the ones with the problem. They expect to walk away from that decades-long mindfuck, without it being mentioned, too.

You see, they want my help in claiming everything happened long ago.

And now, somehow, we're supposed to buy the story blacks should be happy and/or satisfied watching whites posing as authorities on everything - but, especially, justice, ethics and (as the divorce and adultery rate shows) morality - while openly spending the money blacks made once whites gave themselves a multi-century free ride.

Or is it that we should just take our lumps and let them go about their business? 

Either way, what a weird thing to expect us to be thankful for,...

 

Just think:

Without The Civil Rights Movement, Little Richard probably wouldn't have been able to sue Pat Boone for ripping him off. 

There's no reparations for that:

Having to fight for what's yours is, still, just expected,...

Here's an idea going around, amongst my friends, anyway:

"No More Slave Movies; Show Us as Kings and Queens Too"

I agree with the "too". It's important, that Hollywood finally makes movies about black successes in history, but here's what I also see:

   

 When you have over 400 years of untold American stories - on the brutality (and length and breath) of slavery, slaves outwitting slavers (brilliantly) the effects of slavery today, then Reconstruction and it's lies and failures (also length and effects), followed by the Civil Rights Movement, etc. - not only is it a crime how few have been told, but it's harmful to society not to mine them so we can, all, be on the same page culturally. Blacks, whites, and everyone else, need to know these stories:

Like studying the noxious, and obviously taboo, topic of NewAge (to understand our current "spiritual but not religious" culture) our racial politics - especially when it comes to identifying bad actors - too often make little sense because, as I've said, they lack context. 

We simply have to look back - to know how we got here:

And why some still resist,...

 

The family of Malcolm X has launched a lawsuit to stop the publication of a diary of the late civil-rights leader's last year.

The Diary of Malcolm X, a reproduction of a private diary kept as he travelled to the Middle East and Africa immediately before his assassination, is due to be published this week, according to Third World Press, a Chicago-based company. The publisher lists one of the leader's six daughters, Ilyasah Shabazz, as a co-editor.

But in papers filed to Manhattan federal court, according to the Associated Press, heirs to Malcolm X say Third World Press does not have the right to publish it.

 

 Sue Eakin, author and civil rights leader

 

Into the Fire examines the most tumultuous and consequential period in African American history: the Civil War and the end of slavery, and Reconstruction’s thrilling but tragically brief “moment in the sun.” From the beginning, African Americans were agents of their own liberation, forcing the Union to confront the issue of slavery by fleeing the plantations and taking up arms to serve as soldiers in the United States Colored Troops. After Emancipation, African Americans sought to realize the promise of freedom—rebuilding families shattered by slavery; demanding economic, political and civil rights; even winning elected office. Just a few years later, however,  a swift and vicious campaign of terror in the South restored white supremacy and rolled back rights for African Americans. Yet the achievements of Reconstruction would remain very much alive in the collective memory of the African American community.