ADOS: "Queen & Slim" & How Our Political Isolation Hampers Us

On Thursday I saw the movie "Queen & Slim."  Yesterday, while visiting the African community's vendor event designed to stimulate money being spent at African businesses, I saw a table dedicated to the so-called "American Descendants of Slaves (ADOS) movement.  I realized that seeing the two Africans sitting at that table, representing ADOS, is the first time I've seen this so-called movement officially represented beyond social media.

I have been wracking my brain for the last day trying to think about how I wanted to write about that movie.  I have strong feelings about it, but I didn't want to come off sounding negative about an effort to portray African resistance to white supremacy, because we all know we need that imagery.  Plus, I didn't want to spoil the movie for those who haven't seen it yet.  So, I've spent the last day or so processing how I felt about the movie and the ADOS table.  What I realized in a sudden moment of clarity is that the issues I felt challenged about with that movie, along with the method in which seeing the ADOS table somewhat triggered me, reflects the fact that both of those things symbolize the same problematic issue.  

For those who are not aware, ADOS presents its public face as a movement concerned about Africans in the U.S. receiving our "fair share" of the vast wealth this country hordes.  These people express that the primary method that this government should utilize to rectify this historical tragedy is financial reparations to Africans here in this country.  That's the public face of ADOS which is designed and directed specifically to the masses of Africans in the U.S. who, for the most part, don't know much at all about the actual history of our enslavement in this hemisphere.  Due to our general ignorance about our history, most people who are listening to ADOS, and/or believe their message is a positive one, are missing clear and obvious holes in the foundation of this ADOS rhetoric.  For one, ADOS has direct ties to the European right in this country e.g. ADOS initiator Yvette Carnell sits on the policy board for the racist anti-immigration group ridiculously called "the Progressive for Immigration Reform (PFIR)."  If you really want to understand where the ADOS talking points on pushing Africans in the U.S. to oppose Africans born outside of the U.S. who are in the U.S., than all you have to do is study PFIR's policy history and objectives.  Those racist Europeans have no respect and/or desire to African people free and they know, even if many of us don't, that the best way to prevent us from achieving our freedom is to create false divisions and antagonisms among African people.  Xenophobia e.g. the fear of people you deem different than you, is the primary primitive tactic used by ADOs to stoke the fears Africans in the U.S. have been taught for centuries about Africa and anyone born there (as well as Africans from Central, South America, and the Caribbean).  I challenge anyone reading this to identify five people they know who have read any comprehensive book about Africa in the last five years.  Most of us would struggle to accomplish this task which explains why ADOs is so effective at spreading this confusion.  And, their European puppet masters have a stake in this because they know that Pan-Africanism e.g. the total liberation and unification of Africa under scientific socialism, is the true solution to the problems African people face everywhere on earth.  So, these racists promote and prop up ADOS because ADOS is anti-Pan-Africanism and anti-Pan-Africanism means no class challenge to the capitalist status quo the racist Europeans from organizations like PFIR live to uphold.  For the ADOS folks like Carnell, Antonio Moore, and even that individual Cornel West, there are the spoils of getting paid to promote this agenda at the expense of the suffering of the masses of our people.  

The only way this ADOS scam is able to gain any traction among our people is because this capitalist system has effectively miss educated us so that we know nothing about Africa or the rest of the world where African people live.  And, most tragically, most of us have no interest and desire to know anything about Africa.  The reason we have no desire is because we have been programmed to believe everything we need is right here on the plantation. Or, as Malcolm X said "leave this good white man?!  Are you crazy!!"  This extremely limited micro-nationalist thinking e.g. contain all our focus and thought on the U.S., benefits our enemies and works overtime against us because the only moral and logical pathway to power for any Africans in the world is the liberation of Africa, period.  Without that happening, the only potential we have is to become better positioned slaves.  This limited micro-nationalism is the cornerstone of keeping us controlled and oppressed and its that same thinking that reflects the challenges I had with "Queen & Slim."  I completely understand and support that seeing a dark skinned couple in love is a positive to our people.  I also recognize that this type of symbolic imagery is more than enough to satisfy most of us because we are so brutally oppressed as a people and that means we most often have no positive images of ourselves to point to.  Along with that, most of us are not involved in organizing efforts to alleviate our oppression so the absolute only model for resistance we understand is that individualistic example provided in that movie.  In other words, most of us don't have a foundation that permits us to believe that we as a people can unite and defeat this system that oppresses us.  Like the limited micro-nationalism that characterizes the ability of ADOS to gain traction, the same micro-nationalist consciousness, as it relates to us being able to see our struggle as much more than just a reaction to events (that are always at the mercy of the efforts of our enemies to capture us), prevents us from envisioning victory.  Of course, Hollywood is not there to propagate African liberation, but for those of us who go to sleep and wake up working for African liberation, we deeply desire to see artistic images that demonstrate we can and will win.  

I have that vision of victory and I can express it in a 740 page book like "The Paradox Principles", but the only reason I can do that is because I know we are no "minorities."  I know we can never be just "African-Americans."  We are not people who are dependent upon this system to decide our destiny.  We are part of a worldwide people who number over 2 billion.  Who live in almost 120 countries.  Who speak thousands of languages while having a universal culture that permits us to always understand each other.  This is organically true because we were kidnapped so the identities we think define us today are false.  Its really that universal culture, that we don't understand, but still nourishes us.  It was that culture that permitted us to communicate and work effectively together during those mass kidnapping so that even though we ended up in different places (including many of our biological family members), we were successful with our resistance to the point where it made the institutions of slavery in the Western Hemisphere (which built up the wealth in the U.S.), untenable. Contrary to the lies we were told, it was our slave revolts that led to slavery being eradicated, not just in the U.S., but in Central America, the Caribbean, and South America as well.  Slave revolts that were waged by Africans, not African Americans, Afro-Cubans, Afro-Brazilians, and all the other names that divide us.  Its that common culture and history that gives us the ammunition to continuously fight for the liberation of our mother - Africa - and the salvation of all our people everywhere.  And, its that Pan-African consciousness that's completely absent from ADOs and movies like "Queen & Slim."  The absence of that universal dignity explains why practically every encounter in that movie resulted in us casually flinging around the n word towards one another as if every African talks like that.  Sure, many of us do (and I was one of them up until I turned 17), but that as well is a reflection of the brain dirtying process that reduces us to limited micro-nationalist thinking.  As Richard Pryor said in 1980 when describing his first trip to Africa and why he would no longer use the n word in his comedy; "there are no n - - - - rs in Africa!"

We are a great people who have a real life movement - revolutionary Pan-Africanism - that is working everyday to bring us the justice we so desperately crave.  We are not the people who must work with this oppressive system to gain any political, social, economic, and artistic presence that we can possibly hope to generate.  We don't need the U.S., the U.S. needs us, meaning the 50 million Africans (from everywhere) living here as well as Africa herself.  Our task is to grow beyond the ideological and philosophical boundaries that capitalism imposes upon us.  The boundaries that tell us our only salvation is in what exists within these borders and whatever this system will spare us.  We are worth so much more than that and even if there was no Pan-African movement, we should value ourselves enough so that if no movement was present, we would create one (but, since there is a movement, we should value ourselves enough to support it).  

I felt triggered because I dream of us reaching forward to achieve our potential as a people.  I don't know about you, but the constant focus on limiting us only to what our enemies permit us to work with is the most effective element in existence to make my stomach continue to turn at unprecedented rates.  Many of us aren't the least bit concerned about liberation for the masses of our people.  For those sad souls, manipulating crumbs to fall from the master's table or generating symbolic individualistic resistance that fails to be victorious is enough.  For us, we want a vision that brings victory and art that inspires that victory so excuse us if the basics are just never going to be enough.  Our people are worth so much more than that and if our demand makes people angry than that just means we are doing our job.