Last night I was on the couch, and I was reading/watching various news stories that were in my social media newsfeed.  I was thinking here we are celebrating the bicentennial anniversary of the abolishment of slavery, and we are still concerned with RACE.  How far have we come and how did we get here?

Okay so slavery “ended” in 1865 with the 13th Amendment right, or was it the Emancipation Proclamation?  I need you to know the difference between the two.  If you have questions I can help you out with that. Blacks were in search of opportunities to provide for their families, and acquire land.  We wanted our “forty acres and a mule.” Some of our ancestors decided to stay in the south, and others decided to move north (The Great Migration) like my family.

Slavery is abolished, so blacks are free from physical bondage (somewhat), but now they are experiencing mental bondage?  Let’s insert Jim Crow and Willie Lynch.  I call them Mind Games Masters, because they are fictional characters that we have somehow made REAL!  By the way lynching does not derive from “Master Willie Lynch,” and if you don’t know about the Jim Crow Museum you must visit!

Fast forward to Brown vs The Board of Education and the Civil Rights Movement, people marched, were hosed down, participated in sit-ins, and murdered for equal rights.  It’s 2015, and brown skin ain’t in! How in the world did we get here?

When I was pulled over by the police in October I immediately pulled the “race card.”  I sure did.  There was no reason to pull me over.   I was legit, and I wasn’t speeding.  I finally knew what it felt like to be driving while black.  That one tear that I shed while driving away reminded me that the incident could have possibly went terribly wrong.   The only thing that kept me calm was hearing my dad’s voice in my head, “never let em see you SWEAT.”

Chains keep you from trying, leaves you repeating the cycle of fear, and depression.  I look at the chains in the featured photo and can’t help but to think about who died in them, because they were never broken.   Are you allowing what’s going on around you to keep you in mental bondage?  Again I ask how did we get here?  If I ask that question, I need to ask myself the same question.  How did I get here?  What am I doing to free the future generation from mental bondage?  I have to evaluate the chains in my life that are not broken.  I think we all need a history lesson to realize the power of these chains.  The chains are not always in the physical, they are truly apart of our mental.  The future must know how we got here, and work tirelessly to assure that we don’t stay here.  Look around, we have a lot of work to do.  I Steele Believe!