"African Americans are the descendants of captive Africans held in the United States from 1526 to 1865... African descendants...whose ancestors immigrated, or who immigrated to the U.S., also traditionally have been considered African American, as they share a common history of predominantly West African or Central African roots, the horrific Middle Passage of the Diaspora, approximately 340 years of chattel slavery under bitterly brutal conditions including murder, torture, rape, 150 years of federally, state, and locally institutionalized political, economic, and social disenfranchisement, constant and violent terrorism by well known and organized ethnic based hate groups and lynch mobs, lengthy history of denial and deliberate mis-education, a perverting of history, a perverting of religions, forced participation in Jim Crow Era Laws, racial discrimination in every facet of life and in most cases every waking moment of the entire lives of many, many victims, common place and brutal beatings, murder, rape, extortion, mutilations, robbery, sodomy, kidnappings, false imprisonment, etc. by federal, state, and local law enforcement and public officials, a lengthy history of injustice from the federal, state, and local justice systems, political assassinations, constant infiltration and disruption of organized African American human and civil rights, political, and community activists groups, attempted genocide, infanticide, attempted clandestine mass sterilization, constant clandestine medical/psychological/sociopolitical experimentations, a lengthy history of constant threat, harassment, and duress from common place and overt violent acts of racism, mass murder, ongoing bio-terrorist attacks, ongoing “quiet” or silent wars, ongoing covert racism in specialized industries, etc., etc., and still in a constant state of daily hostility and mental anguish while living in a situationally prone overtly racist American society on this day while an African American President sits in the White House (distorted history is evidence of the ongoing well seated ignorance and unrepentant evil that dwells here) for the sixth time in “true” American history. It is these peoples, who in the past were referred to and identified collectively as the Colored, Mullatoes, Creole peoples, Negro, Black, and Afro-American and who now generally consider themselves African Americans. Their history is very rich with ingenuity, innovation, intelligence, courage, faith, perseverance, tolerance, unrelenting and most raw will, constant and multiple struggles and triumph after triumph under the most adverse conditions for the lengthiest time period ever forced upon human beings throughout the history of all of “man”. Their history should be celebrated by all and for all time for it is the very essence of resiliency and the definition of an unbreakable spirit." Akil A. Bomani https://lnkd.in/ghmcF_5F
