VOICES OF THE VILLAGE
By Lissa Jones
“Oh, I say, and I say it again, you been had! You been took. You been hoodwinked! Bamboozled! Led astray, run amok…this is what he does.” — Malcolm X
Last week, I opened my copy of the MSR, and to my great surprise my column was sitting right next to one written by the wife a three-term city councilman; her husband’s own column was in this newspaper only a few weeks ago. It wasn’t so much the positioning that threw me for a loop — it was her headline, as headlines in newspapers and hooks in music are designed to do.
“No more passing the buck, the village has arrived,” read the headline. I stopped in my tracks. The village? Curious, I read on. I came to the conclusion that her column provides some of the strongest evidence of our requirement to think critically about what we are reading — about who is writing it, and most important, about whether their actions match their words.
I thought, ‘This is perfect. A fellow columnist has made my point precisely. Like a living example of what I have been preaching to us — we must think critically for ourselves, independent of old ideologies, developed from myths, repeated for centuries as truth.
The professor taught me from an early age that language is deeply important. It tells us what people are thinking, it informs us of their beliefs; language is intentional for the most part, and definition is critical to learning a language.
Since, as far as I am aware, this term of love for our people was borne from my work on the radio hosting the community affairs show Urban Agenda, I will take the leadership in defining it, thank you.
The village is a place where Black people (specifically African Americans, who share the lived experiences of a people kidnapped and enslaved to build wealth and power for nations):
• Show concern for the welfare of the village over the benefit to individual, in word and deed;
• Share and care for one another, blood kin or not, and never leave one of our own without;
• Raise our children in our homes and don’t allow any one of ours to age out of foster care;
• Are not racially profiled or wrongly imprisoned;
• Practice goodness and mercy as the foundation of our relationships with one another, and we work for our betterment in unity;
• Speak a new narrative, because we have all but forgotten the lies of the ideology of supremacy;
And, very importantly:
• It is a place where we never use the village in support of institutions that don’t serve the people, robbing them of the dignity of using their own voices to demand meaningful change in their condition!
No one who is working counter to the best interests of Blacks has the right to use the people’s term, “the village”! It has been my experience that if the spirit of a thing is not righteous, nothing that comes from it will be either.
The columnist writes, trying to redefine the village as a network of institutions that have been around for years — and for Blacks, what did we get? When I know that the African American Leadership Forum, on which the columnist sits, is at significant odds with at least two of our seated (Black) state representatives on issues of Black Minnesotans? Seated at a table under the auspices of the “African American Leadership Forum” while the behavior, the decisions that are made by its leadership, demonstrate the backing of agendas and initiatives that are at best, no threat to the status quo?
When it comes to Republicans and Democrats, Malcolm X told us that “They are first on our list, and we are last on theirs!” Now the politics try to redefine the village? I say no.
To the ideology that desires, once again, to take Black language and definition so as to contort it and to make it its own, erasing the history of its origins in its process of robbery:
We refuse your disease, and we ask respectfully that you keep using its language as you seem to believe that it has served you well thus far. “The village” is reserved for those who in all things stay true to African American betterment, in all situations and circumstances, by any means necessary. Is this what you believe your work in “the village” represents to the people in it? Really?
Otherwise, please find a new word to use. This one needs to stay pure, and Black.
Lissa Jones welcomes reader responses to ljones@spokesman-recorder.com.
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