We often hear the refrain that Black folks are oppressed in this country. When that is stated, there will be some people who agree with the statement and others who will disagree saying that black folk are playing the “victim game”.
Let’s look at the question.

Even though being called ignorant is often intended as an insult, in reality it isn’t an insult at all. Simply put, to be ignorant just means that a person doesn’t know something. It means that they are unaware or uninformed. Not knowing something is not bad in and of itself, however, it is when a person doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know that it becomes a bad thing. I call that stupid.

In the Western world, there is a “science” that studies almost everything. So...historiography is the study of the writing of history. When I was in school, I actually hated history. It was taught in such a boring manner. That is not a reflection on my teachers because, that is how they were taught.

Politics is not something that I consider myself to be as well versed on as I should be. But there are some thoughts and questions that I’d like to share. My mother and grandmother would often quote proverbs (biblical, Afrikan or even Shakespeare) and say, “food for thought”. I am sharing my thoughts on politicians and politics as “food” to stimulate thought. Obviously, everyone has (or should have) their own opinion, which should be respected (if it is thoughtful, logical and not foolish).

Racism is a word that we’ve heard used in all kinds of contexts for many years. Many use it in an accusing way, many use it in a defensive way and others may use it as a way of explaining things. However, in a world where the same thing can mean different things to different people, I will attempt to answer some questions about the “R” word.

When I played on the marching band in high school and college, there was a marching activity that was called “marking time”. This meant that we were high stepping in the same place-not moving forward. In some respects, this can be applied to AUSA (Afrikans from the United States of America) since our Ancestors were kidnapped and brought to these shores in chains. We’ve been having many of the same debates for more than 200 years. What are these debates? Read on.

Afrika has been called “The Dark Continent” which suggests that there is little known about Afrika and that Afrika is a place buried in the darkness of ignorance, hunger, poverty and warfare. Most television coverage and documentaries do little to change this perception. However, let’s shed some light on this “darkness”.

Amnesia is loss of memory. Afrikans all over the world including Afrikans from the United States of America (AUSA) have been miseducated and dis-educated away from our true history over many generations. Actually, after our Ancestors were kidnapped and brought to America in chains, we were not allowed to have any education at all. It was even a crime for us to even learn to read. Because much of our true history has been hidden, ignored, distorted, or claimed by others, it could be said that we AUSA have developed a form of amnesia as a people. How do successfully cure ourselves?

Oftentimes, we hear words and even sometimes use them without really taking the time to fully understand their true meaning and impact. We frequently look at these words as abstract and don’t realize how the concepts that these words represent have impacted us. One such word is genocide. As usual, we should look at the definition before opening a potential “can of worms”.

In previous articles, we have discussed words that were deceptive in that they gave a subliminal or subconscious picture that was not necessarily always associated with the word. One of these words was “slave” and the definition used was “a person who is excessively dependent or controlled by something or someone”.

When I was a single young man, I enjoyed listening to the older men and Elders in the barbershop. There was so much wisdom there!! One frequent topic was women. I remember one man saying, “I chased my wife until she caught me”. Everyone laughed, knowingly, but it struck a nerve with me and I’ve never forgotten it. As I grow older, I had an opportunity to observe and experience this paradoxical practice of “playing hard to get.”

The relationship of AUSA (Afrikans from the United States of America) with police in America is not complicated. It is today, unfortunately, what it was intended to be, adversarial. Why? Let’s look at the history.

There was a television show when I was growing up that was very popular and also very full of stereotypes . It was called “The Lone Ranger”. The hero was a masked white man who rode a white horse and wore a white hat (the white meant that he was a “good guy”). His sidekick was a Native American man named Tonto who kowtowed to the lone ranger and frequented suffered from and had to be rescued from other, more racist ranchers and cowboys by the lone ranger, who he called “kemo sabe”. Later, I became aware of a joke involving these characters.

It would appear that there has been an unfortunate generational disconnect in the AUSA (Afrikans from the United States of America) community. Instead of the respectful intergenerational communication and transmission of information and wisdom that was (and frequently still is) standard practice in Afrika and even among AUSA in America many years ago, there is a divide and mistrust now that threatens our existence.

Environmental Racism is a term coined by Dr. Benjamin Chavis in 1983 when he was with the United Church of Christ. The term refers to the targeting of a specific population for abnormal exposure to harmful material. At least 16 studies since 1980 have concluded that race, not class or socioeconomic level is the determining factor in locating polluting facilities and waste sites. The last study to draw this conclusion was done by the E.P.A. in 2018. The term “environmental racism” is no longer used frequently but has been replaced by a phrase which is less accurate but more comfortable and accepted by those who commit the actions that define environmental racism.

Ebonics or "Ebony phonics" is a term that was coined in 1973 by consensus among several AUSA (Afrikans from the United States of America) psychologists and ethnolinguists (people who study the relationship between language and ethnic groups) at a conference in St. Louis, Missouri. 

Even though it has been proven that all humans are biologically and genetically the same, descended from the same Afrikan woman who lived 100,000 to 200,00 years ago, geographical, climate and environmental factors influenced the differences in their appearances and outlook (worldview).

Messaging to me is transmitting views, opinions and beliefs to other persons or people so that they understand where you stand as well as attempting to influence them to take a position or adopt a particular belief or opinion.

Warning: this article may get a little “deep” but is intended to explore a dimension of who we are that most of us have never considered.

We have discussed stereotypes before in this space. A question was put to me recently about just how much stereotypes affect our ideas, opinions and beliefs today.

There have been many “justifications” for the enslavement of Afrikan people by Arabs and Europeans:

After our Afrikan Ancestors were kidnapped, human trafficked and enslaved in the “New World”, they had to be kept ignorant. The kidnappers, traffickers and enslavers were scared to death of an educated Black man. Some say that they still are. I say Black man because their culture had no respect for women and they discounted Black women, which was our salvation because Black women saved us in America.

For the next several months, we will be hearing a lot about how loyal Blacks were to the Colonial American Patriots during the Revolutionary War. In fact, it has already started. The 2026 South Carolina Black History calendar mentions several Black men who are painted as “patriots”. But what are the facts?

One definition of the word perspective is a point of view or a particular attitude towards something. The last few years have highlighted something that AUSA (Afrikans from the United States of America) have known for centuries. Even well-meaning non-Blacks see things from a different perspective than AUSA.  This is something that Afrikan people have been aware of since the first Portuguese ship landed on the west coast of Afrika.

When choosing this title, I was kinda overwhelmed at how broad that topic was. The whole idea of American racism is so ironically and almost comically hypocritical that it is difficult to decide whether to laugh, cry or become furious.

In my daily life as a physician, I frequently encounter people who are suspicious of Western medicine. And...frequently rightly so. These suspicious people feel that the overall goal of organized medicine and many individual doctors is to make as much money as possible. Indeed, I have encountered many of my fellow physicians who meet that description.

There have been many definitions and opinions about the importance of history. One of the people who I consider to be my teachers, Dr. John Henrik Clarke, said that all history is a current event. That seems to be so true. What my daughter sees as history is my lived experiences. She studied Dr. Martin Luther king, Jr.’s assassination and I was not only in Atlanta at that time, I participated in his funeral and the activities associated with his assassination.

If you want to hide anything from a Black person, put it in a book. During slavery, all white people had the power to do whatever they wanted to do to Black people. The laws supported these white people even if they killed an enslaved or unenslaved Afrikan. Emphasis on the laws. What the law also stated was that Afrikans were not to be taught to read. In fact, South Carolina was the first state to pass laws forbidding the enslaved Afrikans from learning to read and write and the other southern states followed suit.

On July 4, 2026, the United States will celebrate. 250 years of existence. Many different ethnic groups and races will participate in this celebration. I’d wager that some Native Americans would join in the celebration even though they have been subjected to overt genocide in so many ways.

Sometimes we get so bogged down in life that we create a bubble around us that actually facilitates a kind of selfishness. We get so involved in the everyday realities of our lives that we forget/ignore/belittle and even scorn the realities of others. Reality is the state of things as they actually exist. Academically, there are four types of reality:

The South Carolina Black History calendar for 2026 honored Bishop Henry McNeal Turner by inclusion in the calendar, but the South Carolina Department of Education completely whitewashed his contributions. He would be totally outraged at what they have done to his image.

We all know what a title is but, like many of us, I had to look up the term honorific. An honorific is a title that implies respect. Honorifics were common during my childhood. When I was growing up in Hartsville, SC, there was a hierarchy of my parents’ friends and what I was to call them.

The topic of racism has been discussed previously in this space but hopefully, this essay will add another angle to the discussion. A brief review would be helpful. Racism is prejudice against a group of people based on their membership in an arbitrary and made-up classification called race.

Pan-Afrikanism is the philosophy that all people of Afrikan origin have a significant kinship and should be cooperative and unified in the political and economic arenas. In America, AUSA (Afrikans from the United States of America) have understood this concept (although not necessarily by that name). What we AUSA referred to was “us” and “them”. “Us” generally referred to people of Afrikan origin and “them” referred to non-Blacks of European origin whose Ancestors had kidnapped, trafficked, enslaved and oppressed our Ancestors (or us). “Them” also referred to these non-Blacks who had supported and benefitted from these actions.

Although the south was militarily defeated in the Civil War, they have never surrendered. Southerners and their sympathizers created fantasies and myths about the antebellum period (the time before the end of slavery).  These fantasies and myths are called The Lost Cause, as we have previously discussed. The Lost Cause minimizes the savagery of slavery and paints the South as a noble, virtuous and chivalrous society.

The title of a previous essay in this space was “Empathy” (The Community Times, Volume 38, Number 44, November 14, 2024). In that article, the definition of empathy was given as the ability to understand, share and be sensitive to the feelings, thoughts and experiences of other people. This is different from sympathy, which is the feeling of pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune.

Every time something horrendous in America happens, politicians and newscasters, commentators an journalists will recite that tired old trope that America is “better than that”. But is it? Now is the time to take off the rose-colored lenses that our history books, movies and popular novels tried to permanently attach to our eyes...and brains.

What does the One Drop Rule have to do with the country of Argentina, you might ask? So glad you asked, especially with all the hoopla that we had with the World Cup. I’ll tell you.