BUCK BREAKER
“GET THE HELL OUT OF MY GYM, ANDY!” Coach Whiteness demanded.
“What? What did I do?” I responded in surprise.
“GET YOUR BIG ASS OUT OF MY GYM, RIGHT NOW, BEFORE I BREAK YOU!”
“No, I’m not leaving. All I did was make a joke to Barry!” I gestured to my teammate.
“I SAID, GET THE FUCK OUT!”
Coach Whiteness fired a basketball in our direction and charged toward me.
He was red with anger, and spit was flying out of his mouth as he was shouting so aggressively. His behavior was almost cartoonish.
There was a menacing aura that surrounded his shaved bald head and black-rimmed glasses.
I kicked the wooden bleachers on the way out of the gymnasium in frustration as I left practice for the locker room.
It was my first year playing high school basketball and I was demoralized that a grown man had just threatened to harm my body in front of my teenage teammates.
I felt unprotected, defenseless, and defeated as I took off my practice jersey reflecting on what just took place.
As I left school to go home, Coach Whiteness called me into his office to justify his overreaction.
He shared that he had to be harder on me to set an example for the other players on the team and he knew that I could take his punishment more than the other guys. He said that because of my large size and intellectual defiance he had to be harsher on me for everyone to see.
The overtones of what he was saying are deeply rooted in the world-renowned American human trafficking practices that date back centuries.
Coach Whiteness was grooming me to the idea that defiant black property needed to be physically dealt with in public in order to break the will of the collective group from rebelling against authority.
It would not be the first time that my defiance would be met with violently charged language or actions. I quickly learned as a teenager that accountability in basketball practice — like in this country — is heavily enforced upon the Black body more than other bodies.
The global slave trade disconnected and disassociated the western Black diaspora from the African continent.
The result of that centuries-long operation has resulted in leaving many of us holistically unprotected and exposed to attack from outsiders, questioning our ability to enrich the quality of life in this race-based meritocracy, and searching for our spiritual identity.
The largest-scale human trafficking operation in history resulted in over twelve million Africans being completely disconnected from the rich traditions, spiritual practices, and dietary benefits that are passed down from generation to generation.
Many cultures across the globe have benefited from this ritualistic passing down of knowledge over centuries. It’s humanity's oral blueprint for survival.
The transatlantic slave trade removed us from this inheritance of knowledge. The severing of our proverbial umbilical cords from the vast resources and traditions of the various tribes that we descend from on the African continent has left millions of their descendants searching for our historical identity.
We continue to sustain repeated attempts to crush our dignity which has left us vulnerable to being systematically broken down but yearning to reconnect with the hidden knowledge of who we are as a people.
Learning about my ancestors has been one of the greatest gifts that the digital devices of today have given to me. However, one can only devour so much of that knowledge until one learns that there are limits to the availability of certain information. Either because the literary work can't be found or it costs too much to acquire.
For some folks, our history stops at the slave trade. But the richness of our history goes far beyond what we have been brainwashed to believe about ourselves. Our minds are absent of the many knowledges and lessons in the stories that run through our blood.
I think of literary works like Zora Neal Hurston’s Barracoon which wasn’t published for widespread distribution until one hundred years after she wrote it in 2018. The buried book details the story of Cudjoe Lewis, one of the last captives known to illegally cross the ocean from west Africa to Alabama in the summer of 1860.
My discovery of Hurston’s writing only leaves me with questions.
What other literary works have not been made available for public consumption?
How were people left open to the prey of White captors from foreign lands by African traders?
Once the eastern world knew of the differentiated brutality of the slave practices taking place in the western world, why did they do nothing?
The historical playbook to achieve this crime against humanity was developed by a coordinated effort to take the mind but preserve the body. If you can’t take the intelligent mind then break its back.
Break it so it can no longer stand upright but just enough to continue to labor on to work.
I recently observed the Brooklyn Nets point guard, Kyrie Irving, be made an example of for his defiance to apologize for questioning normative beliefs around ancient east African spiritual practices on Twitter.
Kyrie called attention to a documentary on Amazon without adequately providing a contextual disclaimer that there were proven falsehoods juxtaposed next to his digital suggestion.
The ensuing social discussion and actions by his NBA employer caused me to reflect on my own grappling with the intensity of the way white people have responded to me for being a “smart ass”.
More questions arose as Kyrie was met with backlash but no constructive lesson.
Why is intelligent questioning by Black people always met with such harsh punishment?
Why is Black pushback or Black defiance met with such violent reactions?
What is it about the Black thinker that enrages the mind of Whiteness?
Perhaps, it’s because some of us do not bow to the notion that whiteness is born into an automatically elevated status in society.
Status is not given, it’s something that is earned when one has taken actions worthy of note by his or her fellow peers.
When you’ve constructed western ideologies on the invented construct of white supremacy then you’ve disrupted the natural order of humanity. This mindset robs the humanity of everyone involved — regardless of color, religion, or creed.
I bow to ideals that date back to ancient northeastern African law, the 42 precepts of Ma’at. These practices which predate Hebrew Mosaic Law were rooted in balance, respect, logic, discovery, discourse, justice, and fairness.
These ideas are the antithesis of the ideologies that prop up the brand of whiteness that has thrived in North America for centuries.
Naturally, as is the system's intent, my defiance in the face of this racist American ideology has wounded me greatly and caused me immense pain.
“Get out of my office.” Pastor Whiteness said in the dismissive tone of a mobster.
“Paola had sex with another man and I don't believe she’s pregnant by me. That child might not be mine and I can’t father the child of the man she cheated on me with.” I plead for his understanding.
“She sinned against God, not you. You should father the child because you decided to have sex with her.” He replied. “Now, get out of my office,” the pastor demanded.
Pastor Whiteness led a mostly Black flock of thousands. I was raised in his congregation for twenty years and he just booted me at that moment with such ease. I was also employed on the custodial staff and in one of the most stressful situations of my lifetime, he recommended that I alter my life forever to protect his interests.
Paola, my high school sweetheart, had informed me that she was pregnant and the paternity of the baby was in question as she confessed that she was sexually involved with an older man from her internship.
Her mom was employed on the church staff and the pastor had known her family for decades. I was unwilling to participate in the coverup to father a strange man’s child. I defied the pastor's wishes so I guessed he no longer had use for me.
The lie of me fathering a child who was not my own could not be choked down and I refused to be reduced to another story that he could auction for tithe money.
The pastor could see that my will would not bend to his suggestive demand and labeled me a threat to his congregation. I was disobedient to his authority and order could not be maintained if my mind could not be easily manipulated.
He wanted to maintain the lie, and I had to escape Pastor Whiteness’s plantation-like church to unshackle the limitations on my mind and seek the truth.
The pile of unwanted and sullied bodies that whiteness has defiled through debilitating actions is a mountain high.
Whiteness can desecrate the bodies of women, the laws of this country, and the norms of mankind. But when a Black man defies whiteness for even a moment then there’s a violent anger that is unleashed that is unmatched in recorded history.
It’s the redness in the eyes and the scowl in the forehead or maybe the complete disregard for the well-being of the Black body that I know many-a-body that has hung beneath the hanging tree has witnessed this seething anger in their final moments.
Whether in sports, religion, or business, white skin's proximity to uphold whiteness as the global crown and blackness as its subjects of subjugation are the widespread conditions that we are faced to reckon with.
Keep the slaves shrouded from the knowledge of who they are, to keep their minds but preserve the body just enough for commercial labor. It’s capitalism and slavery, repeated.
It’s never about sports, religion, or business. It’s about control over the greatest number of people in order to maintain dominance over the maximum group or groups of people.
Those industries are just another tool to uphold the supremacy of whiteness in this country.
A majority of the visuals that we’ve been bombarded with in this nation magnify the white-skinned experience and disparage the black-skinned one.
Grace is rarely extended to the Black body. It’s as if some are wired to deal with Black bodies with the absolute amount of brutality and the least amount of patience.
Blacks should be afforded the ability to have the same defiant stance as their white counterparts if this is to be a true bastion of equality.
When this nation faces up to its actions and apologizes at the federal level, then Americans relationally too shall learn to have empathy and grace for one another on the cultural level.
The greatest plague on this nation is Americans' disregard for one another's lives — especially Black and queer lives. Society accepts heavy-handed accountability for some and defiance from others.
This reality leaves me with questions about the intersection of our religious and racial history.
Has the United States of America ever stood in front of a nation of its homies to apologize for its barbarous actions past and present, as the Australian and Dutch governments have?
Have the Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, Belgians, and Italians apologized for their participation as history’s most sadistic enslavers?
If words are the standard for accountability then why have Blacks in North America, the Caribbean, and South and Central America never been extended those formal words of apology from history’s greatest abusers?
Dating back to the fifteenth century organized religion has encouraged the trafficking of Black humans. Pope Whiteness V from Portugal issued a series of official letters enabling white traffickers to go into Africa and capture Black people — no longer deeming the act a sin.
A few centuries later European Whiteness would invent race-based science to support their fantasies that Blacks were subhuman and unequal to their human counterparts.
These actions aligned with power opened the floodgates for this divine crime that was perpetrated across religion, science, insurance, and banking.
This coordination diluted the blackness of sacred texts that were already saturated in blackness.
As I continue to discover my own ancestral history and gain a deeper knowledge of our traditions and rituals, I think of defying the Council of Montserrat that once declared in 1680,
“Everything would be lost once the slave knew that he had a mind.”
I will continue to defy those enslavers and enrich my brain because the mind is the light that will uncover history’s most deeply hidden truths.
“I FEEL LIKE YOU DON'T RESPECT MY POSITION AT THIS COMPANY!” Boss Lady Whiteness shouted at me into her computer screen.
“I do respect you but I respectfully disagree,” I replied. “Can you lower your tone? I’m calmly asking you a question about how this company makes money.”
“NO, AND I WON’T TOLERATE YOUR DEFIANT ATTITUDE!” she bellowed.
Those dangerous words rang like a bell in my ears like the prelude to an all too familiar threat.
She was gnawing on her nublike fingernails as her eyes darted back and forth from her wall clock to the screen.
An uncomfortable amount of tense energy filled the screen and was permeating into my room. I could discern the discomfort as I sought to unearth where these emotions were coming from.
Boss Lady Whiteness was disheveled and rocking her laptop across her thighs in frustration at my tolerance for her anger.
I continued to question her and I began to see that familiar red face of anger emerge. She could not handle thoughtful pushback from a subordinate. So she began to disrespectfully verbally berate me.
As inciteful words flew out of her jaws, I could feel the trauma of my own past wounds arising in my belly. I knew that I was in danger and needed to flee that shady operation.
Recently, I shared the trauma behind that experience with a white woman friend and she reminded me that one of the results of the structure of American patriarchy is that white women will often revel in opportunities to verbally abuse people who they deem are beneath them.
“They love to punch down on Black people because white men punch down on them,” she said.
Those words stuck with me for days. I then remembered that somewhere in America white folks "perform" liberal ideology without confronting the white supremacy lingering in their subconscious.
You see the trafficker also experiences the generational trauma of trafficking — it’s not just the trafficked.
White supremacy has left so many mentally damaged and physically inept from being born into a culture that instantaneously elevates a person to a top position without merit or work, which is damaging to their psyche too.
The biggest lie that has ever been told has been in the development, construction, and maintenance of the brand known as whiteness.
This colonial construct has globally stolen its position across societies, crowned itself as the authority and blackness as the subjugated, cloaked itself in privilege, and then demonized us for searching for where we were stolen from while they named heirs and lines of succession.
This wretched lie permeates our culture, fills our museums, is splattered into our literary works, brush-stroked into the artworks that we celebrate, fortified into the infrastructure that we’ve built, and is generally weaved into a narrative that plunders the minds of peoples across the world.
This environment enables white-skinned people to have the courage to speak to people in a manner that continues to suggest that we are subhuman and void of emotion. In a voice that indicates that there are no consequences for their poisonous words.
But we know that white skin as we know it today is historically the result of climate change-induced migration and humanity’s evolved distance from the equator. However, despite that tribal evolution, modern people everywhere descend from east African black-skinned people. When our species was on the brink of survival, it was our ancient Black ancestors that kept us alive and moving forward.
Traditions from all cultures and nations should be celebrated but we have been left downtrodden and weary from having to deal with centuries of this inequality that we are not wired for.
We have been severed from spiritual traditions, dietary practices, and the recreational joys that give us living water to endure life’s challenges.
We are wired for harmony but today we are constantly met with noise that distracts us from fully reconnecting with those traditions in spite of new evidence that emerges from archeological excavations in North and East Africa every year.
However as evidence is pulled from the ground supporting these beliefs, history looks different as I now view any new evidence that challenges widely accepted beliefs through the lens of defending the historical construction of whiteness and its ongoing preservation and the expansion of the lie that blackness is inferior.
The nurturing and mystification of these lies are vitally important to maintaining the global order and sustaining dominance without the global majority.
This lie is vital to preserving the infrastructure and internal organs of American Whiteness that keep the status quo and prevents us from analyzing how America grew to its pseudo size and influence when three centuries ago it did not exist as a nation.
Anyone that threatens to defy that invented construct and intellectually questions the merits of that falsehood is hastily banished from society and labeled too dangerous for Socratic discussion.
Even now, whiteness is in defiance of the United Nations, the financial laws of this nation, and the laws of humanity.
The atrocity that took place in America needs to be faced so we can move forward to a more respectful society.
When American Whiteness at the federal level will rise and boldly apologize before a collection of nations for its crimes then it may lead the way to face cultural racism in sports, religion, and business.
While I recognize that formal apologies may never be received from the nations that harmed us, having lived in Australia ten years ago, I do know that apologies at the federal level are a step toward national restorative justice and the beginnings of authentic neighborhood healing.
When you broaden the historical lens and include indigenous peoples, you see that the consistent theme in the Americas has been barbarous accountability and lessons for blackness but grace and patience for whiteness.
Whiteness will not be deconstructed in my lifetime because the slavery-infused concept is so deeply ingrained in our culture and embedded into our laws that even when our collective body screams out in defiance of the current unharmonious order we are met with unrelenting violence.
It’s this immoral power dynamic that has left so many of us damaged. A disfigured and withered democratic body.
This can no longer be our mental plight, we must continue to strive toward finding peace and dealing with our past.
Who we are has been disconnected from our memory yet there has been no formal apology, no cultural empathy, and no intellectual room to search for who we come from and what's been stolen from us. We’ve been disassociated from ancient Blackness, we’ve been removed from ourselves.
As I pondered on an inheritance of a memory that I never received, questions echoed. This time as I read more and grew more confident there were answers.
Why can’t we peacefully explore ancient African history?
Because it is rich in civil engineering advancements by Black people that dispel the core historical lies created by whiteness.
What will we learn if we study east African cultures in Kemet and Nubia more closely?
That there were multiethnic societies where Black monarchs reigned for generations.
Why could that knowledge be so dangerous?
Exposing that race was an invented construct intended to contort rationalizations and disconnect the descendants of the African continent from their regal history in order to amass exorbitant wealth and power on the backs of their free labor is history’s foundational truth.
