I received my copy of Evan Carmichael's YOUR ONE WORD last Thursday. Reading through the book, it seemed a little...cliched obviously. It was pretty much standard fare. You owe it to yourself. Stop making excuses. The usual. I got up at 4:00 am to read it, and I was ready. After all of my hard work, I'd made it. How to make your one word. I don't want to ruin it for you, but I went through the exercise and it turned out that my One Word is...SLAVE!
What cruel fate! When I had first heard Evan Carmichael pitching his One Word philosophy on his Youtube Channel, I said " Oh, that's easy my brother! My one word must be READ!" Why? Well, I normally read for four-and-a-half to five hours a day. So I thought that "Read" would be a shoe-in for my One Word. It seemed so...Intelligent. So astute. So prudent. So...safe. I could've gotten invited to a few school assemblies with that one.
But what does #Slave mean to me? Well, everybody keeps telling me that slavery is over, that it was "a million years ago" and that it has nothing to do with today. I'm a conservative, of course (as conservative as a black man can be) but I can't fall for it. Since 250 year is the "cutoff" year for relevance, why do I know the names Plato, Socrates, Poe, Shakespeare, George Washington and Adam Smith? Just today I started reading and enticing little book about Alexander The Great. Really fascinating stuff. If stuff that happened three centuries ago has "no bearing" on today, then how does something that happened ten times as long ago get to be mentioned?
Why we're at it, why do we keep using those damn wheels, that pesky mortar and that confounded roof? Why not abandon them and live underneath a wind mill? I know what I will be accused of, but my ancestral history as a slave is very integral to my personality and my current life. I don't try to run from it anymore. It's in everything that I do. It's the way I think. Always applying for that next job. Waiting for permission to strike out on my own. Ever seeking someone's approval. Raised on welfare. The list goes on.
We went from being considered less than dogs to being the president of the United States. If you say that Obama was only half black, like I do, then we blacks should stand aside and applaud the Mulatto men of America, whose very existence would've been illegal less than 300 years ago. Even more remarkable if you ask me. But it all comes back to #Slave.
And blacks weren't the only slaves. Many races recovered from slavery, but we recovered the fastest and the strongest.
As a black man, if you doubt that the history of Slavery in the United States impacts you today, just walk outside. We are still half-way in transition from the plantation to the promised land.
