Color Your Life Happy

One favorite activity at my majority white church is dressing in period costume. The only problem for me is my costume for the period they want to celebrate would be slave garb. You can understand why I’m not too fond of this activity.

It’s not that I don’t admire and respect my ancestors who survived slavery, that horrible period of American history. As a matter of fact, I’d gladly tie a kerchief around my head, and don a full-body apron if I were celebrating the brave ancestors whose tenacity and strong faith laid the foundation for the freedom and flexibility I enjoy today.

But to celebrate it in nostalgic context of “a colorful happy time” doesn’t appeal to me at all.

This sales flier, common in the South in the 19th century , offers Negroes for Sale. The emphasis was on the physical strength and stamina to work long days. (Click on the image to enlarge it.)

Although selling human beings is unconscionable, the most heartbreaking part of it is the unabashed willingness of the owners to break families apart as an economic move. That makes sense of course when we remember that slaves were property, not human.

Blacks are not the only group of people who were enslaved, mistreated, and tortured throughout history. As a matter of fact, slavery is not history at all. There is slavery on every continent except Antarctica today, with the cooperation or laxity of the government.

This flier doesn’t make me angry. It floods me with many positive feelings. It makes me

• grateful for the progress of my people
• proud of my great grandparents, who though fresh out of slavery, held fast to their faith in God and insisted that we be love our enemies
• impressed by the skills Blacks honed during slavery and later used to start their own businesses
• deeply touched by the slaves who learned to read at time when it was illegal and punishable by death
• thankful for their strength to remain positive and hopeful under unfair neoslavery laws that could land you in jail for such things as selling your crops after dark
• amazed at the critical thinking and logical reasoning that enabled many slaves to outsmart their captors
• moved by the legacy of talent in music, sports, education, politics and many others fields that are being manifested in many Blacks today

I must point out that slavery didn’t end in the 19th century as we like to believe. It just put on new clothes and emerged into the 20th century as the people who profited from slavery conspired to create conditions where the newly freed slaves could be snared into the grips of slavery’s new incarnation: sharecropping, working in mines, and worst of all criminalizing just “being Black “(that continues in the 21st century.)

We must not get distracted by anger, but we must remember and share our story. Evil dealings thrive in the dark. The telling of our story balances the image of itself America likes to portray to the world.

So, while it’s true that this bill of sale was once my resume, now it’s my history upon which I and many others have built the lives we enjoy today. I claim the victory we have won and the ones we’ve yet to enjoy.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said it best

“If the cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. Because the goal of America is freedom, abused and scorned tho’ we may be, our destiny is tied up with America’s destiny.”

This is a guest post written by Michael Price, creator of Courage of Fearless Thinking Program. It has been my pleasure to meet Michael and attend his seminars. His program gets to the heart of what blocks our success and happiness and teaches us how to remove these obstacles.

All of us have had, and continue to have people/situations/occurrences/
events in our lives that we interpret as good or bad, happy or sad.  We know how to handle the good and happy events in our lives.  We enjoy!
 
In each event we interpret as bad or sad, there is a gift disguised as a problem.  Each of us have had, and will periodically continue to have bad, sad or negative events/encounters in our lives.  In each of those situations, there is a lesson for us to learn, an opportunity to grow.
 
We normally feel the emotion of the event, which is natural.  However, many times we fail to learn the embedded lesson.  Often, we continue to feel the emotion long past what is healthy for us.  We re-live the situation over and over (Self-Talk). 
 
It is said that we learn more from our mistakes than we do from our successes.  If this is true, then we should view our mistakes or events in our lives as an opportunity to learn.
 
Certainly we need to feel the emotion.  And the more severe the event, the longer we will naturally feel the emotion.  However, at some point it is time to “Learn the Lesson” and move-on. 
 
We are feeling beings.  We are also problem solving beings with the gift of “Original Thought”.  So, when the time is appropriate, we need to “Leave the Event” behind, and carry the lesson into our future.  We can then put the lessons learned into our tool-box of experience to deal with future events.
 
Use your Fearless Thinking skills to “Learn the Lesson - Leave the Event” and move-on.