17 @ 11 am-1 pm as we discuss self realization & what it really means to be a woman! #WomensHistoryMonth

To listen to the show live Click or Copy link below:

http://timeforanawakening.com/revive

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Damn … Damn … Dayumm! Jimmie Walker Tells Fox News He Loves Trump, Bill Maher and Ronald Reagan

By Elliot Booker — 2 years ago

Written by

Michael Harriot

Monica Morgan/Getty Images

Before we begin this article, I need to reveal that a few weeks ago, I swore a solemn oath to the gods of hot sauce and ankle lotion that I would never publicly refer to a black person as a “coon.” I didn’t know I would be tested this soon.

This morning started off great. I woke up and made myself a collard-green-and-chitlin smoothie (not really, but I know that’s what some people think black millennials eat for breakfast), did a few police leaps (or—as they were formerly called—jumping jacks) and went to work.

I was still high off watching the white allies win the World Wypipo Tournament when I read a Fox News report about Jimmie Walker being a Donald Trump supporter.

I love Good Times. Notice that sentence is not in the past tense. I’ve seen every episode. Even now, if I run across it while channel surfing, I can’t pass it by.

Because of it, I know that Thelma Evans was the finest woman who ever appeared in front of a camera. I know that the Awesome Foursome (J.J., Cool Breeze, Poppo and Head) are tighter than panty hose two sizes small. I know it was created by two black men (Kenneth “Not Babyface” Williams, who wrote Cooley High, and Mike Evans (or, as he is known in black America, Lionel from The Jeffersons). I know that it still ranks as the best sitcom theme song of all time (Fresh Prince of Bel-Air fans, fight me).

So imagine my surprise when I read this quote from the Fox News article:

“There’s not one positive Trump joke out here,” he explained. “No President has been attacked in recent years—because you couldn’t attack [Barack] Obama because he was black … but Trump, they have come out guns blazing against him, but even though I don’t like everything he does, why, heck, darn it, I think he deserves some sort of praise… but you can’t say that in Hollywood.”

Gotdammit, J.J., they got you, too? I knew you were susceptible to this kind of shuck-and-jive skullfuckery when the respected John Amos said he “felt too much emphasis was being put on J.J. and his chicken hat and saying ‘dy-no-mite’ every third page,” But Donald Trump, man?

But this Procyon-lotor-ass nigga (look it up) didn’t stop there. Walker went on to say that he agrees with 90 percent of everything Don Puffy Comb-Over does. Then—because when you’re stepping that hard, why not fetchit—this old I-heard-those-jokes-already-from-my uncle-at-the-barbecue motherfucker apologized for the 10 percent of Trump activities he doesn’t support!

“That means I’m not against Trump, but he makes mistakes, too,” he said.

I really want to end this article here, but there’s more. This feels like too much. Why don’t you take a few deep breaths before you read the next paragraph. I’ll wait.

Are you ready? OK, let’s go.

Then Jimmie Walker explained why we shouldn’t vilify Bill Maher for saying the word “nigger” on national television (calm down, bruh. I told you this part was going to be rough)!

“It was a joke!” he told Trump’s favorite channel. “Come on, people! I love Bill Maher … even though Bill Maher has not put me on his show in about 10 years … Bill Maher is not a racist … calm down.”

One more thing, and I promise this will be over. You know how you tighten your abdominal muscles before you let your 8-year-old niece punch you in the gut so she won’t knock the wind out of you? You might want to do that right now. This might hurt a little bit.

Walker proceeded to say that he thought that Ronald Reagan was a great president, and some other bullshit that gave me throw-up in the front of my mouth.

First I had to stop dancing to R. Kelly’s “Ignition” remix; then I couldn’t stomach old episodes of The Cosby Show; and now this. Pretty soon I’m going to be relegated to nothing but reruns of Amen and What’s Happening.

I know Rerun and George Jefferson would never say anything this stupid.

To read more Click or Copy link: http://thegrapevine.theroot.com/damn-damn-dayumm-jimmie-walker-tells-fox-news-1797510271

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Culture News Featured

The European Problem: Or Africa’s 3,700-Year Struggle To Civilize Europe

By Elliot Booker — 3 years ago

Since the humble beginnings of civilization in the Land of Pwene (Punt) some 12,000 years ago, to the great innovations of Nubia and Kemet, our Ancestors, the Founders of Civilization, have always been willing—even against great travail—to share their wisdom liberally without fail, even with people of very distant lands. One such group of people who came routinely to Africa to study the ways of the Founders were the Greeks. Our Ancestors believed that the only way to maintain perfect balance between themselves and the world around them—a world that was locked in a whirlpool of primitivism, backwardness and violence; a world that only sought to run inexorably to chaos—was to share their science and philosophy. To maintain perfect balance—what we still call Maat, The Perfect World Order—our Ancestors believed they had to share with the rest of the world the solid lessons of the making of civilization.

Kemet, for instance, had one foreign and domestic policy to which they poured libation every day: Maat. To the Founders of Kemet, Maat underpinned the entire goal of mankind in all aspects of life—socio-economic, political or religious. Maat was the philosophy and the religious ideal that made Africa unique. It set Her apart in the quest of man to achieve homeostatic balance with his environment. Even today, a firm understanding of most traditional African religions, for example Vodun, and most other traditional African systems of fractal government point back to this inescapable ideology, Maat.

It was certainly the goal that having introduced the rest of the world to the remarkable transformational lessons of making civilization, the world would become a better place for all humanity.

However, recent events in world history causes us to look back on some of the efforts of the Founders of Civilization and judge for ourselves whether they succeeded in their drive to bring civilization to the rest of the world, particularly Europe, and if not, whether there remains any hope at all for achieving Maat, The Perfect World Order.

The last few hundred years have been most worrisome. The over preponderance of violent wars fought back-to-back and genocides in which many people have been brutally enslaved, murdered and wiped off the surface of the Earth; the occurrence of two mechanical tribal wars in which two Atomic Bombs were dropped for absolutely no human reason and from which some still claim they had reached the Moon; the emergence of the fact of a fast warming planet due to primitive accumulation and the unrestrained consumption of limited resources; and the realization of a world still engulfed in perpetual warfare without end: all point to a chaotic world that has more than often plunged Africa Herself, and the descendants of the Founders, backwards into the brinks of utter and gross barbarism.

The world, as we know it today, could not be any further from The Perfect World Order that the Founders, our Ancestors, in Punt, Nubia and Kemet imagined. It behooves us to understand the 12,000 year history leading up to this current deplorable state and it is incumbent upon us to understand this history thoroughly so that once we have overcome the barbarism, we might not repeat the mistakes that birthed it.

The First Advance: Africa’s Cretan Attempt to Civilize Europe.

In this current atmosphere of crass savagery, it is important to make note of two previous attempts or waves of Africa’s effort to civilize Europe and bring about international peace and rugged advancement, in order that we might yet gain a deeper, more granular understanding of what the problem currently is, what is at stake and what might need to be done! These two previous attempts seem, in hindsight, all but exhausted to no avail.

Africa established the first civilization in Europe on the Greek island of Crete in 1700 BC (some 3,700 years ago), and the elite Greeks who lived there were primarily educated and trained in the African Temples of the Nile Valley (now formerly known as “universities,” as a result of Timbuktu’s later advancements in curriculum research).

The Greeks invariably passed on their acquired African civilization to the Romans who ultimately lost it to several bestial invasions of forest European tribes, spelling the first hiccup on the part of the Founders in Africa to bring civilization to large parts of Europe.

This failure on the part of Rome to hold ground against barbarism and backwardness—which nonetheless came at the heels of the fading identity of the Black Etruscans who had founded the Empire—marked a patent miscarriage of establishing Maat in the rest of the world outside Africa. It also brought with it untold setbacks spelling larger paradigm shift implications about how African civilizations thought about and imagined the pursuit of the Principles of Maat or the Perfect Word Order.

The catastrophic fall of Rome ushered in Europe’s plunge back into primitivism. The Barbarians in name and in deed will come to loiter about the European terrain during the Pale Ages—what they call the Middle Ages—for five centuries. Over this period, multitudes of warring European tribes from the Caucus were pushed deeper and deeper by the invading Huns away into Western Europe, further and further away from civilization and from any prospect of ever being re-civilized by Africa!

The Second Advance: Africa’s Moorish Attempt to Civilize Europe.

Shortly after those five centuries of Europe’s nosedive back into barbarism, the second African wave of bringing back civilization to Europe to restore Maat began, an earnest showing that the ideas of establishing The Perfect Word Order were still, by and large, recurrent in most African cultures.

The Moors of North Africa had begun to see the necessity to re-introduce civilization back into Europe and to forestall the fear of savage invasions that would plunge the world into utter violence. The tough belief in the unrelenting Principles of Maat that they had inherited from the Ancestors spurred the political will to embark on a second attempt to civilize Europe. In 711 A.D., the Moors conquered the marauding hordes of lawless barbarians who had turned Europe into a cesspool of primitivism after what the Greeks and later the Etruscans had managed to achieve with African aid, and once again established another civilizing mission into Europe, bringing the Pale Ages to its highfalutin brutish end.

Recent archaeology and scholarship reveals this remarkable Moorish advance into Europe. The Moors enforced civilization over Spain, Portugal and France for well over seven hundred years. They re-introduced mathematics, astronomy, art, and philosophy into Europe and quickly moved Europe out of the Pale Ages; out of the gloomy barbarism and into a Renaissance reminiscent of the former Greco-Kemetian attempt. The first western European mathematicians, scientists, logicians, linguists and historians were made here. In fact, according to Basil Davidson, during the eighth century there was no land “more admired by its [European] neighbors, or more comfortable to live in, than a rich African civilization which took shape in Spain.”

Differences and Similarities Between the Two African Attempts to Civilize Europe.

Having elucidated the two major African attempts to bring civilization to Europe it is important to also carefully shed light on the fact that though both The Kemetians and The Moors were enamored and inspired by the hope of establishing The Perfect Word Order, there were some marked differences in their approaches. The hope is that by contrasting both efforts we would gain a deeper understanding about the current state of affairs in an increasingly inhuman world.

With all the pomp and pageantry of the Moorish attempt to civilize Europe, there was something historically unique about this second African advance. Rather than a focus on the shared ancient African belief in establishing The Perfect Word Order through civilizing Europe, the Moors emphasized an even more demanding idea veering somewhat away from the principles of Maat alone, which their Ancestors had fully committed to some 2,000 years prior when they established the first European civilization in Crete. The Moors wielded a more demanding philosophy: Islam. In this, the goal was not only limited to establishing The Perfect World Order here on Earth, but also a commitment to the idea of transforming human nature itself in order to gain access to a Perfectly Ordered World in the afterlife.

It was not difficult to see how the Moors came to be Muslims, especially since Islam itself with its humble beginnings east of the Nile and the Middle East had become one of the transformative religious schools of thought, alongside Christianity and many other monotheistic religions, in African philosophy. Having traversed through time and space with a strong bent on a single Supreme Being, and no other accompanying Gods, Islam sourced its theological will to expression from the unparalleled genius of the scholars of Pharaoh Akhenaten of Kemet, who enhanced and promoted monotheism for centuries.

In the same way that Akhenaten’s monotheism represented a paradigm shift from the polytheist doctrines of Maat, which were central to most of Africa’s old religious ideas and philosophical outlook, the philosophies of Islam as an inescapable ingredient and a concomitant aspect of the Moorish civilization of Europe would represent a major paradigm shift in how African foreign policy was modified to not only preserve Maat at its core, but also to promote the individual quest to accessing a higher-ordered Maatocratic world that was theologically only imaginable in the afterlife. Much of the differences and similarities between the Greco-Kemetian attempt and the Moors’ quest to re-civilize Europe can be assessed from this point of departure.

Chiefly, instead of focusing on The Perfect World Order on Earth, the Moors also evangelized about the individual goal to attain salvation in a perfectly ordered world after death. Indeed, the second wave of Africa’s re-civilizing mission into Europe has often been referred to as the Muslim Civilization. In many parts of Europe at the time, Moor or Black or African and Muslim were more than often interchangeable. This new paradigm, un-willfully or willfully, and contrary to the sole Principles of Maat, placed the human as central to all outlooks on life. This ideology was part of a new wave of a human-centric doctrines newly taking root in Africa and the Middle East but which faced major debates.

However for the Moors, in theology and philosophy, in chemistry and mathematics, the Human, instead of the Human cum Nature (as proposed by Maatocratic religious doctrines), became the focus of the paradigm shift. For after all, the Supreme Being was only interested in the salvation of the Human, not in the preservation of Nature, per se.

The Moorish Struggle Against European Primitivism.

With this new shift in thinking about the world, the Moors ascended to great technical heights in every aspect of socio-economic life, technical heights that were arguably hitherto never realized in science and philosophy by their Ancestors and, perhaps, their cousins elsewhere on the continent. The Moors expanded educational institutions to reach more and more people in North Africa and southern Europe, while deeper and deeper into western and northern Europe, which had become more and more Christianized—except for a few educated members of royal families—almost the entire populations remained illiterate and primitive. European kings were practically innumerate!

The juxtaposition of the Moorish advance into Europe and European lifestyle is stark. I shall attempt to enumerate a few instances. At a time when the Moors lived in immaculate palaces all over Europe and built thousands of public baths to promote good hygiene among their subjects, the monarchs of Germany, France, and England fought against Moorish influence, convincing their subjects that cleanliness was an actual sin. These European kings believed that dirt was intrinsic to human development and they dwelt in big barns, if they could manage enough technical knowhow to erect them: barns with no windows and no chimneys, often with only a hole in the roof for the exit of firewood smoke from heating.

In the tenth century, the Moorish capital of Cordoba, for instance, was not just the capital of Spain but also the most important and most modernized city in Europe. Cordoba boasted a population of half a million and touted some of the first and finest street lighting, five hundred mosques, the most sophisticated hospitals in all of Europe (with running water and about fifty of them with the most renowned surgeons the sub-continent had ever known), and seventy libraries, one of which held over half a million books.

Notably, during this same era of the Moorish attempt to re-civilize Europe, the rest of the sub-continent was so immersed in primitivism that it took several hundred years of constant education, in many of the seventeen Moorish universities across southern Europe, for a few educated ones to manage to establish two universities of their own deeper into Western Europe. The founders of Oxford University, for example, were encouraged to form the institution after receiving a thorough education in the African universities in Spain. According to the United Nations’ Education body, the oldest university operating in the world today, besides the Sankore Madrasas of Timbuktu, is the University of Al-Karaouine of Morocco founded during the height of the Moorish Empire in 859 A.D. by a Black woman named Fatima al-Fihri.

To summarize, the immensity of the task of re-civilizing Europe involved The Moors marshalling a stunning amount of resources. In the realm of mathematics, the Moors introduced to Europeans concepts like the number zero (0), Arabic numerals, and the decimal system, training and educating Europeans in methods of problem solving with advanced novelty, accuracy, and alacrity.

And there’s no doubt that the Moors’ scientific re-civilization of Europe extended far beyond philosophy and the theoretical sciences. The flight polymath, Ibn Firnas, who in 875 A.D. made the world’s first scientific attempt to fly in a controlled manner, trained and educated several Europeans in the mechanics of flying. In global seafaring, Moorish advancements in navigational technology such as the astrolabe and the sextant, as well as their improvements in cartography and shipbuilding, which were made available to all of Europe, paved the way there for an Age of Exploration.

In no small measure of irony, the strongest evidence of African technical supremacy in the Age of Exploration comes from the pen of Christopher Columbus, the barbarian himself. In 1920, the American historian and linguist Leo Weiner of Harvard University, in his book Africa and the Discovery of America, explained how Columbus noted in his journal that Native Americans had confirmed that, “black skinned people had come from the South-East in boats, trading in gold-tipped spears.”

Is a Third African Attempt Possible?

The scale of the second African attempt to re-civilize Europe is clear. Moorish Spain not only collected and perpetuated the intellectual advances from Pwene, Nubia, Kemet, Crete and Rome, it also expanded upon those previous civilizations and their humble attempt to bring civilization to Europe. A number of ideas on which modern Europe now prides itself came to it from Moorish Spain: free trade across borders, diplomacy, etiquette, advanced seafaring, research methods, and key advances in chemistry. The Moors single-handedly lifted Europe out of the Pale Ages and paved the way for what Europeans now refer to as the Renaissance period.

But alas, what has become of the nature of this “renaissance”? What happened again in Europe, several centuries after the Moors had disappeared?

Over the past few centuries, with the re-emergence in the world today of utter violence by any means necessary, unending world wars (European aggression), terrorism, and an unsavory expansion of the ideology of primitive accumulation spread across much of the world outward from the deeper interstices of western European ideology and practice—which is even reaching into Africa Herself—namely, the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade, colonialism, imperialism and USAFRICOM, the nature—the success or failure—of the African attempt to bring civilization to Europe must be re-examined.

Pointedly, as Cheikh Anta Diop has once put it: what has been achieved in Europe since the Moors? Is it civilization or have the Europeans—in the same fashion as they stooped to barbarism during the Pale Ages because of the failure of the previous Greco-Kemetian attempt to civilize it—reverted to old fashioned mediocrity and inhumanity with an even more brutal desire? Has the technical civilization they have received from the Moors improved them as human beings or has it exacerbated their penchant for crass violence by way of their fixation on bomb-building and warfare? For how can we perceive of European/American militaries in their forever-preparations for unending wars, phantom wars, fake wars, and wars of unceasing aggressive offensive as any resemblance of a lasting influence of Moorish civilization, let alone a Greco-Kemetian one?

The key to understanding the increased and the more sophisticated European aggression and violence towards other people, towards other races, stems from understanding the nature of the European problem today in light of the two previous attempts by notable African civilizations to rescue Europe from utter barbarity.

Is There Any Hope to Re-civilize Europe Which Has Now Spread Across the World?

Having degraded Africa’s ability and will to re-civilize it, Europe is now set on a path of self-destruction. This is the inevitable goal of barbarism itself. The previous few centuries of Europe’s technologically violent onslaughts on African civilizations, ranging from the Napoleonic book-burning civilization-hating rituals in North and West Africa, to the terrorism of the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade, to colonialism, to imperialism and now neoliberalism, Europe has succeeded to do to Africa with Moorish technical prowess what it could not have done to Africa during the Pale Ages.

At this point only one hope remains if Europe and Europeans spread across the West are to regain some civilizational salvation away from barbarism. Only one hope exists: salvation can only come from the same people they brutally crucified on the cross, but who even in their suffering still managed beyond the odds to give the Americas the greatest love, the greatest music civilization that part of the world has ever known. If the West is to survive, Africa cannot help it in no certain immediate terms that she on two previous occasions has done. Perhaps, only Africans in the American diaspora, now spread across the West—through no fault of their own, and only as a result of Europe’s penchant for utter violence—are capable and situated with the particular interest and will to save the West from utter barbarism.

Africans in the diaspora may resurrect in the equal pomp and pageantry of the spirit of their forefathers and once again, in the same fashion as their distant cousins, the Moors, force back civilization into the descendants of the peoples of Europe, now plunging the vast expanse of the virgin territories of the Americas and the rest of the world into the erstwhile Pale Ages. One hope remains to save Europe, now spread across the world, from plunging back into complete and utter barbarism and carrying the entire world with it: the African resurrection in the Americas! We had better prayed for it.

To read more Click or Copy link:

http://grandmotherafrica.com/european-problem-africas-3700-year-struggle-civilize-europe/

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Current Events / News Featured

Guns ‘key’ to African American equality: NAAGA

By Elliot Booker — 2 years ago

NAAGA Vice President Douglas Jefferson believes gun violence should be remedied with a ‘holistic’ approach [Photo provided by NAAGA]

by Creede Newton

The United States’ recent history is filled with mass shootings and a lack of political will to initiate reforms to curb gun violence. The past two months have seen two of the deadliest shootings in the nation’s history.

As of November 24, there had been 321 mass shootings in the US this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which tracks gun-related violence. October saw the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history in Las Vegas, when Stephen Paddock killed 59 and injured more than 500 concert-goers at the Mandalay Bay hotel.

On November 5, Devin Patrick Kelley killed 26 and injured 20 at a Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, the deadliest shooting in a place of worship in the US’ history. These tragedies have energised calls for increased gun control legislation.

Simultaneously, the far right has seen a surge in support after the election of Donald Trump, whom they view as sympathetic to their cause. US hate crimes have risen for the past two years. Minorities have taken to arming themselves for self-defence as a result.

Gun control has been used to limit African Americans self-defence groups in the past, most notably the post-Civil War “Black Codes”, which disarmed African Americans, and the 1967 Mulford Act, which was supported by the National Rifle Association (NRA) and attempted to inhibit the gun rights of the leftist Black Panther Party .

Al Jazeera spoke with Douglas Jefferson, the vice president of the National African Americans Gun Association (NAAGA), a Black alternative to the NRA, about their view on mass shootings, public perception of African American gun ownership and how responsible gun control could be achieved.

Al Jazeera: What approach does the NAAGA take towards gun violence tragedies like those in Las Vegas and Sutherland Springs, as compared with an organisation like the NRA?

Douglas Jefferson: [The] NAAGA addresses issues of gun rights in a holistic manner, particularly in regards to African Americans. The recent spate of mass shootings are just as tragic as past shootings. However, the reflexive response of many people is to blame the guns used to perpetrate such tragedies. This is a mistake in that this response does not actually solve the issue of mass shootings in a meaningful manner.

In the case of the shooting in Sutherland Springs, laws were in place that should have actually prevented this shooting. The issue was that mechanisms of the current laws did not function properly. Adding more laws and restrictions does not solve that issue. In the case of the Las Vegas shooting, the shooter had no history of arrests, mental illness, or violent behaviour in addition to keeping his plans to himself. That kind of individual is very hard to detect and interdict without laws that violate the civil liberties of the average citizen.

Al Jazeera: The African Americans community has a long history of gun ownership in its struggle to achieve equal rights. In response, conservative politicians have signed gun control laws that targeted the rights of African Americans. How do you view modern gun control legislation?

Jefferson: Gun ownership in the black community has been key to achieving many of the gains that we enjoy today. The marches of the Civil Rights Movement and the accompanied voting registration drives in the Jim Crow South would have been impossible without the Black people from those towns who hosted the out of town marchers in their homes and protected those same marchers with firearms against domestic terrorist attacks from [Ku Klux] Klan members and white mobs. While some of the current gun control laws were well intentioned and others weren’t, I don’t think that the current gun control law structure has had the desired effect of reducing gun violence.

This is [because] gun violence is not looked at holistically. There are many factors that contribute to the level of gun violence that we see, and the presence of the firearm itself is the smallest factor. Since firearms do not operate themselves there is a human element that must be contended with. Also, one must look at the differences between street crime-related gun violence and mass shootings.

Though the outcomes of the two instances are the same (injuries and death), the two phenomena are created by different conditions with structural poverty being the primary driver of street crime-related gun violence and a lack of societal mechanisms to identify and address individuals with mental illness or emotional instability in the case of mass shootings.

Al Jazeera: Is there a way to achieve responsible gun control? If so, what would be necessary?

Jefferson: While there are measures that could be instituted to curb gun violence, there is no one broad-based policy that addresses all gun violence without severely impeding on the rights of individuals who are unlikely to ever commit such crimes and such policies do not focus on the gun itself.

There is also the question of weighing the cost of prevention policies against the rights of the greater majority who do not commit gun violence. We have to remember that with every law there has to be an enforcement mechanism for when the law is violated. Our current legal system tends to lean toward draconian punishments for crimes and, given this fact, I am not inclined to believe that a slew of new gun control legislation would be much different. Given the history of the US, I can see a situation developing where black people are unfairly targeted by such laws. It has happened before in this country and it continues to happen to this day, particularly in the case of drug crime prosecutions.

Al Jazeera: The past few years have reportedly seen a rise in gun ownership in the African Americans community. What do you think is behind this?

Jefferson: There are multiple factors contributing to the rise in black gun ownership. One factor is the level of crime [experienced] in a number of our communities. People are concerned about their safety and realise that the police are not always able to respond in time to protect them. They want to be ready and able to protect themselves in the event that someone attempts to victimise them.

Another concern is the increase in violent rhetoric and acts from hate groups like the alt-right, KKK, and Neo-Nazis. There is a history in this country of such groups violently attacking members of the black community. The past has shown us that armed self-defence is a practical response to such instances where the state cannot be there to protect you due to physics (time and space), or won’t be there due to incompetence, moral cowardice, or outright malice.

Al Jazeera: NAAGA was founded in February 2015 as an alternative to the NRA for the African Americans community. Why did the African Americans community need an alternative? What did the NRA’s advocacy lack?

Jefferson: NAAGA seeks to address 2nd Amendment rights (those that guarantee gun ownership in the US) in a holistic fashion in regards to the African Americans community. When most people think of what a gun owner looks like, African Americans don’t come to mind. Generally, this is true even amongst African Americans. NAAGA seeks to change this reality by educating African Americans on the rich history of the black tradition of arms in this country, which has been integral to every moment of African Americans self-determination which created conditions for African Americans to live as fully fledged citizens of a country that historically has not recognised us as full citizens.

Al Jazeera: How does being a gun owner inform your identity as an African Americans?

Jefferson: I am proud to exercise my 2nd Amendment rights because I know that practice comes from a long and proud tradition of arms within my community. From escaped slaves who took up arms to maintain their freedom against slave catchers to Civil Rights leaders who defended their homes and families against Klan nightriders – who would terrorise them at night after the marchers had gone home, there are countless examples of African Americans affirming their rights as citizens and human beings by embracing the 2nd Amendment. I see myself and NAAGA as continuing that tradition and bringing to life the stories of many of these individuals that have been forgotten.

READ MORE AT: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/11/guns-key-african-american-equality-naaga-171124140652472.html

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