BHM Day 24: Ancestral Trauma and Our Relationships

I had a rude ‘Awakening’ yesterday at the African Spiritual Practices event, where I was volunteering.

I met a sister there who I hadn’t seen in a while. She has a special gift and unique way of helping others spiritually which some people (including myself) may not fully innerstand.

During a Chi’gong session, people were sitting in a circle doing energy work, and this spiritually gifted sister was going around the outside of the circle collecting any negative energy and taking it outside the room to dispose of it (I’m not sure what she did with it).

I was standing talking to a (white) lady on a stall who was selling cannabis products. I made a comment about my sister who was doing the energy work, saying “She’s so extra!”

I meant no harm, but soon after my spirit guides scolded me for the comment I made because from the white woman’s perspective, I didn’t have my sister’s back.

It reminded me of when Europeans went to Africa and saw how the leaders of each Tribe were warring against each other and weren’t united. They used this to their advantage and gave them weapons to kill each other.

By not having each other’s back, we are easily infiltrated.

As women, we must support each other in word and deed.

As someone who’s working to help my sisters heal from ancestral trauma, to reconnect them with their ancestral roots, and to reconnect them with their Motherland, I have a duty to lead in having my sisters backs. In that moment I didn’t, and worse still, I was talking to a white woman about her.

Just the other day (on the full moon) I had accepted my role as a way-shower, and had vowed to be more mindful of the words I speak, as they are power-her-full. In this instance, my guides showed me that I had used my words inappropriately.

As we are living on a modern-day plantation, it’s important to see how the system of white supremacy that was designed to break down our commUNITY is still in effect. Only then will we be able to dismantle it and rebuild our commUNITY.

Breaking down the Black woman’s psyche was a key component of the their system. They saw that women were the core of the family, and that the family was the core of the community.

I left church and entered the Black ‘conscious’ community around 2007. Within it, I witnessed a lack of unity, but my study of plantation life enabled me to see how slavery is still affecting our community today.

In Day 16 of this series, I broke down the different types of enslaved Africans that were raised on the plantations. To understand what I mean, I suggest watching the film ‘Sankofa’. This is the film which opened my eyes to ancestral trauma.

As I mentioned in that blog, the whippings our ancestors received were to break them down mentally. Enslaved African men were forced to whip their women, sometimes to the point of death. Today, the whippings aren’t physical, they’re psychological.

I have received several of these mental whippings, almost died, yet I survived to tell my her-story. My story isn’t personal; many women in our community have been psychologically whipped by men who look like us, who haven’t healed from the ancestral trauma they’re still carrying in their DNA. (And yes, it works both ways).

I didn’t mention white women’s role on the plantations, but I’ll get into that in another blog post, in order to recognise their role on the modern-day plantation.

This post is to highlight the need to recognise that there’s a war going on, and it’s psychological warfare. As I mentioned in a previous post, they tested their ‘Divide and Conquer‘ tactics out on Africans first, and now they’re rolling it out to the whole human population!

The first step to repairing the damage caused by slavery and colonialism is to help the Black Woman to Heal, because this is where the damage started.