(ThyBlackMan.com) Please do not take offense at this statement because it is as truthful as I can be regarding the pervasive ignorance of racial matters that serves as a foundational pillar for this nation; I decided long ago that the saying that “ignorance is bliss” is a truism and I vow never to disrupt anyone’s happiness. This is a public pledge to adhere to the following mantra, if you have chosen to construct a life that allows for you to be blissfully happy due to a phenomenal level of ignorance, I will not disturb you.
The fact that so many people prefer to remain ignorant of this nation’s sordid past in regards to blacks, a term that I have recently decided is the proper description for my kind, is the only explanation for the shock that so many Sugar Land (TX) residents are experiencing at this present moment.
What has shocked them, you ask?
The incident that has shaken the solid ground that Sugar Land residents stood so comfortably on has been rocked by the recent discovery of eighty-nine graves during the construction of Fort Bend Independent School Districts the James Reese Career and Technical Center.
If the discovery of these unmarked graves did not say so much about the ignorance of Sugar Land residents regarding “the making of America” their reaction would be humorous. One has to wonder how people living in a place named “Sugar Land” are even slightly unaware what was occurring in that location centuries ago. How could they be unaware that Queen Sugar, who only took a secondary place to King Cotton, claimed hundreds-of-thousands of African lives during her tenure on the throne of ends-justify-the-means unfettered Capitalism?
As a historian, it is difficult to believe that there are people walking in our midst who are suprised that Sugar Cane was grown in Sugar Land. Even a cursory understanding of American history would tell you that this region was home to wealthy whites whose sole purpose in life was extracting the very life out of stolen Africans for profit. Even the Fort Bend Historical Commission realizes that the grand plantations that enriched slaveholding whites at such a level that their descendants are living off of those profits to this very moment gave way to a neo-slavery called the convict lease system. The bodies found in those eighty-nine unmarked graves are victims of the convict lease system.
Most of my students are horrified to learn that the vaunted 13thAmendment that they erroneously believe vanquished slavery from the North American continent was never designed to achieve such a feat. Many of my students dispute this historical fact as it conflicts with the half-truths they learned during high school. Most student have been taught the same refrain that “the 13th Amendment abolishes slavery.” Such moments force me to tell them to pull out their cell phones and find the 13th Amendment. They soon find that it reads as follows:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
That little “except” explains why there were eighty-nine graves available to be disturbed by a bulldozer in Sugar Land, Texas.
As difficult as it may be for many to accept, I believe longtime residents of this Houston suburb when they state that they had no idea that the graves of black convicts sat in the shadow of their luxurious lives. Such ignorance continues one of this nation’s grandest traditions of dehumanizing stolen Africans and their descendants to a “beasts of burden” status whose sole purpose for living was to aid whites in their pursuit of wealth, power, and political influence.
Although white bigots will resist a historical record that highlights the heavy lifting that persons of African descent have done for this nation, any dispute of the voluminous contribution of persons of African descent to this nation are futile at best. The crafting of a well-woven lie that denigrates blacks as lazy vagabonds that obstructed “progress” in the land of the free are foolhardy. In many ways, it is amazing that many in this nation will ignore these historical truths and remain committed to the fallacious argument that “the Negro has contributed nothing to this society.” The recent discovery of unmarked graves in Sugar Land is yet another example of the indispensible labor of stolen Africans and their descendants to increasing the wealth of aristocratic whites.
I guess that Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels was correct when he addressed the phenomenal power that lies hold for a people and how nation-states can make such statements the national narrative. According to Goebbels,
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
In the words of Childish Gambino, “This is America!!!!!!”
I pray that all of the stolen Africans and their descendants, not just those who have had their graves disturbed, have been able to find peace and rest in the afterlife. One needs to look no further than Sugar Land to understand why an eternal rest is well deserved.
Staff Writer; Dr. James Thomas Jones III
Official website; http://www.ManhoodRaceCulture.com
One may also connect with this brother via Twitter; DrJamestJones.