WE CAN BECAUSE THEY DID

The Transformational Agenda Magazine

 

We Can Because They Did

It is true that a good deal of white privilege, systemic racism, and discrimination still exists in America, which will greatly diminish during the next 50 years, as hard-core racists die and their more open-minded children become adults. This is certain.

It is also true that only the African American community can heal the African American community, and healing is exactly what we need. It is not certain that we will heal (among other reasons) because we don’t recognize the need for healing. We have been focused almost exclusively on wrestling freedom from the oppressive system, yet we don’t realize the trauma we have experienced nor the massive cultural injury which has occurred. We are being constrained by what we don’t even know that we don’t know exists—unconscious cultural intergenerational trauma manifesting as unconscious negative mental legacies of slavery. This edition addresses this situation in depth.

The African American community is truly suffering because we have been disempowered for so long that now we don’t know how to empower ourselves. In many cases, we can’t even conceptualize what an empowered life is like. And while the reality of racism and discrimination is still very real, we are now in an age when we can—and we must—make up our minds that as a community we will do all that we can do and all that we know to do to empower ourselves for success. Waiting for a fair, equitable, and humane society is both insanity and an absolute guarantee of additional pain. Doing—with the fierce urgency of now—all that we can to empower our own situation, by empowering ourselves, is what we must be and do.

This “26th Edition of The Transformational Agenda Magazine – 2020” is devoted to truth-telling—telling the entire truth of our experience in America, so that we can recognize and define the harm, to then come together to create a healing community of love—to facilitate our healing and thus setting ourselves free. 

Our ancestors held on during the days when hope unborn had died and death would have been a sweet release so that we might know today. Their choice of life affirmed their belief that one day a generation of their descendants would know the relative freedom that we know today. Because they chose to survive, we know today. We finally have the opportunity to heal our community—and we must, for not only do we owe this to the sacrifice of the ancestors — we also owe it to our children and grandchildren and their children and grandchildren.