“Knowledge itself is power” - Sir Francis Bacon
When I was a kid G.I. Joe told me that knowing was half the battle. I’m not going to give Duke and Cobra Commander all the credit for my thirst for knowledge. I personally hate being wrong. I can’t stand it. A huge part of not being wrong is knowing shit. So as I child I got about knowing shit. By the way I am a child of the 80’s; you know the pre-internet, pre-google and shit era. I read the newspaper. I read the encyclopedia. I read the dictionary; I mean I still can’t spell for shit but I know the meanings of words so when I tell you “words mean things” I’m eluding to the fact that you’re not saying what you think you’re saying. Anyway as time went on information was easier to obtain from reading books in the library, to looking up shit on Yahoo from the desktop, to googling shit on my smart phone. It’s way easier now to be in the know than it ever was before. I could say with absolute certainty we have the ability to be the most informed generation of all time. Unfortunately, that is not the case.
“There's proof in the very Bible you ask us to read, in Revelations, first chapter, verse fourteen and fifteen, that Jesus had hair like wool and feet the color of brass.” – Denzel Washington as Malcom X
Since 1992 this inaccurate quote has been haunting black people. I just thought I’d throw that in there right fast because this was the Book of Revelation Jesus (the end of everything Jesus) with hair as WHITE as wool and he also had eyes of fire.
I intended to write this blog during that whole “Slavery was choice” debacle but I got over it as I tend to do with 90%of this shit bouncing around in my head. (You’re so lucky I don’t even post a 3rd of the shit I write up. It’s a lot.) Then I accidentally got myself in an argument about black ice cream. And I do mean by accident. I just knew that person couldn’t be serious. I just knew I was getting trolled. Here I was going back and forth about the ingredients of fucking ice cream and why vanilla ice cream was never black and couldn’t possibly be black. Forget the fact that vanilla beans go for about $200 per pound so the amount it would take to make two scoops of ice cream black would probably make it the same price as a porterhouse steak at Morton’s. Anyway it’s way too many people getting history lessons from memes and taking it on as fact.
Dumb woke.
See the problem with all the access to information there’s a lot of false information. Regrettably false information is so much more engaging than the truth because it’s made the fuck up and subsequently, spreads like wild fire. You know like that photo meme of 2 black men hanging from a tree as a mob of white people look up at them captioned “On July 4th 1776”. The picture is real; it’s the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith on August 7th1930 in Marion, Indiana. Even if you didn’t know the exact setting or date or circumstances of the photo you should know that cameras didn’t exist 200 years ago. Nope. Clearly not because every year it’s on the timeline.
We lack the discipline to fact check the bullshit we share because it’s all so entertaining and thought provoking. I mean why not watch a 5 to 10 minute YouTube video summarizing 400 years of history because it’s filled with jaw dropping imagery and the narrator speaks ever so eloquently? Why not forward it to 25 of your friends because you’ve been newly awoken with this knowledge and you want them to be awaken too? Why not share an article to the timeline no matter what the news outlet knowing you’ve only read the headline? Who cares if it’s fake news? Who cares if the article is 4 years about a recall on Bush’s Baked Beans?
Do your research and stop being willfully ignorant
Jean DeGrate be knowing
Aaaaarrrrrrrggggghhhhhhh! Thank you.
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