Circumcision of the Heart Ministry
For we are the circumcision, which worship God in the spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh.
Philippians 3:3
Philippians 3:3
Early on in our nation's history, when white settlers colonized Africans through systems of indentured labor and slavery, they justified these acts of racial aggression by claiming that black people were not fully human. In particularly it was in relation to matters of the heart, of care and love, that the colonizers drew examples to prove that blacks were dehumanized, that we lacked the range of emotions accepted as a norm among civilized people. In the racist mindset the enslaved African was incapable of deep feeling and fine emotions. Since love was considered to be finer sentiments, blacks were seen as lacking the capacity to love.
Subsequently, over time, we began to believe what we were told we were, dehumanization had happened too many of us and we were left damaged by the ongoing racist genocide. Forever wounded in the space where we would love. It is no mystery what has happened and is still happening today. White supremacy has remained firmly embedded in both secular and religious forms of media, communication, and education. While African Americans have won a measure of freedom for our bodies, too many of our minds remain enslaved by the more subtle manacles of an ideology of white racial preference. The structures of discrimination are not attempting a comeback in updated forms, as some would have us believe, they never left. We've upgraded from the cotton plantations to state and federal plantations. And those of us caught in the snares of the racially unjust laws that have us confined to within these overly populated plantations in large measure have not the spirit to respond. And long gone are the voices of the prophets of the civil rights movements.
Sadly, our well-to-do brothers and sisters would have you to believe that all is well and people in prison deserve to be here, until one of their love ones are faced with the same dilemma.
Now, instead of the lack of ability to love, we're targeted as the reason for the drug problem in this country, particularly, cocaine base (crack cocaine). Whatever, problems this country has--blame it on the African Americans and Hispanics--and come up with a plan we (the country) can use to keep African Americans and Hispanics out of the voting booths. Whites are rapidly becoming the minorities of this country--they are losing control--thus, the first African American president. It's not what they really wanted it, but they couldn't stop it or the health care policies implemented by said president. So, now we have what is termed political genocide. It's sad, I know, to speak of whites this way but it's not that far from the truth. Evident in cases such as; Apprendi, Blakley, Kimbrough, and Booker where the Supreme Court explained the errors being made in the way… certain laws are being applied and stopped short of saying the corrections ought to be applied retroactively to reach back to those wronged by the errors.
When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers and Malcolm X, were assassinated, America lost its most effective prophets. Oppressed people, both at home and abroad, lost their most articulated voices. Their prophetic words mirrored a twentieth-century America that had acquired global power. But one that had also sacrificed some of its most treasured values on the altar of institutional racism, economic injustice, and international influence. They were not the first American social reformers, to offer jeremiads about unfulfilled promises. Indeed, they stood firmly in the mainstream of this American dissenting tradition. Yet, paradoxically, they were unique personalities and representatives of their people precisely because they belonged to this tradition.
This was a tradition that included abolitionists and many other varieties of progressive social reformers. Many Americans do not understand or have forgotten how indebted we are to the stubborn tradition of the loyal opposition in American history. The opposition's determination to put righteousness, conscience, and morality before social and political expediency helped to shape some of our most fundamental values and institutions.
From time to time, there were moments when this loyal opposition reflected the prevailing national mood. But few dissenters helped create the mood, such as Dr. King did. With the help of the media, Dr. King showed the nation from Montgomery to Selma that the cancer of racial bigotry had infected America's cherished democratic and moral tradition. Sadly, we are still a nation infected and our leaders are going along to get along.
Where are the leaders in opposition of the social, political, and economic evils existing today?
Subsequently, over time, we began to believe what we were told we were, dehumanization had happened too many of us and we were left damaged by the ongoing racist genocide. Forever wounded in the space where we would love. It is no mystery what has happened and is still happening today. White supremacy has remained firmly embedded in both secular and religious forms of media, communication, and education. While African Americans have won a measure of freedom for our bodies, too many of our minds remain enslaved by the more subtle manacles of an ideology of white racial preference. The structures of discrimination are not attempting a comeback in updated forms, as some would have us believe, they never left. We've upgraded from the cotton plantations to state and federal plantations. And those of us caught in the snares of the racially unjust laws that have us confined to within these overly populated plantations in large measure have not the spirit to respond. And long gone are the voices of the prophets of the civil rights movements.
Sadly, our well-to-do brothers and sisters would have you to believe that all is well and people in prison deserve to be here, until one of their love ones are faced with the same dilemma.
Now, instead of the lack of ability to love, we're targeted as the reason for the drug problem in this country, particularly, cocaine base (crack cocaine). Whatever, problems this country has--blame it on the African Americans and Hispanics--and come up with a plan we (the country) can use to keep African Americans and Hispanics out of the voting booths. Whites are rapidly becoming the minorities of this country--they are losing control--thus, the first African American president. It's not what they really wanted it, but they couldn't stop it or the health care policies implemented by said president. So, now we have what is termed political genocide. It's sad, I know, to speak of whites this way but it's not that far from the truth. Evident in cases such as; Apprendi, Blakley, Kimbrough, and Booker where the Supreme Court explained the errors being made in the way… certain laws are being applied and stopped short of saying the corrections ought to be applied retroactively to reach back to those wronged by the errors.
When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Medgar Evers and Malcolm X, were assassinated, America lost its most effective prophets. Oppressed people, both at home and abroad, lost their most articulated voices. Their prophetic words mirrored a twentieth-century America that had acquired global power. But one that had also sacrificed some of its most treasured values on the altar of institutional racism, economic injustice, and international influence. They were not the first American social reformers, to offer jeremiads about unfulfilled promises. Indeed, they stood firmly in the mainstream of this American dissenting tradition. Yet, paradoxically, they were unique personalities and representatives of their people precisely because they belonged to this tradition.
This was a tradition that included abolitionists and many other varieties of progressive social reformers. Many Americans do not understand or have forgotten how indebted we are to the stubborn tradition of the loyal opposition in American history. The opposition's determination to put righteousness, conscience, and morality before social and political expediency helped to shape some of our most fundamental values and institutions.
From time to time, there were moments when this loyal opposition reflected the prevailing national mood. But few dissenters helped create the mood, such as Dr. King did. With the help of the media, Dr. King showed the nation from Montgomery to Selma that the cancer of racial bigotry had infected America's cherished democratic and moral tradition. Sadly, we are still a nation infected and our leaders are going along to get along.
Where are the leaders in opposition of the social, political, and economic evils existing today?
Black Leaders Needed
