Monday, July 18, 2011
Friday, July 15, 2011
‘Planking' craze reminds some of slavery
‘Planking' craze reminds some of slavery
(NNPA) - A fad entitled “planking” has recently emerged that calls for participants to find the most difficult place in which to lie face down with palms to the side and feet pointed to the floor. It was originated by two men in Australia.
Some say the fad reminds them too much of African slaves who had to lie in the same position for months during the “Middle Passage.”
The game is said to have been by started by Aussies Gary Clarkson and Christian Langdon 14 years ago, according to The Sydney Morning Herald. As children, they performed in public places, reveling in amusement from onlookers. But they had no idea their practice would one day garner worldwide attention, with “plankers” sharing their pictures on social media.
“It was just a really stupid, random thing to do,” Mr. Clarkson told the Australian newspaper. Other Australian kids took up the practice and, in 2007, a Facebook group was created. Plankers from Europe and America started to share their planking pictures on the group and as it gained followers, the practice received worldwide attention.
But, participants found more risky places to lie face down, culminating in the death of a 20-year-old who tried to plank off a balcony. The negative media attention from that incident increased as some began to link the game to slavery.
“If you look at the pictures of the ships used in the ‘Middle Passage,' slaves used the planks as beds,” a report on news web site The Black Urban Times stated. According to the news site, plank collars, or wooden planks with five openings, were used as holding collars for five slaves. Commentator Daja Robinson on entertainment web site thisis50.com called the game a cruel reminder of the past. “This ‘game' is another way to remind us that no matter how far we've come, we will always be a slave to our past,” Ms. Robinson said. “Not that deep to you? Just a game? Well ask your grandparents how they feel about lying face down with their hands to their sides while you take a picture to laugh with your friends and post on Twitter for views.”
In the book “The Slave Ship: A Human History,” author Marcus Rediker detailed the workings of British and American slave ships during the 18th century.
“Vessels in the slave trade needed to be sturdy and durable, so (the buyer) insisted both vessels be built with heavy ‘2 ½ and 3-inch plank with good substantial bends or Whales,” Mr. Rediker wrote.
The author described Oladuh Equiano's Middle Passage as a “pageant of cruelty, degradation and death.”
“The enslaved were spooned together in close quarters, each with about as much room as a corpse in a coffin,” he wrote.
While the current practice of planking did not stem from undertones of slavery, Camillo Smith, a columnist with The Grio called the position a “humiliation and confinement for African people during the Middle Passage” and referenced a passage from, “Upon these Shores: Themes in the African-American Experience, 1600 to the Present.”
“Some ships had tiny bunks, really nothing more than shelves, on which slaves could recline; in others, the slaves lay side by side on the planking, rolling with the ship, bodies virtually touching, for weeks on end,” the book states.
So do you still want to plank?
Petition to make Black History Curriculum Mandatory in grades K-12!
U.S. CONGRESS and Obama Administration: Make it MANDATORY that the History of the Black Experience, including the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, be taught in all K-12 curricula, and that it be funded through the U.S. Department of Education PetitionTo: U.S. Congress and Obama AdministrationWe, the undersigned, demand that our nation’s lawmakers—the Barrack Obama administration and Congress—establish the history of the African Experience—including the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade—in the curricula of the nation’s public schools, and that it be treated with the same importance as the Jewish Holocaust and Heritage. The Jewish people were victims of a brutal experience under Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, and all Americans have been expected to support the legal, educational, and humanitarian requirement to study this history in our schools to ensure that the history of the Jewish experience is never forgotten and never repeated. Wide knowledge of this history has aided and motivated the Jewish people to accomplish and overcome this difficult past, so that today the Jewish people stand as examples and leaders in many areas of endeavor from culture, to science, to business.
The Africans’ Experience and the African Slave Trade must be treated with the same importance as the Jewish Experience, to ensure that this tragic history never takes place again in the history of man.
Furthermore, we, the undersigned, believe that at the root of our Black community’s tragic degradation is the vast knowledge gap between our past accomplishments and the problems of the present generation. After the Civil War, the newly emancipated slaves set up dozens of independent, self-governing “Black towns,” and they established schools, farms, and businesses for their own communities, yet more than a century and a half later Black communities across the nation face an increase in high school drop-out rates, increases in incarceration rates, and increased poverty, to name a few of the chronic social ills. Instead of declaring a national emergency and mobilizing nationally to find permanent solutions, America has made calculated efforts to remove Black history from textbooks and school curricula. This kind of destructive targeting of Jewish history would never be tolerated.
We, the undersigned, demand that our elected federal, state, and local officials, and especially our school boards, support this petition and act strongly to bring official attention to this crisis and to the history that preceded it. The greatness of the United States of America and the creation of its vast industrial complex are a direct result of the expertise, ingenuity, hard work, raw talent, and bloodshed of Black Americans over hundreds of years. The extent of their contribution is a well-kept secret to most Americans. The descendants of the enslaved, and the descendants of their enslavers, have all been deceived and purposely misled about this critical connection to the past.
We, the undersigned, believe that the books The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews: Vols. 1 & 2, provide the critical knowledge link in the study of the American Slavery Experience. These books, published by the Nation of Islam, and based primarily on the research of Jewish historians, extensively document and properly interpret the Black experience in slavery and Jim Crow, and they reveal the very source of America’s current economic and political infrastructure. Also, Blacks and others have been taught that Jewish people “suffered like black people,” but this new information finally corrects our vision as to the true reason for today’s vast disparity in the social, political, and economic position of Black people as compared with their White and Jewish counterparts.
Therefore, we, the undersigned, join our Jewish counterparts in their commitment to “never again” allow the oppression and degradation of any people. We believe that only through requiring the accurate teaching of the great history of the Black Experience—just as the Jewish experience is taught to us—can America achieve the true greatness that has been denied to her. The survival of the Nation now depends on its knowledge and understanding of the rich history and heritage of the same people whose blood, sweat, and tears built everything that the United States prides itself on. Our nation’s leaders, from President Barrack Obama to our local school boards, must now mandate this curriculum change. This may very well be America’s final call to true change.Sincerely,
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Elevated Places with Dr. Ava Muhammad Online Radio by Dr Ava Muhammad | Blog Talk Radio
Elevated Places with Dr. Ava Muhammad Online Radio by Dr Ava Muhammad | Blog Talk Radio
Elevated Places with Dr. Ava Muhammad
Dr. Ava Muhammad is a gifted attorney, minister, researcher and author of the powerful and popular book, REAL LOVE. She received her Juris Doctorate from Georgetown University in Washington D.C. and is a member of the New York Bar. She has been featured in Essence Magazine and Virtue Magazine, which named her one of America's most powerful Black women. The focus of her work is self-empowerment and community development. Click on her website under the "Profile" heading on this page to order books and lectures and to schedule Dr. Ava for speaking engagements.
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