What Life Was Like Before They Changed Our Story

  

  Before They Took Everything

    When we think about the scale of power before colonization, we often think of wealth and lineage, because those controlled who held power. The assets, family name, and riches a person carried dictated how they were treated and where they stood socially. If we look at the lives Black people in Africa lived around that time, they carried enormous value, from the wealth of their land to the richness of their lifestyles.

When Race Replaced Class

There were complex societies with diverse cultures, thriving economies, and deep-rooted traditions. All of this placed Black people at the higher end of the social spectrum if the division was strictly between the rich and the poor. But today, that balance shifted. As John C. Calhoun once said, “The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black” (Coates 71). With the idea of race taking over, people are no longer judged based on their wealth, values, or traditions, but by the social construct built around the color of their skin. Post-colonial life for Black people is often defined by racial oppression, rooted in colonization and the transatlantic slave trade. “The Dream” that America promises is one of the clearest examples of the lingering effects of colonialism.

Black societies once thrived because everyone started on a relatively equal footing, and progress depended on factors like hard work, skill, or family ties. However under post-colonial structures, none of that seems to matter. This book itself, and its messages, clearly shows that a person of color has to work twice as hard just to reach the starting line where white individuals are often born; and even then, getting to that point is extremely hard.

What “The Dream” Really Looks Like for Us

Many who have been indoctrinated into “The Dream” would rather “see Prince Jones followed by a bad cop through three jurisdictions and shot down for acting like a human or they would rather reach out, in all their sanity, and push [Coates’s] four-year-old son as though he were merely an obstacle in the path of their too-important day” (Coates 71). This shows that the core impact of post-colonialism on Black people, as written by Coates, is dehumanization, and the same tactics used in slavery to oppress knowledge are used in a more seamless manner, causing Black people to work twice as hard for their achievements and intelligence to be seen and valued.

I’ve experienced this myself. There have been moments when opportunities that could’ve changed my life were taken from me simply because of the color of my skin. And it doesn’t help that people like me must fight for access to programs and services, just to barely reach the same starting line others were born on, benefiting from a system built on the backs of Black bodies.

Coates sums it up perfectly for many people of color. “It is truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential below of your country…” (Coates 72). That feeling is more than emotional. It’s a daily reality. To be seen as the foundation of a nation’s success but denied the full benefits of it is a cruel reality that still defines the Black experience.

This book has been such a great read! If you are interested here's the link, along with articles pertaining to Colonization, and how our lives before colonization. Until next week! 

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates | Goodreads
 
Cited work Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. Spiegel & Grau, 2015.

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