Living in the 21st century has
made many of us take freedom for granted. Being raised in a golden age of
freedom makes us ignorant on what exactly freedom is. I came to realize this
after reading books and watching movies based on the 19th and 20th
century in the USA. I understood what it meant when they termed the USA as the
land of the free. In these books and movies, the main theme was slavery, the
black slaves and what they went through on their day to day activities. Let me
first name these movies before I get into my discussion. They are: The help, The butler, 12 years a slave, The color purple and Django.
In the help we see that even in the 60s,
the black people had not achieved their freedom yet. Most black women were
house helps, who were not allowed to use their master’s washrooms, a need which
should really not earn any discrimination.
In the movie the butler, the main character’s
father was shot dead right in front of him just after his mother was raped by his
master’s son, how cruel is that? On top of that, the white man who did all that
was not liable to any criminal conviction.
In the movie, 12 years a slave, we see how
the southerners would kidnap free black men from the north and sell them to the
cotton farm owners as slaves. If a black man was literate, he would be liable to
thorough punishment. Black women were easily traded as sex slaves. They were
sexually abused by their masters and in case they got pregnant, the children
were beaten out of them. This was to make sure that the Caucasian race remained
‘pure’. This is only a depiction of what happened to the slaves in America, not
taking into account, Europe, Middle East and even Africa during the colonial
era
The slaves were deprived of their social, physical
and psychological freedom leaving them only with the ultimate freedom-spiritual
freedom. This is knowing that you are not the body,
knowing that you are not the mind, knowing that you are only pure
consciousness. It separates you from the body, it separates you from the mind,
and ultimately only you are there as pure consciousness, as pure awareness.
That is spiritual freedom.
This freedom is what
delivered the African American from slavery and the Africans from colonial
times because it was really all they had. They knew that they were not just
human beings but persons, spiritual beings who did not deserve to be defined by
their physical nature but by their spiritual nature. They knew that race was
just a collective and the collective has no soul, the collective has no mind.
The collective has no body even; it is only a name. It is just a word.
From their spiritual
freedom, they were able to gain their other freedoms, physical freedom-that
your body is not enchained, that it is not categorized as lower than anybody else’s,
that there is an equality as far as the body is
concerned.
Their perception of
freedom was totally different from that of the 21st century and we
ought to ape their attitude. Therefore as we approach the black history month
in February 2014, we should get more informed on the struggles that the black
people went through all over the world in order to gain independence and be
termed as free people.
