African Americans long-ago won a long-fought for standing to exist peacefully in America. Our ancestors in Africa were living in advanced civilizations with architects, mathematicians, scientists, libraries, art, music, fashion, social activities, sports, and higher education for 4,000 years before Europeans arrived in America. Africa is 3 times larger and has 4 times the population of the USA. Black people are going to live peacefully in America and history lessons in American genre are skewed in the wrong direction. To learn you true genealogy and family history helps African Americans heal from the destructive forces on institutional and systemic negative images and downright lies and manipulation that affects, unfortunately, the minds and actions of the ignorant and sometimes, the evil.
This is a battle we are fighting today highlights, make no mistake about it; the use contrived images of Black people through the lens of non-Black editor, producers, and media distribution systems — in both traditional and social media — is destructive and directly impacts Black Lives. Any of us who have traveled and consumed foreign media can attest to the contrast in media. During the 2000’s, my family I traveled to Canada at least annually, for more than 10 consecutive years, because my in-laws owned a home on a remote Canadian island called Gabriola. Expecting the constant tension of daily micro- and macro-aggressions African Americans face practically daily, if they go outside of their family and friends, I found none. In the hours, days, weeks we spent in British Columbia, Vancouver Island, and Gabriola Island, my family experienced the opposite of racism. We found warm, accepting, friendly, kind, welcoming people – in every city we visited. I believe any experience was because at the time, before the complete explosion in the use of online media, Canada refused to import American media programming. As a member of the United Kingdom, Canada stayed away from importing racism. As soon as we returned home, however, that Canadian glow was usually almost immediately gone by the time we got home.
