quote:
Originally posted by Noah The African:One of the primary conduits to exploitation is IGNORANCE. The reality is that people choices and bargaining would radically change if they new the true cost or value of something.
At the risk of sounding like a 'speaker of truth', I must interject at the juncture of the above quoted selection beginning with the word 'reality' in order to discuss the 'true' value of 'something' called Life.
Noah has deftly established the culprit of exploitation as Ignorance, and as a result, I would like to remind us all of the circumstance of our present Ignorance. As Africa-'americans', it is slavery.
But before slavery, how did we 'Africans' value Life? Did everything including our food come with a price tag attached to it? Recall the Europeans called us 'uncivilized savages' in order to justify the taking of our lands. Enslaving those they saw as 'savagaes' was be no different than domesticating wild animals to them, and 'domesticate' they did.
Now we speak their language, discuss their economic policy, call ourselves by their names, and refer to what they call 'theirs' our own as 'equal citizens'. We have been domesticated by European standards to look like, walk like, and talk like them. Everything we were before they came is lost to us, so we have no measure against which to compare the 'true' value of Life. Only their European one.
It replaced our own, and in the process, deleted any memory of there ever having been another. Like a modern virus erases a hard-drive, our minds have been erased completely and totally, and infected with a European mentality. We have been assimilated into the 'borg' collective peoples. lol, no joke.
Any way, back to what I was saying, what is the 'true' value of Life? The European way? To what do we compare it to? Because it has been drilled into us minorities as the 'right' way', the 'only' way, the 'american' way.
We are the decendants of former slaves and our history not only includes that of the Europeans, it goes much further back. But in less than two thousands years, they have wiped away all legitimate record of the preceding African empires. They destyroyed it all, and now we think like them, argue like them, and believe like them.
WE are the very epitome of IGNORANCE. We ARE the exploited, and have been since we got here. We have simply managed to 'forget' that we were given ignorance as an inheritance by those who enslaved us. They replaced our identity with theirs, and now we argue the economics of capitalism, as we have observed through them.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
sd