NOTE TO JANET (mrs. patmore on Downton Abbey)

I grew up with an inferiority complex a mile high.

at Knox, I felt strongly that when the white kids sat around in their own circle, it meant that I was a second rate person to be excluded.

Lewis Davidson finally came out and asked why they shouldn't stick together with like people.

Good question, but he hadn't educated us about black pride (although in many ways he worked at it around the edges).

Marcus Garvey and black pride was never taught

Were we at the age of 13 or 14 to figure that out for ourselves?

My behavior since then has been a ragged, often shameful accommodation to my butchered sense of self.

Black uprising in the 60's encouraged me.

I went through an extended anti-white period which I subsequently felt ashamed for. It now seems to have been superficial, and often ignorant.

I also went through a pseudo Rasta period that again moves me to shame for lack of being true to myself, and the pretentiousness of getting into other people's business. 

It took a lot of blows about the head and shoulders to get me somewhat to the position I hold today. And I'm still emerging and groping, sometimes shamefully

I've come to an accommodationist position (or perhaps it could be called a transactional position) with forces of higher status than my own. I'm appreciatibve of white people who  claim plantocracy heritage for the sensitivity, knowledge, manners, confidence. 

I give abundant thanks for all black people who have struggled and made gains for dignity and justice before me

We've come a very long way.

I now accept my heritage as being a blend of oppressed slaves and opprerssive slave masters

That is perhaps a simplification. I'm also descended from oppressed oppressors

There was slavery in Africa

Black rulers in Egypt enslaved other black people to build the pyramids

Should I plot and scheme to overthrow the pyramids?

Our black ancestors built the colonial structures with their hands

That should bespeak some level of ownership

"We" worked for free for colonial masters, and now that they have lifted up and gonet, we have every right to take their relics as our own and make what we will of them

These relics bespeak of a culture

Without them, what is our material culture?

We saw that squalid scenario with the mad people a week or so ago

That could be what goes for culture in the future

If we present ourselves as an African nation (as I think we should), what material heritage do we have to show for it?

Many people think that to be African, you must speak an African language and wear African clothes. But African language and African clothes from which of the many nations with the African continent?

Why should we be ashamed to present our material heritage as one won by attrition, involving the sovereign ownership of all that is called colonial heritage, whether from the rich or from the poor?

Without it we come with empty hands and the most shameful ugliness of uncultivated and uneducated pseudo Africanism