You’re Lynching Her Legacy: Harriet Tubman On The $20 Bill

https://revolution-news.com/youre-lynching-her-legacy-harriet-tubman-on-the-20-bill/

By Keno Evol

“I go to prepare a place for you” – The Last Words of Harriet Tubman, 91.

And have we arrived? Here at the adolescents of the twenty-first century? Perhaps we are not yet haunted enough by our ghosts. And let me say that by “our ghosts,” I mean our history. Our black struggling history. Perhaps the echo of Harriet’s pistol aimed at a very young but very capitalist, white, and heteronormative America has faded into waters. Perhaps we have lost the vocabulary in which to describe her. Perhaps she is still in the woods of our imagination trying to escape. Or perhaps she is kneeling, knee deep in a mix of soil and feces in sixty percent humidity, singing a mantra to herself to avoid passing out with a village of folk behind her waiting for her signal. Perhaps that mantra is “One day we’ll be there…One day my baby will breathe as babies are intended to breathe.” Perhaps we are not yet equipped to have a true interrogation of her legacy. Kin, I am afraid we are still not that far from the dogs, the swamps, or the southern trees. I am afraid the dogs have echoed into police pistols held by officers like Mark Ringgenberg and Dustin Schwarze and bull whips into repressive policy. I am afraid the cotton lines looks a lot like assembly lines for private prisons owned by corporations like Cooperations for America. And how do we stomach satisfaction? As always a recognition from? From what? An empire absent of a moral compass? What is our disposition and how do we register it? When I say disposition, I mean the placing of our politics and how they critique power. Do we still have links to folk like Harriet? Who were anti-capitalist, anti-empire, pro-abolition, pro-militant?

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We begin to lynch legacy when we begin to misplace and puppeteer the vocation of our ancestors. When we see Harriet on the $20 Bill, but do not have a holistic conservation on the institution of slavery and how it persists today in a 2016 America that is disgustingly overdue in learning from its atrocities. We begin to lynch legacy when we see Harriet and not the social relationship of the plantation or captivity. When we don’t see the dog collars on black toddlers and black babies. When we don’t see the 412 pounds of cotton picked in a 18 hour work day by a pregnant mother. When we see Harriet but not the sexual trauma endured by enslaved womyn (intentionally spelled) hourly and daily. When we see Harriet but not the tactical and crucial strategists she was in implementing the Combahee River Raid. These get lynched, and by lynched I mean unwarned, unprepared execution from our collective memory. We are killing her contribution. If money grows on trees in sweet America is our Harriet hanging? Have we strung her up by her pistols for the need of representation? Is her rope interwoven with colonial need for erasure. Do we still have some outwitting to do of our overseers? I am afraid we have not yet outrun the slave catchers.

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So where do we draw the line at counterproductive symbolism? I believe it arrives when we trade in name dropping, calling out repressive policy,with individualistic, quick fix liberation tickets. Diversity is a ticket. I ain’t buying. Here I’ll say it twice so you’ll know I meant it. Diversity is a ticket I ain’t buying. We must have a greater imagination on empowerment outside of being assimilated into the protocols of capitalism. Do we want to be acknowledged by the anti-human systems of oppressors? Do we want to be recognized by things that divest in the interest of the human being and our offspring who will have to inhale and survive under our mistakes and shortcomings. I believe Amiri Baraka wrote a poem titled “Somebody Blew Up America!” Not “Somebody Got Stamped Into America” I Believe Martin Luther King inhaled a bullet shot by a rifle trying to silence him on poverty not assimilation into the corrupt ideology of the American empire. I believe Audre Lorde wrote “to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call America, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson –that we were never meant to survive.” Not to survive we must change the face but not the project of supremacy.

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Give this beautifully written piece a slow and thoughtful read.

https://revolution-news.com/youre-lynching-her-legacy-harriet-tubman-on-the-20-bill/