Our Own Liberators

We are our own liberators.
Surely no one thought we'd sit forever waiting for those who placed us in bondage to free us from it.
Surely no one imagined that after centuries of being studied, used, exploited, borrowed from, built upon, extracted from, and fed upon, that we would still be standing at the gate asking permission to walk through it.

The jig is up.
The illusion has been broken.
In full color,  we see now.
We see that our people have been medicine for the world.
Not merely healers.
Medicine.
The treatment.
The remedy.
Thee… answer.

When societies become sick with greed, violence, separation, and spiritual decay, it has often been our humanity that reminded the world how to remain…human.

When cultures lost their rhythm, they actively sought ours out.
When nations lost their conscience, they borrowed our struggle and called it inspiration.
When people needed hope, they found it in our endurance.
When they needed innovation, they found it in our minds.
When they needed labor, they forced it from our hands.
When they needed culture, they harvested it from our communities.
When they needed a future, they built it off our blood sacrifices.

So why shouldn't we be able to cure US?
Why should the medicine be incapable of healing itself?
Why should the physician remain untreated?
Why should the people who have spent generations carrying the burdens of humanity be expected to believe they cannot remove the burdens placed upon their shoulders, for themselves?

It's time we cure ourselves of parasites. They have fed for far too long.
Fed upon our labor.
upon our creativity.
our resources.
our images.
our stories.
Feeding upon our genius while simultaneously attempting to convince us that genius belongs primarily to them. 


There were a few great thefts throughout history, among them: land, labor, and resources.
But the greatest theft was to steal a people from the knowledge of self…their own identity. 
Powerlessness projected onto our collective psyche as if we haven't been the answer to every ill known to man.

As if our existence itself is not evidence of solutions.
As if resilience is not a solution.
community…not a solution.
creativity… not a solution.
adaptability…not a solution.
As if loving one another in the face of hatred is not a solution.
As if a people who continuously found ways to live when death was the expectation do not somehow possess knowledge the world desperately needs.

We have been told what we cannot do by people who have repeatedly demonstrated what THEY cannot do, without us.
Thiink about that.
We have been told to doubt ourselves by institutions that routinely depend upon our participation.
We have been taught to question our value by systems whose ONLY value is measured by what they EXTRACT from us.
And somehow we were expected to accept that contradiction as valid.
No.

We simply only needed the opportunity to continuously solve our own problems with our own hands uninterrupted.
Every time we built, interference arrived.
Every time we organized, disruption followed.
Every time we accumulated, confiscation appeared.
Every time we educated ourselves, someone became nervous.
Every time we unified, someone became afraid.
Not because we were incapable.
Because we were capable.
Not because we were weak.
Because we were strong.

Waiting for long-gone deities and supplication to spirits who left us in oppression to rot—not our lot.
Not because we reject the sacred.
But because the sacred has always required participation.
The river flows by removing all obstructions.
The seed does not become a tree because it prayed to become one.
Creation itself teaches responsibility.
Everything living participates in its own becoming.
Why should we be any different?

Perhaps the miracle was never coming from the sky.
Perhaps the miracle was sitting in our homes.
Walking our streets.
Speaking our languages.
Raising our children.
Working our jobs.
Building our communities.
Perhaps the miracle has always looked exactly like us.

We are brilliance difficult to gaze at face-on.
The kind of brilliance that forces questions.
The kind of brilliance that exposes myths.
The kind of brilliance that cannot be permanently hidden because it leaks through every barrier constructed to contain it.
And excellence flows through our veins. 
Excellence that many times barely has to try.
Excellence so natural that we often dismiss it in ourselves while others spend lifetimes attempting to imitate it.
The world has known this.
The world has always known this.

While we have been waiting on outsiders to deliver us, the world has been wondering how we could not know we are the solve for the problems heaped upon our backs.
How could the builders not recognize their own hands?
How could the visionaries not trust their own sight?
How could the descendants of survivors question whether they possess what survival requires?

The answer is conditioning.
The answer is repetition.
The answer is a story told so many times that some of us began mistaking it for reality.
But reality has a way of returning.
Memory has a way of returning.
Truth, it has a way of returning.
And when a people remember who they are, entire futures change direction.
So let us remember.
Not tomorrow.
Not when permission is granted.
Not when recognition arrives.
Not when validation appears.
Right now.

Let us remember the medicine.
Let us remember the builders.
Let us remember the thinkers.
Let us remember the dreamers.
Let us remember the farmers, teachers, mothers, fathers, artists, workers, organizers, inventors, healers, and protectors.
Let us remember ourselves.

For there is no freedom coming that does not pass through our hands first.
No liberation coming that does not pass through our minds first.
No future worth having that we ourselves are unwilling to build.
The waiting is over.
The remembering has begun.
And the work ahead belongs to us.
WE alone, are our own liberators!

-(Djeli) Makeda Baraka