Diasporas, Globalization, & Black Lives Matter
From the day that I developed the ability to read and write and was conscious about the things that go on in the world, I never stopped hearing about black history. This topic became so common in my ears, I would be with my friends and some will talk about the topic as just a by the way, my parents at home will sometimes discuss about it, I would pass near my brother when doing his homework and just by passing my eyes on his book, I would see something to do with black history. Equally, when I took my father’s newspaper after he was done reading so that I could read some comics and see some cartoons I would time and again see some topics about black history. This did not end there since even though I was not mature enough and therefore conscious about what was going in the world, I kept on hearing the same topic discussed in the news.
After sometime, I began wondering what ‘black history’ was all about. I gained a lot of interest in the subject and whenever I heard about it in the news I would leave whatever I was doing so that I could hear about it. After doing my own silent research for quite some time, I got to learn that the topic revolved around the black people who I discovered they traced their origin in another land. After this revelation, I now grew so much interest to know more about the whole account. My curiosity got me to ask my brother about black history and most specifically about how the African Americans came into existence.
Since he viewed me as a small boy, he just brushed though the whole issue in less than two sentences and smiled as he left me surprised. For me, at least I learnt another new thing in the whole issue. From what he told me, I now knew about the element of slavery. However, as I tried to ponder over the whole issue, the account of how people could be enslaved seemed total impossible. The whole issue remained very disturbing in my mind but I had nobody who could help me any further since my brother who I expected would tell me, saw me to be very young to learn about it and therefore he took the whole matter lightly.
After some years, it dawned on me that I had to take a step myself for me to learn about the topic. I once waited when my brother had finished doing his home work and left his history book on the table. I went there looked at the table of content and went straight to the topic ‘slavery’. I read the whole story. I learnt everything about the Africans in diaspora. I learnt about how the first Africans were shipped in 1619 from their cradle land in Africa and taken in the North America to work in crops plantations.
I learnt about how the Africans were subjected to harsh treatment by the whites in America and how they contributed in establishing the American economy. I discovered the trend in the whole issue, such as how slavery got into its peak at around 1970s when the South, West and North America intensified into it. They used this to compete with each other as far as their economy was concerned. The emergence of abolition movement was very clear to me and I saw how the various movements tried to save the Africans from slavery. Finally, I learnt about the formation of the civil rights movements in the 1960s and how they tirelessly worked and finally achieved racial equality in the U.S.
After this interesting but astonishing unfolding, I now began following the trends in the subject matter by looking into how the African Americans were being treated, how they are perceived now, how they view slavery and how the world view slavery. Equipped with my knowledge, I landed on globalization. I found how modernization has tampered with this serious and historic account. For instance, I was perturbed to learn that quite a very large percentage of the current African American generation themselves does not know about how the event took place. They are not conscious about it despite many of their immediate grandparents being there during the times of slavery. Globalization has brainwashed them so much and they just learn about the matter at school and take it as just a mere coursework and for examination purposes.
Unfortunately, even after emancipation and the realization of civil rights by the African Americans, it is clear that some instances of racial discriminations have been happening from time to time. Incidences of extrajudicial killings of African American have become rampant not only in the past decades but even currently. Many African American families have lost their loved ones due to these merciless killings. Even though African Americans have formed or rather re-established the Black Lives Matter movement that campaign against this extrajudicial killings and other forms of discriminations that they are facing, this racial discrimination has not stopped and do not seem to completely come to an end anytime soon.
