Concept of Deity” And The Destruction of Black Civilization

Concept of Deity” And The Destruction of Black Civilization

"Concept of
Deity” by Dr. John Henrik Clarke

To hold a
people in oppression you have to convince them
first that they are supposed to be oppressed.

When the
European comes to a country, the first thing he
does is to laugh at your God and your God
concept. And the next thing is to make you laugh
at your own God concept. Then he don't have to
build no jails for you then, cause he's got you
in a jail more binding than iron can ever put
you.

Anytime
you turn on your own concept of God, you are no
longer a free man. No one needs to put chains on
your body, because the chains are on your mind.

Anytime
someone say's your God is ugly and you release
your God and join their God, there is no hope
for your freedom until you once more believe in
your own concept of the "deity."

And that's
how we're trapped. We have been educated into
believing someone else's concept of the deity,
and someone else's standard of beauty. You have
the right to practice any religion and politics
in a way that best suits your freedom, your
dignity, and your understanding. And once you do
that, you don't apologize.

Nothing
the European mind ever devised was meant to do
anything but to facilitate the European's
control over the world. Anything that you get
from Europe that you are going to use for
yourself, remake it to suit yourself.

Where did
we go wrong educationally? After the Civil War,
the period called reconstruction, a period of
pseudo-democracy, we began to have our own
institutions, our own schools. We had no role
model for a school... our own role model. So we
began to imitate White schools.

Our church
was an imitation of the White church. All we did
is to modify the old trap. We didn't change the
images, we became more comfortable within the
trap. We didn't change the images, we changed
some of the concepts of the images, but the
images remained the same. So the mis-education
that gave us a slave mentality had been altered.
But it remained basically the same.

The late Dr.
John Henrik Clarke, a pre-eminent African-American
historian, author of several volumes on the history
of Africa and the Diaspora, taught inthe Department
of Black and Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College
of the City University of New York.