 So, uh, hello. Good morning, everyone. This is March the 25th, the International Day of Remembrance, uh, for, uh, enslaved, uh, people, the transatlantic slave trade and enslaved people. And I wanted to make this video as, uh, as my way of honoring our ancestors and, uh, and, and I'm doing this stream of consciousness videos. So, anyone who wants to correct anything, I say, don't feel free. Uh, I have no problems with being corrected. We all can learn. I, I am happy to be available and able to do this. So, to me, I have come to the conclusion that one of the things that, that we, as a people, deus, and when I talk about we, I'm not talking about all black people. I'm not talking about immigrant blacks and their descendants. I'm not talking about, uh, uh, uh, blacks, global blacks and, uh, descendants of Africans and slaves in other countries. Although their history is very similar. I'm really talking about something what I know, which is descendants of Africans enslaved in the United States of deus. And what I know is, is that we are a wonderful people. Our ancestors were ripped off of their continent and placed into a former slavery that is unlike anything that was in the, the rest of the continents. Uh, if you go and visit, uh, uh, other, uh, countries that had slavery in South America, Brazil, uh, Cuba, this, one of the things that strikes me is how they're former slavery, awful as it is. I'm not minimizing it, but one of the things they didn't do was they didn't wipe out all indicia of the African, uh, culture and history. We, I have come to the conclusion that we, as a people, are a, are a indigenous to the United States, that we have ancestry that is from Africa, but we were formed here and we should take ownership of that because our people built this country. Our people, the wealth of this country was made on the millions of thousands of people who, who, uh, was in slavery and died in slavery and never was able to accumulate wealth, to accumulate anything to pass down through to us be able to do. And yet we excel. We, at every stage we have excelled. We have had, we, we complain and, and, and that's okay. I'm, you know, humans, it's human nature to complain and it's human nature to think that your group is worse than any group ever. But the truth is Deus has always been at the forefront of every war, at the forefront of every movement, at the forefront of leading people in the United States to a true understanding of human rights and civil rights. And without us, not only would this country not have the wealth that it has, it wouldn't have the stand, it would not even begin to approach the standing in human rights. That as bad as it is, it's better than it would be if we were not a part of this country because we continuously remind everyone through our work and our achievements that we, that our ancestors gave to this country, built this country and was, and, and had their lives and their, their work stolen. And we should not apologize for where we are because history says that every single time we try to make a giant step forward and we do, we, our ancestors work to get us out of slavery and instead of paying the, the, the, the descendants of enslaved enslaved people reparations, they paid the landowners for the loss of their slaves. Basically saying, yeah, you lost some property and we're going to pay you for your loss of property. But you descendants of enslaved people, you didn't lose property when you were enslaved for centuries. That was as it should have been. And so we're not giving you any reparations. Our people came out of slavery sick, dying and uneducated because the law made them that way. And yet inside of a hundred years, we have been, we reversed much of that. Even, and when people saw, when white people saw the kind of efforts we were going to make for the improvement of race, they start passing laws to, to put, to stop it. So you have all the Jim Crow laws. I grew up in Jim Crow. Uh, the, the civil rights act, 1964, I was an adult when it was passed. I was the first generation civil rights beneficiary and I am blessed by it. But I also know it was very limited because by the 1980s. So what during the seventies, during the seventies, late sixties and seventies, as we begin to really grow and push forward, people began to, the whites began to say, oh, we can't have this, but we can't make it explicitly about being black. And so out of that came the 1980 laws that the Democrats and the Republicans put in place the war on drugs, the introduction of cocaine into our community to destroy our efforts to rebuild ourselves after Jim Crow. So our effort to rebuild, we had to rebuild ourselves after slavery with no help from the white government. We had to build ourselves after Jim Crow. And when it began to look like we were in fact going to do that, we, uh, things began to happen like the war on drugs, criminalization of the black man, mass incarceration, the use of the 13th Amendment as a means to re-enslave black people. And so, and now we're in the third phase of our enslavement because I, we have to look at what's happening now. The three parts of what's happening now is mass incarceration, enslaved people under the 13th Amendment in prisons, and the taking away of all the rights of enslaved people. So we have a large percentage of our people who are enslaved. We have a large percentage of our people who are technically free, but who have limited rights because of racism and discrimination. That's always been the model. And now we've been, and they've reintroduced terrorism, uh, taking the lynching and transforming it to police killing and, uh, uh, stand your ground laws that will allow whites, uh, to shoot black people that they're scared of, which of course will be everyone. So despite all this, and I don't want to, despite all this, what I feel like is that we as a people, our ancestors, and this has done in honor of our ancestors, our ancestors managed to achieve significant achievement and growth despite continuous effort under the law to push us back down, to continue this effort under the society to keep us from achievement. We are where we are today, not because the government or whites did anything, but we did it. And we need to take ownership of that and be proud of that and be proud of the fact that we are a group of people who don't give up, who don't take no for an answer, and who, uh, keep on pushing even in the face of, uh, outrageous adversity. And I am thankful to my ancestors for passing those strengths on to me and to all the people that I know. And I just want to say I love all of you all and I hope that you will take a moment today to honor our ancestors and to acknowledge that we are an amazing group, amazing people, uh, who have achieved so much with so little and so much effort to keep us down. I love you all. Thank you.