Slavery’s scars remain for Black Americans | Pius Kamau – Colorado Springs Gazette

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DR. PIUS KAMAU

DR. PIUS KAMAU
I recently recorded a podcast on Black History month for the Coalition Against Global Genocide (CoAGG.org), a group I belong to. In this podcast our guest, Dr. Lee Butler, president of Iliff School of Theology, discussed how Black American history is reflected in and continues to influence today’s Black Americans’ lives. A society’s history influences its existence.
Like many immigrants, my sympathy for Black Americans has been shallow, having bought into the majority’s narrative about Black people’s lives and behavior, without empathetically considering their origin, and the painful, complex history they have endured. My attitude reflected the country’s majority’s, not because I am a racist, but because I was ignorant of Black history and the issues American born Blacks live every day.
I read James Baldwin, WEB Dubois, Ralph Ellison and others, and yet, I lacked understanding. Not having lived the Black experience, to second-guess what and how it feels to be a Black American requires special mental contortionist skills; or walking a mile in their shoes.
According to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Black American family varied from the “traditional nuclear family.” Its weakening led to a “tangle of pathology”: cycles of poverty, crime, and educational underachievement. Like Moynihan, I lacked the ability to correlate Black people’s history to their African roots and to appreciate a similarity of matrilineal African families. I preferred Moynihan’s “traditional family” that is the American majority’s Eurocentric families.
The matrilineal family structure sustained the Black family, through slavery and post slavery times. Dr. Butler’s description of the family, where a child is raised not by one individual, but — in ideal circumstances — by the community, resonated with my own African tribal background. My siblings and I were raised by a community of mothers — members of our clan. Often, one woman took care of children while their mothers worked in the fields.
It is easy, for those willing to do so, to see how, many problems that confront the African-American community are a result of systemic, deliberate denial of services or resources. Our public schools leave a great deal to be desired, including poorly paid schoolteachers; decrepit, insecure schools and school buildings. All are a result of neglect and unwillingness by society to better fund poor students’ schools. Unfortunately graduation from these schools to our prison system is just a hop, skip and jump.
For Black Americans, the prison system has a long historical correlation to slavery — free labor — and the need for “a captive free labor.” Historical structures have a memory of their own. Consequently, it is easier to incarcerate than to educate a Black man in America.

At a time when the DEI system is being dismantled, it sounds counterintuitive to raise issues that confront Black and Native Americans. But our hard rightward swing of the political pendulum doesn’t negate the truth: Black Americans continue to be disadvantaged and people like me need to look deeper at and understand Black and Native American history.
Black Americans have, on an average, a better life than Blacks around the world. In the past I unwisely compared Black Americans’ lives to the life of average Africans. Black Americans carry a heavy 400-plus-year burden of history. We may not see it, but the wise among us can imagine it. Listening to Dr. Butler helped me to peer through a dark historical veil that enslaved Africans lived through. Without exception and whether they know it or not, all Black Americans bear post-slavery psychological scars. Sadly, many reject psychotherapy.
Black History Month calls upon our Black fellow citizens to remind us that they are here and they will never let us ignore them. It’s a time that reminds them they have come a long way, and still have a long way to go. Despite today’s harsh rhetoric, and despite cruelty from some, a majority of Whites empathize with their Black fellow citizens. People like me are open to learning more about the issues that Black and Native Americans confront. Extend a welcoming hand to African, Caucasian and Asian brothers; consider establishing more educational, social fora to engender and exchange amicable dialogues.
Above all, I now realize how wrong I was.
Black Americans are the most resilient, hard-working people in the world. To survive 400-plus years of harsh unimaginable treatment demands we acknowledge that, “You are a breed of the toughest humans on earth, and you have earned a place in the Americas.”
Pius Kamau, M.D., a retired general surgeon, is president of the Aurora-based Africa America Higher Education Partnerships; co-founder of the Africa Enterprise Group and an activist for minority students ‘STEM education. He is a National Public Radio commentator, a Huffington Post blogger, a past columnist for Denver dailies and is featured on the podcast, “Never Again.”
Pius Kamau, M.D., a retired general surgeon, is president of the Aurora-based Africa America Higher Education Partnerships; co-founder of the Africa Enterprise Group and an activist for minority students ‘STEM education. He is a National Public Radio commentator, a Huffington Post blogger, a past columnist for Denver dailies and is featured on the podcast, “Never Again.”
DR. PIUS KAMAU
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Gilliam Nii Lighter

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