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FREEDOMWAYS
FOURTH QUARTER 1968

group in relation to this state organization. It falls to us because we were the humans converted into the commodities which were the basis of the building of the state called America. We were the first major imports into the political units which became the United States. And we were a major part of the imports into the new nation for the first 87 years of its national life-from 1776 to 1863. We were a major part of the national inventory of goods and services better known as the Gross National Product, GNP. Each people according to its group’s historical experience has its human lesson to contribute to the movement of the consciousness of mankind. It may very well be that if a people do not carry out or play out their historical role they may go either to fascism or to slavery which would include extermination.
This is our question to raise and to resolve: whether it is right for economic power to be passed along hereditary lines. That is the historical responsibility of this generation-of us who are conscious and have voices and hands. In summary then, we must examine the organization called the United States, understand our political relationships to the state, define for ourselves the national events that the state has defined for us, establish for ourselves what our struggle must be in relation to this state, understand the implications of the lessons of our slave labor in relationship to this land, and then raise the question of the right to pass economic power along hereditary lines.
One of our basic and consistent errors has been that the basic assumptions for our educational programs have come from others-therefore, from other people's historical experiences-usually, those interests which have traditionally oppressed our group. Our basic assumptions must be founded upon our objective experiences and they must be instructed by our history; i.e., the cumulative lessons of our group's historical experience in relation to the world.
Not only are we oppressed by an economic imperialism but we are also oppressed by an educational imperialism. I can't stress this enough: at this point in history we are vulnerable to all of the programs, plans and panaceas of neo-colonialism. Our school people should definitely be wary of this.
To go to school now to be able to get a job is merely to struggle to keep our subjugation abreast of the objective conditions of the state. We are caught in the classic position of exerting every effort to keep our colonial conditions from falling too far behind the technology of this state. I think this is a revolutionary situation.

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