There’s a tight close up of Diane Nash in Spike Lee’s documentary, 4 Little Girls.  Her voice is calm, but her words are deliberate as she speaks into the camera: “We felt that in order to respect ourselves as an adult man and woman [former husband Rev. James Bevel (SCLC) and herself, one of the founders of SNCC], we could not let little girls be killed.” Bevel echoes these words: “We are not going to do it,”—that is, allow people to kill our children.  The idea for the Voting Rights campaign came about as a result of the Birmingham Church bombing.  We would fight for the right to vote, said Nash, in order to “protect our children.” Helen Pegues, aunt of one of the girls killed (Denise McNair), talks about how the fire hoses used on the children in marches before the bombing were “ugly.” To see grown men put fire hoses on young children was just ugly.

That was forty-four years old.  It is not fire hoses our children face, but they do face unfair punishment in the public schools and longer sentences for non-violent crimes.  Our children face poverty and unemployment.  Despite voting rights (slowly eroding away with the violent practice of caging and plain thievery of votes) and hate crime laws (at best mild and ineffective), domestic terrorism against Black Americans, particularly our children persist today. 

How do we bring about new ideas, new methods, and new approaches within the same imperialist order? I suspect we can’t.  If we can’t, then perhaps the best way is to not engage for the purpose of ineffective reform but to disengage for the purpose of revolutionary change? 

The idea of disengaging from mainstream America would perhaps frighten some Blacks who have inherited the “American Dream” and think “our children” refers exclusively to their individual children whom they have urged to stay clear of anything that reeks of blackness.  Be successful in school in order to enter the halls of Harvard or Yale and “get over” with that successful position of power—like the man.   Those Blacks who would object to any idea of deliberately disengaging Black Americans to re-think our future have benefited from America’s primary value: Get rich or die trying.  As Minnesota Rep. Keith Ellison informed U.S. Attorney Donald Washington, King did not struggle and die for Washington to buy a big house and drive a Lexus.  These Black people have already maneuvered themselves away from the Black masses.  Or so they think.

Unfortunately, our children are being taught the value of greed and individualism too.  Some of our artist now rap for personal financial gain, singing lyrics in honor of greed while generating images that denigrate their maternal heritage.  How much more powerful the lyrics of our children’s outcry would be if they were infused with the knowledge of Black feminism, for example?  How revolutionary to flavor their lyrics with the empowering memories of Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Ida B. Wells, for instance. This would do so much towards gender and class relations in the Black community!

As it is, our children do not have the right to fulfill their human potential.  They don’t have the right to be, to love themselves and their heritage and they have had to witness Black adults capitulate to white power, white values.  Neighborhoods of Black youth are treated by this white power structure as farm animals slated for a literal death or a spiritual death as they are herded off to prison industrial complexes.  The white power structure profits from these deaths of our children.  These young people on their “release” from prison don’t have the right to have their votes stolen, thus participate as citizens in this country. 

Malcolm was right forty years ago when he said we were not ready for integration with white America.  After four hundred years of the denial of our human rights, we needed to collectively consider a course of action that would make it possible to survive living alongside who never considered our humanity.  Now today, after the destruction of Affirmative Action and in the midst of a continual assault on our heritage, we are terrorized still with the appearance of nooses everywhere.  Are they signs of what is to come: actual Black bodies hanging once again from trees? 

We can’t wait to witness the outcome of these racist and hateful assaults.  Our children are already being killed, one way or the other.    

The nooses are an “ugly” sign of the mentality of white Americans who are not and never have been comfortable in a world of racial difference.  Their “civilization” began in violence in feudal Europe and they were indifferent to the plight of their own people.  This “civilization” brings to the world an ideology of whiteness that is simply not at “home” with humanity.  Having experienced four hundred years of Europe’s wild child trashing about, why are we Black adults still debating whether or not we have seen enough nooses, enough threats to our existence?  Certainly we have been disenchanted with the last forty years of integration.  Certainly we know too that these nooses are delivered by the messengers for the silent ones who cowardly look away as they stand on mountains of rope.  

We can’t continue to let an America’s narrative of whiteness (innocence, that is, the absurd idea of its ideology of non-violence) continue to bury our children in their dungeons.  We need to disengage our children from the terrorists’ nooses and engage them in our heritage and our right to self-determination.

Malcolm said, “We surely need to stop being the minority and become part of the majority…” We have to remember as we think of ways to re-group within this country and re-unite ourselves with others around the world oppressed by the same American Empire.

And Malcolm continued with the following:

Let’s defend the right of our children and our future to exist as we have been on this Earth longer than any other group of people.  Our children are waiting and the world is waiting. 

BlackCommentator.com Columnist Dr. Jean Daniels is a writer and lecturer in Madison, Wisconsin. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.