COURSE COMING SOON!!!
VISIONING LEGACY
“How can we be successful if we have no idea or, worse, the wrong idea of who we were and, therefore are? . . .Our minds can be trained for individual career success, but our group morale, the very soul of us has been devastated by the assumption that what has not been told about ourselves does not exist to be told.”
- Randall Robinson, The Debt |
All that we are and all that we do must be in honor of those who have gone before us and to the benefit of those who are to follow in our legacy.
As Black men, we are living history for our next generation! Yet, only rarely do we make time to box the compass of our manhood around the most crucial cultural parameters for our African essence: justice, harmony, truth and balance. Instead, we either pursue pathways for survival and excellence that soothe our wounded egos or we ignore our responsibilities to the global African village that has provided our most valuable assets. Brothers have shared that they were so busy “achieving” or simply “getting by” that they never gave much thought to what their manhood might look like to others after completing their urgent missions. Sure, some secured awards and public recognition, but the MLK standard for judgment by “the content of their character” often was overshadowed by those pursuits for public recognition. Only after age forty-five do we usually begin considering our legacies!
Think about that, Black men in the U.S. live an expected 72 years (versus the more than 76 years for white men). According to the CDC, “Black men continue to have substantially lower life expectancy at birth than Black women and White women and men” and “There is a lag in increases in survival between the ages of 45 and 75 years for Blacks with the largest gap in survival for Black men.”* If we wait until our mid-forties to think about our legacies as Black men, more than half of our adult lives went without attending to the examples we will leave as assets for our children or succeeding generations! Moreover, research reveals early toxic life exposures and cumulative negative effects on body systems are what make heart disease and cancer our highest death rates. THE VERY FIRST MAN WAS A BLACK MAN! The very cradle of human civilization lies at the roots of the Nile Valley in East Africa. Our African roots are the template for not only human being, but the greatest and longest sustained civilization that has been known to exist. Our African legacy in Egyptian theocracy provided what is unquestionably the most sustainable governance and most technologically-advanced alignments with systems of the Cosmos known to humanity. To this day, Black male legacy of ingenuity in construction and astronomical alignment in the archeology of the pyramids, in medical sciences and in prioritizing spiritual principle above all else has yet to be matched. All of this and so very much more is YOUR LIVING LEGACY!!! The ancient African construct of Ma’at (justice, harmony, truth and balance) was characterized in hieroglyphs at death as a scale with an ostrich feather on one pan and the soul’s answers to the Declarations of Virtue (a.k.a. “Negative Confessions”) on the other pan for balance. Our lives as loving, conscientious, respectful, responsible, strong and creative Black men must be—in the words of Edward Wilmot Blyden “worthy of study, respect and of preservation”! |
