Looking Back To What-Or For What?

February 08-2009:

Looking Back To What Or For What?

Tonight I watched one of those documentaries that cater to Black Americans who seek closure, for their ancestral slavery experience. And it induced me to pen my views on this most compelling experience for many Black American families and individuals.

I have never known my father. I was raised by my mother, (a Barbadian) by birth, who sailed to British Guiana as a young woman from Barbados, to settle there. She begat me and four sisters. All of us have different fathers. But I was the only one that never knew who my father was.

I thought about this ever since I was a child, and always wondered what my father may have looked like, or if he knew that I existed or cared. So eventually, as I grew older, and became an adult, I've learned to dispense with that idea, and be thankful, that at least, my mother never aborted me from her womb, despite the way she may have felt at his departure and irresponsibility.

So when I see and hear fellow Blacks wanting to revisit their former slave owned relatives somewhere in the hinterland of America. I ask myself, these questions.

* Visit them for what?

* Meet them to find out what?

* And what difference will this meeting do, to alleviate any resentment, or ancestral inhumanity to one's relatives now?

CONCLUSION:

I believe that if we keep looking back to past grievances, hurts, or injustices, we will never move on mentally, or spiritually. What has happened to us or our ancestors are already done. That time has already past, and can never return, nor can it be corrected now.

But what we can do now, is strive to ensure that it never re-occurs in our lifetime, or our offspring's lifetime.

There is so much drug usage, crime, self abuse, killing, and self degradation among Blacks in the USA, and globally. That it is incumbent upon each and every Black male and female globally, to strive for judicial equality, economic and educational access and opportunity, and ethnic, regional, and cultural unity among us now, tomorrow, and always.

That is what we MUST do now and for all time!

Derryck S. Griffith
Guyanese.
NYC.