Chapter 1 plantation patriarchy
Throughout our history in this nation African-Americans have had to search for images of our ancestors. When Ivan Van Sertima published his awesome work They Came before Columbus telling the world about the Africans who journeyed to this land before the colonizing Spaniards, it should have created an academic revolution, changing the nature of how American history is taught, particularly African-American history. Decolonized black folks realize that masses of AfricanAmerican people once believed that ignorance was at the core of white anti-black racism. After a militant civil rights struggle led to new ways of knowing and those ways of knowing were systematically ignored by elites within the power structure, it became evident that the root of white supremacy was not ignorance but the desire on the part of unenlightened white people to maintain their dominance over black people in this nation and around the word. Even when liberal white individuals make popular movies, like Amistad, which offer radically dif ferent understanding of the role played by Africans in the so-called new world, most citizens continue to believe that African-American history begins with slavery. African explorers coming to the “new world” before Columbus were men. The fact that they did not seek to dominate and/or destroy the indigenous native people who were living on these shores reveals that their sense of masculinity was not defined by the will to dominate and colonize folks who were not like them. The fictive Africans in the film Amistad are sensitive spiritual learned men of feeling
