quote of the week...

"The Revolution will not be televised..."
Gil Scott-Heron

Nosce te ipsum...

It has been a while. Entirely too long. Almost 90-days to the date. Within those 90-days much has transpired globally and locally. About 90-days ago I just read "As a Man Thinketh." Ninety days later all I can say is that reading that one piece has changed the direction of my life.

All that aside tonight I discuss "nosce te ipsum," or "know thy self." As a black man I think this phrase can be a paradox. The deeper I explore myself the more I realize I don't know who I am. Not just me per se but I don't know my ancestors and since I don't--how can I know me?? For example, just last weekend, I went to my first Iftar to celebrate Ramadan with a friend and her social circle. It was so interesting for me to meet people that could say, "my family is from Syria," or "My family is from Northern Africa," or "My family is from Vietnam..." As a black American I always find myself stuck in these situations. I know my family is not from North Carolina, or Washington, DC or Virginia--but where are we from--and how do I get there? How can I really know myself if I don't know my Roots? And of course this is why Alex Haley wrote Roots because he didn't know--no one told him, Haley's story was "erased" from history (HIS-Story).

Just today, randomly, on my iPod I heard a speech by Randall Robinson, "The Debt and the Reckoning." In this speech he brings valuable insights, through humor and indirect confrontation:

• "On the memory side, we even do this thing every year, in February. [laughter] Dick Gregory said 'They even gave us a month with some of the days missing.' [laughter]"
  
• "The notion of black history month is ludicrous on its face, but its so telling. You can't segregate history. The story of America is the story of America. It begins with the story of the first American--left untold."
• "Jews have been able to survive all the hardships because they can remember 4,000 years back. That gives them the strength and so they can go to Abraham and come forward to Moses. But what about Zipporah the wife of Moses, who was Ethiopian and black. Nobody told me anything about that--and I needed to know that."
  
• "Herodotus, the great Greek historian, wrote 500 years before the birth of Christ, that everything that ancient Greece was--its calendar, its division of the year into 12 parts, its language, its math, its science, its gods, its mythology, its practice of carving figures in stone, all of it, according to Herodotus, 500 years before the birth of Christ--had been derived from older civilizations to the south, the civilizations of Egypt and Ethiopia. But I didn't know anything about it, and I needed to know."

I site elements of this speech because at the age of twenty-eight--I NEED TO KNOW. I need to know "my" culture. My culture outside of what America has given me. I need to know my native tongue, I need to know where it is on a map, I need to know what my contribution to humanity has been--not what my constantly overlooked contribution to America has been.

Maybe I am feeling this way because for the first time in my life I feel as if I can know. For my twenty eighth birthday I received a "Genographic Kit." This kit allows one to trace their ancestry via their DNA after just a few cheek cell scrapes. Ever since I have mailed in that package I find myself constantly checking the website to see if my results have been received. It is that anxious feeling that can only be described as "the night before Christmas..."

For now I wait patiently...after twenty-eight years I supposse it is only right. Stay tuned for the results.

I need to know.