Social structure

I mean, everybody, all these different groups.

And then you talk about the Africans who came from many different nations in Africa, which had its own social structures, Mali and old Oyo, and, and Ouida, and, you know, you name it, all the different places, the Benin Kingdom and all of these folk, the, the Ashantis.

I mean, these are different groups.

And then you traffic them, and they end up in Haiti, and Jamaica, and Brazil, and, and Georgia, and North Carolina.

And through his memory, he's a master of movement and memory we were talking about perry james marshall a century from now and more but he says now this is where this is where i wanted to have this conversation my law students too marshall says now if i want to be competitive and you want to be competitive in anything you're practicing music law any form that you're moving through the world if i want to be competitive without reinforcing the dominance of the artists who were doing their own thing.

In other words, if I want to be competitive while being myself, as the great Sterling Brown said, if I want to integrate into a larger social structure, but integrate as a whole number, integrate as an integer, integrate not as a figment of somebody else's imagination, but as myself, and for Kerry James Marshall, not just as me as an individual artist, but as representing something.

In this case, people of African descent, Blackness in this larger context.

If I want to be competitive, Marshall said, without reinforcing the dominance of the artists who were doing their own thing, then I, we, us, we have to figure out how to project the image we want to see represented in the world And then he mentions three words that I spent the rest of the class with the young people asking them what they thought they meant about it.

and their cultural patterns existing in America without discrimination and on terms of equality.

That's usually where people cut it off.

That's the social structure piece.

Who are we to other people? No, I'm coming up in here.

A social structure, for their purposes, describes you as three-fifths of a person, but you've never been anything other than a whole human being.

Throw that language away.

So in grappling with these relationships between governance and social structures that hold them together.

The Asante delegation raised questions of governance where authority is informed by the cultural meaning making that recognizes relationships between memory and vision, the protective custodianship of ancestral continuity.

And as we're thinking about that, in this week where Bozo has gone berserk again on the international level, trying to steal the Venezuelan oil, saying, now we made a deal.