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This is a short (sub-3 minute) video. If made me think of conversations we have been having here. Particularly as if concern race. Anyone who has been active on these forums knows I believe we should dispense with the concept of race in its entirety because it is flawed scientifically and it provides a mechanism for us to hold onto racist stereotypes that have never served us. The video below speaks to the later. Leonce, the Brother speaking in this video is a novelist. His book, I Dreamt I Was in Heaven - The Rampage of the Rufus Buck Gang is an 18 time AALBC.com besteller. He is currently the 20th bestselling author on this site over the past 20 years. The video describes the premise of his first (I believe) nonfiction work; Whites Shackled Themselves to Race and Blacks Have Yet to Free Ourselves. Let me know what you think.

@Troy I love his video. It is on point. There is a complexity that exists that we also need to step into. While the concept of “race” is something we most certainly need to dispense with given that it is a social construct created by whites to place themselves above all other “races” and cultures, we cannot dispense with the very real, tangible and visible biological fact of our melanin rich skins. It is our melanin richness that whites used, given the evident nature of our melanin, visually amazing and powerful, to create the construct of race. Were it not for our visually evident melanin, they would not have had the opportunity to construct a social notion called race that they now use against us and have brainwashed much of the planet to use against us. At the end of the day, race is really a more charged word for our visual differences, all of us. The word race is not strictly used for melanin rich people. European biology breaks down all races, including their own, as one on a list of several “races” which is based on our physiology. And, quiet as it is kept, our overall biology. Just as slight differences in DNA make me a woman and you a man, DNA also gives me melanin, Chinese slanted eyes, Whites a brachycephalic head, so and so forth. DNA plays a role in every aspect of our physiology and biology, even when it comes to disease, DNA steps in and can alter how our children are born, passing on to them often deadly diseases once latent in our lineage. So although race can and should be cast aside due to how it has developed in the cultural and what it has done to us, my melanin (a visual representation of what my DNA has created) cannot be dispensed with. It is there to be seen. One of my melanin rich friends told me about a conversation she had with her white friend. In any case, her white friend one day said to her that she doesn’t see color. Now most people would get all warm and fuzzy and be happy that this woman said that. But my friend, who is a fierce thinker, turned to her friend and said, ‘Now you’ve just insulted me.’ I smiled and listened as she explained why she said that to her friend. She asked her friend what was wrong with her color that in her mind she must make it invisible? Is her brown skin ugly? Unworthy? Low in her esteem that she feels that the only way she can cope with being her friend is to make her melanin invisible? Her color gone? I whole heartedly agree with my friend. What is this nonsense about not seeing my melanin? What does that mean from a psychological standpoint exactly? And how do these folks who have constructed the term race see me when they now claim to not see the very thing they once abused us for? I am not asking you or anyone these questions directly. They are merely questions we need to meditate on. In general, why does my melanin (color) need to be invisible for there to be comfort in European culture, or even in melanin rich cultures for that matter? Given that some of us are on board with this thinking of ignoring our beautiful melanin. Why do I need to dispense with discussion of my melanin? Isn’t that what makes me beautiful? What is wrong with my melanin that I must make it invisible in an effort to make whites comfortable, or, worse, to transform society into an “equal” society? My color must be subdued as a discussion in order for me to be equal, treated equally? Seen as equal? While I can dispense with notions of race given what it’s done socially to us, I will never attempt to NOT discuss my melanin to help forward society. There is NOTHING wrong with my melanin. Nothing. And I won’t hide my words around it and subdue it for the comfort of those who take issue with my beautiful melanin rich skin. Never going to happen. Those who ask me to make my melanin invisible are people I want nothing to do with. They don’t make their melanin-poor skin invisible. They attempt to make it so visible and superior that they’ve driven nearly every brown culture on Earth, even the non-brown cultures such as Chinese, to use skin whitening cream to make themselves whiter. Why? Because melanin should be hated and every culture is taught to hate melanin. Even the Aborigines, which “science” labeled as Caucasian still caught hell, regardless of the label science had given them. Why? Because of their melanin. Their race classification was Caucasian for a very long time, yet they were oppressed because of their melanin. So what does that say about their own discussions about race? It is meaningless. When it serves them, they use it. When it doesn’t serve them, they ignore it, like they did with the Aborigines. Race be damned. But my melanin is not going away and I am not invisible; and any white person who says they don’t see color is, frankly, a disgusting human being who plays into the reasons why all this madness continues to happen. SEE me!!! SEE my melanin!! And let that be OK! It is OK for me to be brown! And for the record, I use white/black only to forward the conversation given that that is the term 95% of people use and can understand when discussing such issues. But I often prefer to use melanin rich or melanin deficient when speaking with those who know how I converse about these things. Reference history (per the video), I have a personal library of over 5,000 books. I read from Ivan Van Sertima, to John Henrik Clarke, to Cheikh Anta Diop, to Yosef Ben-Jochannan, and everyone in between. Including thinkers such as Lillian Smith, author of Strange Fruit and Killers of the Dream. I am very present with and aware of my history. I know why I use the terms I use. I have a deep understanding of who we are and how far back our history spans. I am still working on Yurugu, an amazing work by Marimba Ani, which dissects the European mindset to a great degree. What I think many melanin rich people should also read is Falsification of African Consciousness by Amos Wilson. Now that really digs into the how and why of many aspects of this culture. My belief is we need to focus on how we think, above all else. The language we use is important, but we need to begin transforming that language and really looking at the nuances and why European culture even created certain words/terms. There are words in the dictionary that are illegitimate and don’t belong. And/or, words that we need to redefine because they’ve been bastardized, or more specifically, the idea of the word has been bastardized, such as race. This is all a mind game meant to keep us focused on everything but enriching ourselves. Race is a cunning synonym for melanin. If they used the term melanin, a biological term, they could get themselves bound up in all sorts of flawed logic that could easily be torn down. But when they invent the word race, which subtly attempts to diverge away from the word melanin, it becomes easier to create intellectual garbage and reasoning around their behaviors. And, create negative stereotypes around us as a culture. As a Jamaican woman, I never grew up seeing race, only class and culture. But that did not mean there wasn't an issue with color on the island and here in America within Jamaican communities. It remains so to this day. Even within brown skinned communities, we have been made to believe that lighter skin is better than darker skin. This comes from our melanin being made to seem inferior, which is why I think it is dangerous to attempt to pretend our melanin is invisible in this culture we live in. My Jamaican roots of diversity and racial equality (or more specifically how my family raised me) did not shield me from cultural behaviors around melanin rich peoples. Anyhoo, let me stop rambling on. Bottom line, I agree with you, but with some additions/deletions and clarifications on how I view it. We should dispense with the concept of race. But we need to be careful that we are not dispensing with our melanin as a discussion, in an effort to make others feel comfortable about who they are and how they look.

@Troy my parents raised me to think this way. Before cross-cultural awareness was a thing - it was how I viewed the world. First from my immediate cultural perspective then how others' behavior informed their culture. So yes, that's it. I don't see race, per se and I never have. I see culture and subcultures in humans. Here's my backstory: My dad was stationed in Frankfurt, Germany and that's where my public education began. Since the school was affiliated with the U.S. Military - I didn't encounter "race" indoctrination. When we returned to the states, I was a cosmopolite. Yes, 5 going on 6 and I was already a citizen of the world. By then it was hard to talk me off my foundation. When I was confronted with race and the civil rights movement - my mom told me humans were all the same. I remember using the word nigger when I was in the doctor’s office looking at a magazine. It was Jamaica travel ad and I remember saying the little girl in the picture looked like a nigger. My mother said when retelling the story that a "pink" woman in the office smirked. My mother quickly corrected me right there. She said people were fair-skin some were brown-skin and everything in between. What's weird is looking back, the little girl looked just like me. I was under the influence of grown folks’ conversation. I used their” nigger" label and depiction of a girl who looked like me. I made a note to younger self that would be the first and last time I let the national conversation influence my concept of me, my culture or any culture. I kept that promise too. My mom indoctrinated me to her concept of beauty and that's been hard to shake. If I'm not slim-trim, well-dressed and hair perfectly coiffed I'm not fit for polite company. But that too is part of my culture (or sub-culture.) My mother never said whites, negros or coloreds, it was fair-skin, brown-skin. I would later learn that my father wanted to share the harsh realities of "racism" with me, but my mother said "no" because there were more important things I had to learn. She is an education advocate and I still have more books in my library than I can read in this lifetime. But get this, my mother uses the most derogatory terms when it comes to cultures. She didn't when I was young, nor did she use those terms when my daughters were in their formative years. Aside: She didn't tell me about her battle with colorism within the family until I was older. Her skin color was the darkest in the family. The women of my maternal line are light brown to fair-skin with light colored eyes and jet-black hair. My great great-grandmother's father was native American, her mother was from Ethiopia, East Africa. We think she was a free negro since we can't find any enslaved people in my maternal line. We are from the north - most of my maternal family live or are buried in West Virginia. I empathize with those who were enslaved in this country. I hold a harsh opinion of those who did the enslaving. I give a side-eye to those who sold off or let Africans be captured. None of it defines me. Case-in-point, a boy called me "nigger" when I was bussed out of my middle-class to upper-middle class black West Indian and Jewish neighborhood to go to a school in an Italian American poor to working-class neighborhood. Yes, that was NYC bright idea of diversity back in the late 70s lol. By then I already knew who I was in relation to the world. So instead of internalizing it; I beat his Italian-azz. It was no different than him calling me out of my name. My euro-Jewish teacher tried to chastise but I was "eff you too". You already know about our high-school - it was about as diverse as any public school could be - except we were the talented tenth of all cultures in NYC. It wasn't until I got to St. John's University did I have to face the reality of” racism" and clash of the cultures. In college, you realize the clash is more about competition and folks will use anything at their disposable to graduate top dawg to get that head start in the rat race. But it was social media that blew up my cultural reality. I learned that everyone doesn't have the same understanding of the game. I learned there was a difference between blacks - almost the same as what WEB Du Bois revealed in his Social Studies report in 1901 ... There was a difference between southern and northern blacks - there was a difference between free negros and newly freed enslaved blacks. True to that 1901 report my mother. a northerner married my father a southerner. His family were sharecropper but had to escape the south because someone had a hit out on his father. My grandmother with her 9 children made it to Brooklyn but her husband did not. My paternal grandmother had to start all over. It took them just one generation to become lower middle-class and the next generation (me and my first paternal cousins all got accepted to BTHS (wild, right?) one of my first cousins is a millionaire. I think what saved them was cultural assimilation. The sisters and brothers left their southern culture behind and quickly assimilated and all married northerners. So that's a snippet of my back story and how it informed my cultural view of the world.

@DelLOL. Good point. Obviously there are all manner of manipulative forces out there: the many branches of the media, self-serving black leaders, paternalistic white liberals, political parties with hidden agendas, religion and its greedy expectations, - all examples of the duplicity which blacks are free to resist, but which their minds aren't liberated enough to inconvenience or obligate themselves by doing what would be to their advantage in the long run. They are sometimes their own worst enemy. IMO Semantics can involve the intricate use of language, a style i was free to employ in writing this post. I'm sure many will think i needed to be liberated from doing so. What word, if any, would you have found more coherent than "manipulation"? Or do you totally disagree with my contention?

Well, February is underway, ushered in by the ground hog seeing his shadow, an event signifying six more weeks of winter. February also signals the start of African American history month, an observance which sets aside 28 days every year for blacks to extol their icons, recognize their unsung heroes and bitch about the shadow cast by the racism that represents the ongoing "winter of their discontent". White racism is indeed at the core of black discontent, even as it sometimes takes a back seat to black freedom. Poster Xeon spoke about blacks being free to do all the things they deem necessary to advance themselves, if they so choose. Conservative columnist, Shelby Steele, was a tad more cynical when he recently wrote about freedom catching blacks by surprise, leaving them off-balance and unable to cope with the loss of victim-hood, something similar to what the father of black history month, Carter Woodson, mused when declaring that if blacks couldn't find a back door to enter, they would rip out the wall and make one. On a more personal level it strikes me as disturbingly ironic that it is not unusual to watch the local news where on any given night impeccable black news anchors enunciate the daily toll of black-on-black crime, offenses that run the gamut from children being caught in the crossfire of drive-bys, to elderly people being robbed and assaulted, to respectable hard-working folks having their autos carjacked. Any black Chicagoan choosing to explain this self-imposed genocide is free, however, to blame it on white racism. And there's nothing more stunning than having black intellectuals publicly debate the nature of racism. As is the case with perennial malcontent, Cornel West, accusing angst-ridden Ta-Nehisi Coates of being a whitewashed neo-liberal who has a masochistic fetish about the pain of systemic racism. White publishers pay these 2 big bucks to take advantage of their freedom to dissect white racism. Meanwhile back at the circus, the Freak presiding over a bunch of clowns under the white house big top, cruises along, throwing the constitution under the bus. In the course of delivering a state of the union address full of half-truths and self-praise, Trump became the object of disdain to black law makers who took advantage of their freedom to refrain from applauding his drivel. Troy reminds us that humans all belong to same big family, so when siblings exercise their freedom to accuse and abuse each other, this family obviously becomes dysfunctional. Welcome to America, land of the freed slaves. Bottom line, what they say about freedom not being free can't be denied. Freedom is a double edged sword because it allows whites the freedom to enforce racism. What blacks really need is to be liberated from the freedom to be manipulated.

@Delano don't think of it that way. You don't have to "accept" anyone's opinion anymore than you have to accept the fact that some people hate brussel sprouts and other love them.

I haven't been logging in as much because I've expanded my network of websites to 4 sneaker and sports based websites. You are exactly right Mel. We have given away our power by living our lives via social media. Having your own site and building old school webrings is the way to go. I've done this with AHN and now my site and network in the course of a year and a half have grown from around 3000 visits a month to 400,000 visits a month. The sites generate income and sales and when we hit 1 million visits a month we will be in the rare air of sneaker sites that generate considerable interest. Several sneaker sites have gained investors with amounts ranging from 2 million to 50 Million dollars. As long form content becomes more important those with their own platforms are the people who will benefit. Social and search continues to change requiring paid engagement. It's not the way to build a long term business. 3rd party should be used in support of, not primarily.

Well you answered you own question regarding pioneer Cynique. This line is classic; "...and they take root amidst an environment where your brain is on lock down, imprisoned in an ego-centric cell where the bars are forged from your myopic mentality." Are you this witty in real time? I named the forum for you because your contributions are prodigious in both depth and duration. These forums exist because of your contributions. If you were not here the forums would be much less valuable. I still believe contributions are worth of a book. Your dedication deserves more than I can return. Naming the site for you may one day really mean something. I would be really nice if you can see that day. At the same time all of the regular contributors -- even Pioneer -- make this sites possible and give it life. I welcome indeed need his contributions too. So even when I disagree with him, I welcome his input. The literature site is named for Thumper. Even the address of this site pay homage to him https://aalbc.com/tc The "tc" stands for Thumpers Corner. But Thumper who posted here for over a decade has not posted here in years. This Cynique gives your contributions even more weight because of you longevity. The literature forum will always be Thumpers Corner and the Culture board will always be Cynique's Corner. Over the years we had some great contributors. I miss @Thumper, @ABM , @a_womon, Yukio, and so many others. I appreciate @Xeon popping by every now and then and I hope @zaji shares a bit more too. This forum is only as good as the participant's contributions. The very fact we that were are still here in the face of social media is really quite an accomplishment. When I see the success of forums like Lipstick Alley, it gives me hope for the future.