After I received a comment on the Free Black Space Blog that described the work as too academic, too wordy, and too long; I went back to my initial contemplation on abstraction, intellectualism and the limits placed on the black mind.

To be black and to be practical could easily be suffering. Our negation is a cage. For the slave to speak of philosophy can easily be read as ludicrous. So too it should be with the master speaking of freedom without the emancipation of the slaves. We know that. Grew used to it.

It is human to accept and seek some middle path, but alas we Americans are fighters. We are African Americans and at the least have in our gut some of the same urges and desires to fight, to be free, to work hard, to be chaste, to know what’s right and do it, even if the fundamentals are wrong.

The black seems to be forced to accept what should not be accepted. We have to come to terms with it. Codes move towards that. One way of looking at them is to ask--How do we come to terms with what we have done in order to survive without despair or over-reacting? The question begins with slavery and still remains today.

It’s the most simple philosophy we have and is rooted in our relationship with slavery. Our survival is our trophy and a thing we can be most ashamed of. Knowing what we have done to survive and what we have been through can make us proud or convince us we are worth nothing.

Dealing with this is even more difficult, because what we have learned has not been leveraged towards civilization. We have yet to construct systems and run things based on this knowledge. We survive because of what we know, but the use of knowledge for many can only be used to survive in the same way.

Without the agency to use what we know to build a new world, being understood becomes the substitute. We head into spectacle. We perform. We tell it like it is. We entertain. We use our knowledge and if people like it, we know it is real. Know it has value and weight.

In our current stage we struggle against misunderstanding and failure as much as we struggle for freedom.

For failure seems all too common and connected to our origins. It is at the heart of what it means to be black. Slavery implies sometimes of failure or problem that we must deal with outside of the right or wrong of the matter. We imagine slavery as a mythic failure we all suffered collectively. The path to freedom comes through understanding and success more than anything else.

I mean if we can’t get reparations as a group, at least we can be individually understood. At least we individually can know that we are successful and have contradicted the negative assigned to us.

Success and being understood are the easy answers for all of our enduring questions.

What else can we do?