Coming at you live from my childhood bunk bed at 3 am.
One thing I love about writing these blogs is that even if no one reads it, I produce something that I am proud of and that I feel like contributes to the world.
The amazing thing about doing a series on the things that other people have said that inspires me or taught me something is that I am disseminating the knowledge from them and passing it along so biases can be broken down and understanding materializes.
I believe education is important. I also believe that it doesn't come just from a textbook or a classroom. I think there are things to learn from formal education but a very important education comes from poetry and song, stories of struggle and love, and our own heart-wrenching, hard-to-swallow life experiences. If we can come out of these things learning something, we have been rewarded with something more precious than gold.
It was the summer after my freshman year of college. I was taking what would be the best trip of my life: a month in Ghana. I might have mentioned this trip in an earlier blog post (because it was that great), but it was more than anything I could ever imagine. The joy was different. The air was different. I was thankful and filled with gratitude at the kindness and laughter from the people I had met. The trip was a service learning trip and for the first two weeks, we remained in central Ghana living, working, and playing with the kids, young adults, staff, and families surrounding an orphanage.
The best part of that trip wasn't that the joy made me forget the poverty or that I felt good about what I was doing. It was quite the opposite. I saw the poverty and I listened to the experience of these individuals who became my friends. I held empathy and through their stories, understanding and respect. I had so much respect for the ability to be content and joyful despite lacking. But what they lacked in material items, the US and my hometown lacked in heart and genuine care for their fellow man.
Additionally, many times I knew I wasn't making any long term difference. I knew that my guest appearance was entertaining at best. But the mutual benefit of friendship and a bond between someone so different yet so similar to myself was the result.
I miss that feeling often.
I remembered that feeling as I read Assata Olugbala Shakur's autobiography. She talked about the vibrancy of being involved in Black liberation movements and the joy she felt being surrounded by her brothers and sisters united in the same struggle.
Lately I've been thinking a lot about the concepts surrounding social justice. Equality, capitalism, neoliberalism, vaccination rights, climate change... the list goes on and on.
I try my best to make decisions that are going to be beneficial for all of these issues and to not contribute to things that I don't believe in. I hold that as a position because I want us to be able to collectively do better and I think that starts with self. I also know that there is little change that happens with one person and that there is only so much I can do.
I'll never be blameless because I do not live in a society where I am able to.
Our phones are produced by underpaid, exploited workers, our desires to have cheap clothing causes the same socioeconomic harm to those folks as well as increasing pollution, we live single-use lives, and this country will still drop bombs on nations in the Global South without hesitation in the name of "democracy" no matter how Black our vice president is.
So, yeah. We can't change everything. It doesn't mean we shouldn't try. We just have to focus on a few things at a time to be the most effective.
And we need friends.
Assata has so many amazing quotes in her book that brought knowledge behind beliefs I already held and introduced new ones to me in ways that I was able to embrace.
If you don't know, Assata Shakur is an amazing Black woman who was a part of the Black Liberation Army, a revolutionary movement towards the social, political, and economic freedom of Black people. She was wrongfully convicted for multiple crimes including the murder of a police officer on the New Jersey turnpike and is now on the FBI's most wanted list today (which, I'm sorry, is bullshit, and the FBI knows it). She has escaped to Cuba and not only has the most beautiful name but is the badass I aspire to be.
Assata= she who struggles
Olugbala= love for the people
Shakur= thankful
Also, side note: these systems are always built against Black people with any consciousness to the oppression that they have faced and will continue to face in this country. If law enforcement serves to protect property and the government to protect the status quo, then Black liberationists have to be squashed at every stage possible. These are the same political and economic policies that will always put profits over people.
In her autobiography, she goes back and forth between her present situation for being on trial for the murder of the NJ police officer and her past and her story that led her to be a Black revolutionary.
"We began to talk about an education that was relevant to us Black people, that we could take back to our communities. We didn't want to learn Latin or classical Greek. We wanted to learn things that we could use to help free our people"
- ASSATA, p. 186
She describes her and her fellow students at this community college requesting funding for an after school program that would support kids who had trouble with their reading or math classes. They, the students, would help over summer and facilitate a class and teach these Black and Brown students about their culture and increase their sense of self worth.
Just reading this inspired me. It perked me up and almost depressed me at the same time. Is that being done in classrooms today? Are students able to be supported by mentors that look like them and can tell them that they are smart and worth something in a system that is envisioning them in orange jumpsuits?
I would hope we have come further than Assata's work.
When you struggle against a large enemy, be it greed, the downfalls and negative impacts of capitalism, or any other type of violence, it is almost therapeutic to be able to struggle for something better.
"The more active I became, the more I liked it. It was like medicine, making me well, making me whole. For the first time, my life felt like it had some real meaning. Everywhere I turned, Black people were struggling, Puerto Ricans were struggling. It was beautiful. I love Black people, I don't care what they're doing, but when Black people are struggling, that's when they are the most beautiful to me"
- ASSATA, p. 189
I mentioned earlier that I believe education is of the most importance? Not because I believe that "education is the only way to liberate our people" and gain the respect of the white man. I believe it is of the most importance because it allows us to fight back the things we are fed to believe are morally justifiable and right.
Without knowledge, we can be convinced that it is our own hand on our throats and not that of the oppressor. We will believe that WE are the ones that brought drugs into our communities and that WE are the ones that chose poverty by not enrolling in a four-year college.
With education, true education, we know that none of that is true.
"Revolutionaries in Africa understood that the question of African liberation was not just a question of race, that even if they managed to get rid of the white colonialists, if they didn't rid themselves of the capitalistic economic structure, the white colonialists would simply be replaced by Black neocolonialists."
- ASSATA, p. 190
It is important to understand fully what you are fighting for and the best ways to reach that outcome based off of the facts.
I want people to have community behind them in their struggle for a worthwhile life. Without community, a movement is nothing.
Happy Black History Month! If you would like to support me and the blog, feel free to venmo or cashapp me at @marthaessi/$marthaessi
Also, donate to this featured nonprofit to help provide transportation, food, and relationships to the materially poor in Tampa: click this link
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