Rethinking Black “His-story” Month - February 2024
This article was published in the February 2024 issue of the Youngstown Buckeye Review, a locally owned black publication.
Homer Warren
It’s important to appreciate early advocates (e.g., W.E.B. DuBois, Carter G. Woodson) and current local luminaries (e.g., Jimma McWilson, Brother K, Sarah Brown Clark, Vince Shivers) of the Black Story. The Black Story connects us with the wisdom teaching of ancient Afrikan cosmology, it acknowledges the huge number of brilliant Black contributions to the sciences and civilization, and it helps to intelligently contextualize our current social, political, economic, and cultural problems. Most importantly, the Black Story is crucial to “producing” a humane world free of the hatred that fear brings, gratuitous violence, corrupt sexuality, and the economic, political, and cultural madness that comes from not knowing who-we-are. Unfortunately, the long Western “his-story” of denying, rejecting, distorting, and coopting the Black Story has prevented the “production” of a humane world.
Where the Black Story is to help our young Producers deal with marginalization and encourage them to “produce” intellectual, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing, we have commodified and commercialized the Black Story into a motivation story for our young Producers to get an education in order to get a good job, get money, get status in the oppressor’s world, and buy a lot of unneeded stuff.
The Black Story is not a commodity in a transaction with the “his-story” of white supremacy (e.g., the Slave Trade, Slavery, overturning 1860’s Reconstruction, The Black Codes, Jim Crow, overturning 1960’s Reconstruction). And since all forms of oppression are symptoms of “his-story’s” consumer mindset disease, the Black Story is about liberating us psychologically and spiritually from this deadly disease.
The Black Story must be told under Producer mindset. The Producer mindset captures ancient Kemetian wisdom teaching of how humans are Producers made in the image and likeness of a powerfully creative universal energy and that humans must live in harmony with how this energy flows through nature’s phenomenal Input-Output production systems. In short, Kemetian wisdom teaching rests in how the brain-mind must appropriately assess life’s Inputs as either: 1) threats to survival, 2) contributions to survival, 3) threats to flourishing, and/or 4) contributions to flourishing. Threats result in the production of negative FARTs (feelings, actions, reactions, and thoughts); contributions produced positive FARTs.
Yes, “his-story” is filled with many real threats to survival, resulting in our ancestors producing a lot of negative FARTs that motivated the call for freedom. But today the consumer mindset disease has commodified and commercialized the Black Story into mostly a study of the threats to survival and negative FART production which, in turn, is bartered for white guilt, shame, and moral irresponsibility. This is an intellectual trap. We must see the Black Story as taking us way beyond whiteness and anti-blackness. The Black Story is far more about assessing life for contributions to flourishing and the production of positive FARTs that will allow us to live in a humane world free of the hatred that fear brings, gratuitous violence, corrupt sexuality, the economic, political, and cultural madness from not knowing who-we-are.
To conclude, the Black Story, as told under Producer mindset, will help our young Producers make direct intellectual and visceral connection with the FARTs they’re producing in their life and the FARTs produced by our ancestors. [[The book Producer Mindset: A New Mindset for Education details the study of the Black Story]]