Hoochie Coochie has been replaced by Gucci in the rhyming dictionary of the (American) human mind, and that’s a depressing sign of how nobody paid attention to what the fuck Carter G. Woodson was talking about when he said, “If you can control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do. If you make a man feel that he is inferior, you do not have to compel him to accept an inferior status, for he will seek it himself. If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.”
Woodson was actually born right across the James River in Buckingham County, a few miles from where I walk the Rivanna line. That 69th mile marker where they’ll scatter my ashes is a metaphysical power zone. Woodson was born nearby. The James has flowed by for centuries. The good luck of the horseshoe bend is about 8 miles west. The slate quarries once mined by poor Welsh immigrants and then slave labor are around there, which is where Thomas Jefferson demanded the slate roofing tiles for all his buildings be from, to mimic the style of what he saw in France. Knowledge of Self is missing for a lot of people, not just minorities. We’ve had our histories scrubbed from us so that we just purchase a new identity, as often as possible. That shit ain’t sustainable either. And that’s not a real culture. We live in a hollow era.
Woodson was actually born right across the James River in Buckingham County, a few miles from where I walk the Rivanna line. That 69th mile marker where they’ll scatter my ashes is a metaphysical power zone. Woodson was born nearby. The James has flowed by for centuries. The good luck of the horseshoe bend is about 8 miles west. The slate quarries once mined by poor Welsh immigrants and then slave labor are around there, which is where Thomas Jefferson demanded the slate roofing tiles for all his buildings be from, to mimic the style of what he saw in France. Knowledge of Self is missing for a lot of people, not just minorities. We’ve had our histories scrubbed from us so that we just purchase a new identity, as often as possible. That shit ain’t sustainable either. And that’s not a real culture. We live in a hollow era.
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