A Message to Black People Part Three

by Ibsahu Pernebsati

So it’s finally happened: Jim Crow is back. The Voting Rights Act that we marched with Dr. Martin Luther King to achieve has been gutted. Racial gerrymandering is re‑normalized and disenfranchisement is the name of the game. The private prison industry is booming again, which we know is just a resurgence of slavery in this country. Today, immigrants may be the most visibly targeted among the marginalized, but as the United States pivots its destructive oppression back toward the Black community, we have to ask: what will we do differently this time?

Over 100,000 of us fought in the Civil War to free ourselves, while our labor fueled the North’s victory over the South. Yet we did not attain sovereignty; we begged President Lincoln and his generals for our rights. Later, with Brown v. Board of Education and the Voting Rights Act, we again begged the executive and judicial branches for rights and for sovereignty. Now, as we watch the M.A.G.A. movement strip away those gains, we see clearly that the promises of the United States are worthless. We thought we had secured representation in Congress, but even that is slipping through our fingers like sand.

We are still exploited for our labor every time we pay taxes. Our Ancestors forced their oppressors to expend energy and reveal themselves through whips and chains. Today, our oppressors have become efficient; they no longer need visible tools of force to make us work. We put on the clothes they sold us, set our alarm clocks, and drive the cars we bought from them to jobs where our labor is turned into fuel for a war machine that is dropping bombs all over Earth. Our labor becomes the wealth of the richest so they can grow ever richer.

For generations, America has told us to “wait for the future” for things to get better. Now we are in that future. Our labor is still exploited, and chains on Black bodies are still big business. The American workforce tells us to wait for the future; the future never comes. American preachers tell us to cling to the Bible as our solution. The reality is: when we held the sacred books of our Ancestors, we were pharaohs. When we traded our Ancestral texts for the Bible, we became slaves. Today, we remain slaves as the spirit of destruction grows stronger over the world.

While that destruction grows, we are sold new forms of the same old pacifier: hope. American scientists promise to take us to space, but they will only bring oppression with them. American technocrats claim we are better than our Ancestors because of technology, medicine, and military might. Yet our Ancestors birthed civilization and were sovereign; we, supposedly “advanced,” remain dependent and colonized.

The American market tells us each new product will solve our problems. American democracy lets some of us sit in seats of power so we can become destroyers just like our oppressors, sometimes even more efficient than them. American psychology tells us artificial intelligence is superior to ancestral intelligence, while engineers quietly build their biases and destructive tendencies into every new tool. And still, we go back to the same system for medicine, education, freedom, and dignity begging the same oppressor to hand us what they use to dominate us. How do we think anything will change?

It won’t.

Assimilation has been a survival technique. Our oppressors understood this and planned it for their benefit, not ours. Many of us feel there is no way out, and that is true if we keep doing the same things. Black people, indigenous people, oppressed and marginalized people know that those who appear weaker often depend on those who appear stronger. But in this world, the “stronger” minds and bodies, ours, have been continuously exploited to satisfy the greed of petty wealthy men.

“Black American” culture, Christian culture, hip‑hop culture have not freed us. The system has forced us at every level to become accomplices to our own destruction. What little gains we thought we had are being rolled back. Once again, we are tempted to do what we have always done: to beg the same American system for tools to free us from the very oppression those tools were designed to tighten.

Can you imagine being robbed and asking the robber to borrow their gun so you can stop them? Does it make sense for the oppressed to use the oppressor’s tools to free themselves from that oppression? It is illogical. The master will never give the slave the tools that would end slavery. Instead, he convinces the slave that the very tools expanding his global plantation are the path to freedom. This is mind control, nearly invisible from the slave’s position.

What are these tools? The economic system. The education system. The legislative process. AI and digital technologies. Telecommunications and social media. Modern science and modern religion. Each is presented to us by the American oppressive system as our ticket to improving our condition, the “responsible” alternative to “complaining” or “blaming others.” Yet none of these come from our Ancestral culture. It is that Ancestral culture we were stripped from when this nightmare of enslavement, oppression, colonialism, and second‑class citizenship began. If our solutions do not start by returning there, why are we surprised that we fail?

Our failure is on display for the world. Protests don’t work. Clutching the Bible doesn’t work. The best lyrics in hip‑hop haven’t worked. Putting Black faces on the Supreme Court doesn’t work. Making Black billionaires doesn’t work. Sending Black people into space doesn’t work. Appointing Black military generals doesn’t work. As the masters of violence and oppression sit in their government offices planning our scripted demise for the next decades, what will we do differently?

Those who resist the system with force are quickly destroyed. In a society that prints money to feed weapons of war, armed resistance becomes a pretext for further militarization. The more we fight within their paradigm, the more dangerous we appear, and the more power and funding the system allocates to crush us. It is a simple playbook, and those who fight in the same language of force are drafted into it. Fighting the system on its own terms only feeds it.

So what can we do to truly change our situation? This is the problem we must solve for ourselves, for those we inherited our blood from, and for the children who will inherit ours. Will we continue to let our blood be monetized for the pleasure of individuals and clans of the powerful? Will we hold up a mirror to our behavior, to the lives we choose to live, to the ideologies we adopt to “better” ourselves? Can we honestly say we’ve achieved meaningful success? When we measure success, are we using standards set by our exploiters?

Two directions offer us a way forward, neither of them original, but both ignored.

Firstly, Black Americans are so special and so powerful that we hold keys that could move the entire world forward. The wealth and power of the richest, mightiest country in human history rests on our exploited labor. Many of us know this, and so do our oppressors. That is why they imprison us, brainwash us, and pacify us with endless pleasures. If we are to find our way out of the world they have constructed for us, we will have to return to the true source of our power.

Today, there is a living movement among the descendants of Pharaoh in Africa. If Black Americans aligned ourselves with our Ancestral homeland and stepped away from our role as accomplices and batteries of this system, we could rewrite the balance of power on this planet. Becoming billionaires or politicians will not save us or our families from oppression and the traps laid by those who print the money and script the global agenda of war. Reclaiming our sovereignty through a conscious alliance with our Motherland is the only logical conclusion for the Diaspora.

Secondly, the richest man in the world and the oligarchs of this capitalist system want us to trust our minds, money, and future to artificial intelligence. AI is a tool to multiply the power of a few, fulfilling personal ambition and feeding insatiable greed. Our response must be to embrace not a new AI, but an old one: Ancestral Intelligence. This intelligence is not rooted in greed and oppression, but in wisdom from beyond the border between life and death.

When slaveraiders handed us the Bible, the Torah, and the Koran, they stole our Ancestors from us. They cut us off from those pure beings and from the divinity our Ancestors dedicated their lives to discover within. They knew that to subjugate us, they had to separate us from our Ancestral culture and wisdom.

None of this is new. Many before us have said it: reclaim your Ancestral roots and live accordingly. That is the only way to cultivate the strength we need to reclaim greatness and restore harmony in the world. That power is invisible, and therefore cannot be tracked, controlled, or regulated like our digital and financial lives, which have been thoroughly invaded and abused. But we will have to put down the Bible, put down the blunt, and stop being accomplices to the powers that are plotting our destruction.

Assimilation has been the survival strategy of the oppressed. It was necessary, and we must thank our recent Ancestors for choosing survival. Their choice created the opening we have today: to realign ourselves with the invisible and immaterial Ancestral spirit residing in our blood, which cannot be tracked and controlled by the greedy and powerful. The inevitable death we march toward is a mystery that holds the keys to our self‑sovereignty. No living tyrant can conquer that kind of power, which is precisely why our oppression began with cutting us off from it. That must be our answer.

This may sound mystical, but it is a practical solution to the pain and conflict that tear our lives and families apart. Other systemic solutions that Black thinkers have offered often grew from modern education and the social culture attached to it. They were thought up, communicated, and implemented in the language of our oppressor, a mercantile language designed to coerce buyers out of their money. Those projects were flawed from the root because they relied on modern society’s tools instead of coming directly, authentically, and unapologetically from our Ancestral heritage.

The forces that exploit us and march us toward our own destruction can be defeated not by bigger weapons, but by intelligence and wisdom. The teachings that reach us from the temples of the Nile and Niger Valley come from a time when harmony still existed between humanity and nature. Our Ancestors are speaking to us now. Each of us must decide: will we turn and listen, or continue toward our inevitable end?

We must be clear about our weapons and tools. Our only real hope is to use wisdom and intelligence. Protesting, begging, revolting, fighting fire with fire, these have failed, and in a war‑obsessed society they will continue to fail. We live in a system that solves every problem with force, that prints money to invest in weapons of mass destruction. This is not fear; it is simple observation.

We must take the harder path: to look in the mirror, to abandon self‑loathing, and to remember that the greatest forces we can touch are the forces of nature itself. If we align ourselves with those forces and let thoughtfulness, wisdom, and intelligence guide our decisions, we can rise up and reclaim the greatness of our Ancestors.

This society uses surgery and blades as its “health care.” It uses megaphones and social media to shout down dissent. It negotiates with bombs and governs by fear. That is not how our Ancestors created a civilization so great that it still mystifies the modern mind. Underneath all of this lies a hidden axiom: that destruction is the solution to everything. That assumption lives in the subconscious of our language and behavior, and overcoming it will be one of our greatest challenges.

Already, when majority Black districts in the South are redrawn to disenfranchise Black voters, our leaders say, “We will fight. We fought for everything we have and will continue to fight for our freedom.” It sounds noble. But fighting the system on its terms will not work. The system is already smart enough to turn our fight into its fuel. The more we threaten it, the more it grows to meet the threat. It would be wiser to preserve and protect ourselves than to keep feeding this machine.

Preserving and protecting our Ancestral culture ensures a future for our children far better than another round of struggle inside a rigged game. At some point we must lose interest in chasing broken promises and illusory dreams of modern society. At some point we must turn away from investing our attention there and accept that the wise and intelligent will simply preserve, protect, and perpetuate Ancestral culture.

Our future must live with intelligence, just as our past.