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VOL 3. NO. 29 Monday, July 30 - Sunday, August 5, 2001
AFRICA
AGAINST THE GRAIN
BUSINESS/NETWORKING
CARIBBEAN CONNECTION
CONSCIOUSLY SPEAKING
FOR THE FAMILY
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JUST CLUBBING
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SOULFUL CUISINE
SPORTING ACTION
STAGE
THE WORD
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AGAINST THE GRAIN
THERE'S THAT RACE CONFERENCE AGAIN
A Prelude ...
By C.D. ELLISON
As the World Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance approaches, conversations on the topic become claw fights gnawing away on gritty clauses and explosive phrases, bouts of unrestrained turpitude unable to reach beyond the first flare of anger. Do you actually read the words or do you instead try to feel in between them? Do you read in between the lines or do you actually see them?

Burning questions of race presently rattle the brains of social experts meandering the halls of the intellectual academy in search of answers. These are the ordinary and timeworn discussions on "social problems." The same ideas are regurgitated in various forms in various conferences and forums. Half attending know about ... half of what they are talking about. Talk takes up time, space and energy; when we could all be off talking about something else. Conferences come and go.

Allow me to break this into pieces for you ...

Shortly thereafter, we will all experience the reddening, almost purplish insult of a bruising, blemishing embarrassment. Suggesting and accepting our acquired taste for the human family's most tasteless will lead us into a gut's fill of guilt.

The history of our world had been adversely influenced, shaken, rattled and rocked by what Rome had done to us. And not because of the wisdom passed through the cracked walls of broken generations or the whispers passed from blue-watered, warm shores to barbershop floors caked with grades of hair, talking excessively about Rome and Rome's ways, Rome's devilish nuances, life in Rome, and Rome in life and when living in Rome can be like the
Romans while living in Rome
was
miserable enough because
Rome was
not
so
grand
anymore.

And Rome's trials as opposed to Rome's exalted and overweening success. We knew Rome ... well, some say as much as Rome knew us. We knew Rome well
enough
but if Rome
was
such a problem,
what
did
we do
about Rome?

And we knew of and felt Rome's unbridled, uncurbed appetite for conquest and its quenching, unsatisfied thirst for the blood and soul of others.

But Rome was Rome, and Rome reached the heights of Rome and what the Almighty had planned for Rome because Rome had been trained and poised to conquer ... it obviously took the exploited ones by surprise.

Undoubtedly - and, yes, once well known - the exploited ones were by all measurements once great. It was the sort of greatness beyond history's expectations, but still within God's reach at that time. They spanned across large rivers like overgrown, magnificent flowers blooming in the spring, temples and pyramids erected in a fashion unparalleled. Indeed, they were once far beyond the cradle of civilization, for they had instead been the forbearers who rocked the cradle and nursed its worldly possessions. The exploited ones once held the center of the world in the sweaty palm of their hands.

Now, the Elders continue to contemplate what had happened. What happened to the richness along the golden edges of those great rivers, and the splendid trading paths across the burning Sahara, or those almost indestructible stone structures across the Southern plains. They explain that it was the Great Rape and Plunder of the "Motherland," their eyes awaiting fiery response, their posture straightened for congregational acceptance. "It was what they did to us!" firing the accusatory index finger in the direction of the Roman legionnaires spying from the back of the audience as they watch and fail to express the slightest emotion. The Elders, choking on vanity, fail to remember that the Romans are, indeed, well trained.

However, there was a fundamental, most tragic flaw subtle to the open eye, but frighteningly obvious to the third eye unseen and talked of in roundabout ways unheard of by those who claimed to listen. Their Elders continued looking at wrinkled reflections, the wrinkles through time in the ripples slashing the inward mirror and thought deep like fish with half-closed bedroom eyes dragging fins across the ocean floors. The had studied the maps, perused the time lines and drawn conclusions once they had seen the massive migrations wiggling spasmodically from the Northeast, through and around the Continent, then falling off into the deep blue of the Atlantic.

There was a weakness.

How else could they explain it? How do armies win a war? They find an opening and they exploit it, ultimately crushing the opposition. How do the conquered ... end up conquered in the first place? Like Scipio seizing the key moment at the Battle of Canae, inviting the Carthaginian infantry inward as if allowing the warmth of an easy, center-penetrating victory, the Romans reared the two sides of their cavalry into an enveloping circle of death.

The exploited, long before the final stage of their dire circumstance, had trusted the conquering Romans, had for too long placed terrific amounts of faith in the untested conscience of the Romans.

Before Rome, lessons had been as clear as the tell-tale signs that hung from the flaunted, bloody spears of an inescapable melancholy brooding and slapping the Mediterranean shores of Lower Egypt. Many times since past, the Elders explained, there had been others who came, bent and lumpish and longing to fill the perdurable intellectual void which left them declassed and ignorant across the Eastern mouth of the sea. "They were still naked and unclothed roaming forth across the snowy, frigid Nordic plains, living in caves while we had already learned the meaning of the constellations," boasted the Elders.

Yet, these "naked, unclothed" specimens the Elders and their lot now speak so lowly of - the loathing, the frustration, the disdain so apparent and easily detected in the voices of the conquered - managed to roll through the Nile Delta to the Straits of Gibraltar, as far down as the Horn of Africa plundering and purging the mastodonic temples and pyramids of civilization's golden cradle. How? It is during such discussions or such thoughts which catch the Elders masticating their tongues into the unspeakable, exposing the glossy pretext of Roman-made racial shams played by both the Romans and the Roman-worshipping slaves.

By no means were the exploited any less intelligent, nor less trained, nor less superior than their Roman counterparts or the Assyrians, the Greeks before them and the Arabs, the French, the Turks and the British long afterwards. But they knew. And for reasons camouflaged by shame and the spite of blistering truths many of the Elders deliberately overlooked a marrow of manifesting evidence. Untold was the exploited once exploiting themselves long before the invasions took place, the years of sightless disseverance and deviating disunion which helped cause the final demise and destruction of empires once great. The migration charts studied by the Elders not only portrayed a conglomeration of nation-states and principalities circling the Motherland in continental disarray, moving in nomadic spurts, creating one kingdom after another broken kingdom and then another, but - like a horrible Cain and Abel replay - they displayed a faded, disjointed resistance unable to stand against the weight of its own internal feuds, much less repelling a cultural and military blitzkrieg from the outside.

Hence, it became a very difficult and most disconcerting thought for the majority of the exploited ones to look at their present condition past the one dimension. Meaning that while forever annoyed and looking back into the past, there is a failure to see what is to be, can be, needs to be ... done in the now. Yet, they clung to the past so, with little challenge to forge ahead. But, we must recall and step ever so lightly so as to not defeat the real purpose: to live and to simply be. Meaning? It is indeed hard to accept the fact that sometimes accountability lays on the person most affected by what there is for which to be held accountable. This assertion, which many could and will very well accuse of accommodation, is simply evaluating why the exploited end up exploited in the first place. For the sake of finding a cure for an incurable condition, this should be, perhaps, preferable to the overused notion of the underdog.

C.D. Ellison is Contributing Writer to Metro Connection. He can be reached at againstthegrain@metroconnection.info.


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