Disclaimer: The following opinion piece by ANWO Member Daniela represents the Comrade’s viewpoint and her call to action for other young African women to get involved. ANWO recognizes that many young African women are engaged in the African liberation struggle. However, ANWO recognizes the spirit in which the article was written and encourages all young African women interested in overturning colonial oppression to join the African National Women’s Organization.
More youth involvement and fewer distractions. Simple words that have such a large impact on our community. My generation has been oblivious to the call to action that we have to contend with. Our elders have established a path for greatness, yet many youth are focused on materialistic things such as who has the most followers and who has designer clothes.
We are the future doctors, nurses, and lawyers who will have an impact on the following generation. We, as a community, need to focus on the bigger picture. We will continuously face discrimination and prejudice if we do not take a stand now. The people who came before us have fought so hard to get to where we are and it’s still not the justice we deserve. Put down the cell phones, put down the computers, put down the thoughts that we must be better than one another. We should be working together as a collective to achieve worldwide goals that affect every single one of us.
Once our elders have gone and passed, what will my generation be doing to continue the fight for justice? The youth nowadays don’t realize the power they have in the palm of their hands. They are ignorant of the world around them and don’t seem to be taking much action.
Being a former foster youth, I have seen the hate and the injustice of the system for African people. I was raised in a Mexican household and without knowledge of my own family, I lost my identity. I hadn’t known much about my roots and culture and how much power I have to make a difference in my community. Why should it matter what shoes I wear? Why should it matter what designer I’m wearing? Why should it matter how well I do my makeup?
What should matter is we have the power! We have the power to break generational trauma. We have the power to come together and fight for a common cause. We have the power to build a better life for our community. More youth involvement, fewer distractions. I feel like I owe it to my elders and myself to teach my peers and the youth around me that this is something we need to fight for. I have been put in a position to have the chance to be a leader through ANWO and to show my generation that we will not be shut down! However, I can’t do it alone, it takes a village.
Joining ANWO has shown me the behind-the-scenes of the constant fight for justice. I have broadened my knowledge by taking black studies classes, which have shown me that even though it’s not shown in the news or social media platforms, colonization has affected our community on a deep level. The government has continuously used falsification, integrated modification, and conceptual incarceration to suppress us as a whole.
We have been given incorrect concepts of ourselves and our community, and so we then become prisoners to these alien ideas. Under the process of scientific colonialism, which is the sophisticated process of falsifying the production of information and ideas, we are controlled by mechanisms of destruction, distortion, fabrication, and suppression. White power has created methods to mentally enslave us by erasing the memory of our history and culture; because if it does not exist, it never happened.
We are bombarded with distractions daily, so we can be distracted from the real problems around us and not realize the problems we have faced and continue to face. Why is fighting for justice something that has been put on the back burner for my generation? Why is wanting justice something that is far less important than how many followers you have on Instagram?
More youth involvement, fewer distractions! We need to take a stand now and demand our power back now. I want the youth to read this and think, “Maybe I am that one person who will make a difference.”
