Papi brought up the subject of emancipation day...or year...what are we supposed to be celebrating?

I don't pay much attention to special days proclaimed by the powers that be in bids to quell the dissent of the dominated. Politicians and the affluent minority they serve sign off on all sorts of proclamations as a way to observe good public relations without actually examining or claiming the power and domination that runs through society as a whole.

Our relations are diseased.

No tight-lipped, carefully worded, signed with a flourish to the sound of hearty applause apology is going to fix that. The heads of state of various countries (including Britain) built with monies earned off the backs of enslaved and colonized African people, whose forced labour provided the human fuel for the Industrial Revolution will never fully, openly claim culpability for the horror that was the Middle Passage.

If Britain, Canada, the US and all other countries involved admitted full guilt, this would be moment of no return. They'd have to start handing out apologies and cheques left, right and center.

If the British admitted guilt over enslaving Black folk, they'd of course have to admit to attempting to completely clear lands in north amerikkka of First Nations peoples through horrific acts of conventional and biological warfare.

Any apology these heads of states offer will be as surface and noncommittal as they can possibly make it...otherwise their coffers will feel the pinch.

So, I'm not particularly interested in any pathetic apology from any smiling, affluent, politically ignorant, conservative, heterosexual (or closeted), patriarchal white men who are really just doing what their handlers and advisors tell them to do anyway.

I prefer to think about the pervasive influence of the "good" work their christian, colonizing imperialist ancestors accomplished which lives well beyond them and into present day.

I reflect often on the official end of the African slave trade that changed the destinies of my ancestors forever. The end of slavery was just a series of papers pushed.

emancipation wasn't the end of the pain and torment faced by Black Africans brought to the West. It wasn't the end of our experience of domination at the hands of the colonizer. It didn't mark an end to the exploitation of our labour. Actually, the emancipation proclamation didn't even mark the end of slavery.

As I understand it, the British government had to do millions in pay outs to the people who were running the whole show to entice them to close up shop...I guess in amerikkka some "freed" Africans themselves got the now legendarily inadequate forty acres of (Native, stolen, bloodied) land and a mule. Black loyalists who went north to kkkanada got some rocky (Native, stolen, bloodied) land. Gotta check to see what caribbean formerly incarcerated then "freed" Africans "got".

In any case, official emancipation marked the beginning of the surpression of the knowledge of the horror. The collective torment itself just went underground. It had "passed over" and existed no more in the collective consciousness of those who mattered. Therefore the continuing agony could not, would not be allowed to exist in the collective consciousness of those "freed" Africans who were still experiencing it.

We learned to make do, to overcome and to think of ourselves as "freed" and clear.

I think about Toni Morrison's character Sethe in her book Beloved. The white massa came to collect not her, but his property -- her children. She knew this and did an act of biological scorched earth. She tried to stem the flow of product from her body to his human factory -- the plantation. Sethe tried to keep her children out of the reach of slavery by attempting to kill them all. She only succeeded in "removing" one child, aptly named posthumously -- Beloved -- from his reach.

Honestly? This moment of desperate resistance (and the section about the Black men having to give slavers head in exchange for breakfast) overshadows so much of what I remember about the book that I have to go back and reread what happened next. I seem to remember the people who witnessed or heard about her murder of her daughter expressing shock and surprise. There could be no situation so horrific that a Black mother a runaway slave would have to kill her own child.

There could be no situation so horrific, so grave that a conscientious and loving mother would want to spare her child from the experience.

Already, even in the fictional context of Sethe's escaped slave existence, surrounded by other people scarred and damaged by the experience of slavery, her actions were questionable.

People had forgotten, been invited to forget, been offered forgetfulness as a balm. But a balm to who? Who exactly does the submerging, the denial of the ongoing impact of slavery serve?

When I think about the declaration of emancipation by wily white politicians so long ago...
When I add to this the observance of this day by descendants of "freed" African slaves...
When I go on from there to reflect on these descendants presently struggling to get present day politicians to observe a day invented by politicians...
I smile wryly and laugh the laugh of the damned.

The purpose of emancipation day was to smooth things over in a spin doctoring, PR sort of way.
This has already been achieved.
Present day politicians have no use for a hugely successful PR campaign hatched by their predecessors to manage a problem (what to do with the fucking slaves who had now become more expensive than the cost of their living) that is no longer a problem...for them. (more laughter of the damned)

The descendants of African slaves know tha kids are definitely not alright. But at this particular juncture, nobody fucking cares. We do not pose a collective threat to any powers that be anymore. The last time we posed a real threat was probably in the sixties and politicians commissioned a few strategic hits, imprisoned some people, beat some others and then made some very publicized concessions in order to smooth things over and make the fabric of polite society appear smooth again. Civil "rights", anyone?

I don't count what happened in los angeles because the burning of certain parts of that city was a historical hick-up easily contained, not the continuance of an ages old struggle against domination. In toronto echoing riots were repositioned as youth discontent. The powers that be were prepared and knew what to do. These "disturbances" were declawed, rendered devoid of their intended meaning, made to serve as an opening to spearhead the separation of youth from their cultural communities of resistance in a series of insidious and extremely subtle ways that to this day allow resistance knowledge to flow not primarily from a cultural community context, but instead from employees of government bodies, the henchmen and wimmin of politicians and from NGOs. (Did I tell you I have a hard time finding work in community? More laughter of the damned.)

Right now, the only people who give a hoot about Black people are corporations who see us as a biological resource, a demographic they've already figured out and branded...pardon the painful pun. hee, hee.

In the consumerist, capitalist western world emancipation day can only be a commodity, a product and pop/ular experience ready to be mass distributed and then ecstatically consumed. Black people have convinced themselves that the dish of emancipation arriving cold so long after the (constructed) fact, with a side dish of apology must be served up by the powers that be with a (heartfelt) apology suitably televised, recorded and packaged for future family time viewing.

We need the fiction of politicians giving a fuck about our feelings so that we can continue to think of ourselves as colonized settlers who are necessary, powerfully positioned and valid.

Please, please don't let us down. Help us maintain the fiction that prime ministers, presidents and whole governments care about us. If you can hide your disdain and just do this one thing, we'll have the motivation we need to keep our noses to various grindstones working to uphold the structures that maintain our own domination.

Just say you're sorry and we'll continue to forget, continue to ignore our present lot as glorified surfs working, helping to dominate land soaked with Native blood. It's not too much to ask it?

Then of course others will chime in to reposition, redirect and eventually nullify even the limited significance such demands for apologies hold...

Who tha fuck do you think you are? What makes you so "special" that you should deserve an apology from our rulers? Well, if you're going to get an apology, we want one for the Black muggers, Black home invaders,Black children who bullied our white children, that Black post man who went ballistic...this is about equality. We think everyone needs to behave nicely and get along.

Oh, and when I talk about accountability in this context I'm not referring to an apology or about monetary reparations. I'm talking about a profound examination of the impact of British imperialist policy as the origin of so many diseased power relations in the West., specifically in north amerikkka.

But, I know...
People don't want to look back in acknowledgment of the "sins" of their forefathers and foremothers. They're not responsible for what a bunch of dead white people did long ago.

Fascinating, most like to look back and inventory the achievements of their forefathers and foremothers, acknowledging all the benefits they've been able to access because of the actions of a bunch of dead white people...which are inextricably linked to many horrific acts of wrong doing perpetrated on people who happened to smile and say: "Hullo. Welcome", when perhaps, they should have been saying: "Here's some moldy coconut water, get back on your muthafuckin' boats and paddle".

Oh well, no use crying over spilled blood...well actually, I cry over it often.

Here's to previously, purposefully submerged trauma and consciousness surfacing in ways that can actually transform relationships so riddled with power (over) that even a simple apology is completely suspect and emptied of meaning. I'm not worried about whether Tony, or Georgie or Stevie or any of the other politicians apologize. Their apologies ain't worth the toilet paper they'll be written on.