R.E.S.P.E.C.T.

People tell me they don’t understand how Black women would call police on Black men for domestic violence when they know Black men have thorny relationships with police violence, incarceration, stop and frisk, and other issues that threaten Black masculinity in this Babylon. Then I asked whether it was acceptable for some Black men to treat Black women poorly, considering that Black women have endured the greatest suffering from the Middle Passage, slavery, plantations, Jim Crow, and other historical injustices while continuing to face various forms of discrimination today. Brother Malcolm said this many years ago, and it still resonates today: the most disrespected person today in America is the Black woman.

This analogy has resonances with people who say, "Why are we calling foreign people to help settle our problem when we know the histories of their intervention?" To be clear, the person calling the police is after survival, not retribution. They want to live even if calling the police is a palliative measure to more profound problems.

Are you suggesting that people in the diaspora, who witnessed what state agents did to Black and Brown bodies in various chocolate cities years ago and continue to do today in Chicago and other cities, desire foreign intervention on our soil? Perhaps the answer is yes, as African politicians appear to have no fear for their constituents. They brutalize our people until they run to the "complicit savior." No, because the militarization of any space does not guarantee safety; it only makes people hyperalert and sensitive. More to that, many times we talk about what "they" do to us. What about what we are doing to ourselves? We need to discuss the internalized self-hatred of African leaders, which manifests itself in cruelty toward our people.

When your child reaches for a poisoned drink instead of your polluted water, it's not because they fail to see the relative benefit of your water, even polluted; it's because they've suffered so much that death by poison seems preferable.

Queen of Soul sang "Do Right Man, Do Right Woman." I rephrase that to say, "African leadership, do right by your people. She also demanded respect.

If our ancestors from various Black Thought traditions demanded respect from a world that has violated us for centuries, it is now time for us to ask for the same respect from our own leaders.

Respect the pain of women, men, and pastors who have buried their sons, daughters, aunties, parishioners, and other family members. Stop the denialism.

Respect people who have no witnesses to their formative years because their homes have become havens for terrorist groups.

Don’t defecate or urinate on the graves of innocent lives, whose untimely demise resulted from your failure to secure their lives and properties.

A nation cannot heal with lies and a forgetfulness of what pain means, especially when we must unite a country that you have divided through your divisive politics.