March 7, 2023 • 35 mins
On today's episode, Host Ramses Ja continues with part 3 of his discussion with Anthony T. Browder, author, cultural historian, and Founder/ Director of IKG Cultural Resources.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
And now part three of our four part conversation with author, publisher, historian,
artist and educational consultant, director of the ASA Restoration Project
and founder and director of IKG Cultural Resource Center Cultural
Memory Specialists, mister Anthony T. Browder. I am Maggie B. Noan,
and this is a Black Information Network Daily podcast with
(00:24):
your host Ramsas Jah. You know, I think that this
you're making, you know, there's a lot of people who
are in support of educating our youth, and you're making
as good a case as anyone I've ever seen. And
I realize this is why I kind of went into
(00:46):
my own experience humbly knowing that there are a lot
of things that I've learned that may not be true, right,
they may, like you said, you feel good you know things,
and this is why I was like, you know, you
know better than me, of course, Um, but of course
that thirst for knowledge, that that thirst for just the
(01:07):
basic understanding that there may be something else to the
story that was profound and again something that I found
very early on. Um, just kind of you know, coming
across your your conversations with you know, Rock Newman, and
you know, just the many, the many works that you've
done and that were available to me online. UM, so
(01:27):
that brings me to, you know, a point that you
were making earlier about what we're doing about our youth.
So I definitely want to get your thoughts, you know. Um,
I believe it was stated by DeSantis and the governing
educational body in Florida that, um, the ap African African
American Studies class lacked significant educational value. I believe that's
(01:50):
exactly what they said. UM, I want to get your
thoughts on why African and African American education is important
and why you think there's such a push back when
(02:11):
we're trying to educate ourselves when there's not as profound
of an attack on Holocaust education or you know, the
eradication of indigenous tribes, its whitewash stories, but it's not
completely you know, gone from the curriculum. As an educator
and as a person with such you know, monumental insight,
(02:31):
I want to get your thoughts. Well, I would say,
let's go to the words of doctor CARTERGI. Woodson, who
wrote the book on this process and minist education. As
a matter of fact, that book is ninety years old now.
The book is entire of the miseducation of the Negro.
(02:53):
And the whole purpose behind miseducation is, to paraphrase Woodson,
if you control the person's thinking through the process of miseducation,
you don't have to worry about their actions. You don't
have to worry about what they do. If you control
the person's thinking through miseducation, you won't have to tell
that person to stand here or to go there, because
(03:15):
they will find their proper place and they will stay
in it. A person who has been miseducated will not
have to be ordered to go to the back door
of any society, because they will find their proper If
there is no back door, they will create one for
their special purposes. That's the purpose of education, to instill
(03:40):
in the mind of people a sense of superiority or inferiority.
And when it comes to people of African descent here
in America, people who were forcefully dragged from their homeland
in chains and enslaved for over two hundred and fifty
years in this country and then subjected to Jim Crow
(04:04):
segregation and lynching for almost a hundred years, and then
went through thirteen years of a civil rights movement before
they were given the basic rights, freedom, justice, inequality. And
then once that legislation was introduced in the nineteen sixties
and blacks integrated into American society, that integration, as doctor
(04:27):
King correctly theorized, that integration was the integration into a
burning house. And as a consequence, people of African descent
today in twenty twenty three are in worst shape educationally
and we've been in the last one hundred years because
we no longer have those black schools that I was
(04:48):
telling you that I had grown up being where there
were teachers who looked like me, who had invested interest
in making sure that I understood the value of education
and that I learned to read, to write, and to reason.
That's not happening in school systems anymore. If you talk
to any educator or any administrator, they would tell you
that schools now have been preoccupied with teaching to the tests.
(05:12):
So there's certain core information that they are mandated by
law to make sure that a significant number of teachers
within their classroom, within their school or their district must
pass a test in order for them to continue to
get funding from the state or the federal government. So
there's no education going on anymore. It's preparing students to
(05:36):
remember certain lessons so that they can pass the test,
so the school districts can get money to continue the
process of this education. That's what's been happening, and it's
happening now on steroids. And so as a consequence, people
like the Santos and other right wing Republicans are fearful
(06:00):
of the type of information that my colleagues and I
have dedicated our lives to researching, documenting, and making accessible
to school systems because they know that this information runs
contrary to the acceptable narrative. And if you recall last year,
(06:21):
as this debate was going on in school districts throughout
the country, particularly in the South, one of their justifications
for limiting this so called African centered information is because
it would make the white students in the classroom feel bad.
They didn't want to hurt their feelings. So essentially, what
that says is they don't give a damn about how
(06:44):
black and brown people feel in the classrooms. Learning that
Christopher Columbus discovered America, learning that slavery was referred to
by some folk as involuntary servitude, right, so they don't
care about our feelings. That's clear, that's obvious. And given
that reality, then what should we care about How should
(07:11):
we care about that? And so my position has always
been to look after our family first. So if if
you are not actively involved in going to the school
board meetings in your community, if you're not actively involved
in holding schools accountable to ensure that your tax dollars
(07:34):
are used to make sure that in your child's classroom
there's information that uplifts the psyche of your child and
makes them feel good about themselves. In a school is
more than just feeling good. But when a black child
is in a classroom. And here's about the fact that
(07:55):
Africans had traveled to the America's twenty five years before
Christopher Columbus is born. And they see the physical evidence
of the twenty Samad statues in Mexico, of the people
who are classified as the Old max who brought technology,
who brought architecture, who brought engineering, who brought a knowledge
of theology and the calendar to the Indigenous Americans, And
(08:19):
see how the Indigenous Americans acknowledge their presence, that those
are real historical facts that everybody needs to know, not
just black children or brown children, but everybody in every
classroom needs to know this information, and they need to
know this information not just during February Black History Month.
This is world history, Okay. So one of the things
(08:41):
that I've been concerned about is raising their awareness of
young people like you and elders like me, so that
we can become responsible advocates for our children and for
those who yet to be born, so that we can
insist that our tax dollars be used to educate everybody
in the classroom so that they can have a different
(09:02):
understanding of themselves and their potential. And trust me, but
that none of this information has anything to do with
making white folks feel bad. It's about telling and teaching
historical truths and teaching the young folks in the classroom
how to be objective in internalizing that truth right, and
(09:25):
how they can use those truths to empower themselves and
assume responsibility for making sure that this nation lives up
to its creedy. That all people are created equal and
all people have a right to freedom, justice and equality.
That's what's at state. So helping students become good civil servants, right,
(09:48):
responsible citizens of society is really what this This movement,
if you will, is all about and that only happens
when you know the truth and you can bind yourself
to that which is such a transformative entity. You know,
there's um something I was going to say. I came
across recently a meme on you know, my social media feed,
(10:10):
and it was a photo of David Banner. It was
in MC okay, you're familiar, and David Banner was it
was like a like an artistic photograph, you know, an
esthetic photograph of him, just kind of with that powerful
frame of his and he was reading a book and
it was one of your books, right, beautiful photograph, very
(10:31):
powerful image, and you know, as you were speaking right now,
it brought me the thought and I hope I don't
get this wrong, but I believe that there was a
group of people, maybe you were involved, maybe not, but
they were trying to get your book involved to a
degree or something like that in some sort of curriculum
(10:51):
right for students to be able to read. And there
was some pushback against that. So before we get too
far from this point in the conversation, I would love
for you to help us circumvent those traditional avenues and
educate our children by ourselves. So please plug you know,
(11:12):
any any books anything like that that you've written that
you feel like we need to know. Right now. We're
certainly going to circle back, but I'd love to make
sure that we touch on that while we're here. Truly,
the picture that you're talking about is is this picture
that's it? Reading the Browder File and about Oh gosh,
(11:32):
I guess about eight or nine years ago, I received
a call from from David called me up out the
blue and just said, how much reading that book as
a teenager. I think he was a sophomore in high school.
How much reading that book changed his life. He said
it was the first book he ever read. From cup
to cover. I think he said he was a sophomore
(11:54):
in high school going to high school in Mississippi. And
so he has made to the point to buy cases
of that book to give to sophomore students in his
former high school, so that some of these students could
have the same transformative experience that he had upon reading
that book. So Banner is a difference. Banner is a
(12:18):
brother who understood how people in his line of work
have been socialized to focus on and expand the worst
of African people, the criminality, the abuse of women, and
once he learned something about who he was as a
perfect person of African descent, he shifted. He said, I
(12:41):
can't do that anymore. And and so what we're looking
at is creating a movement among people whose consciousness has
been awakened. And I don't particularly like the term woke
because you know anyway. So what we have been doing
(13:02):
is through kh specifically writing books, publishing books, dissimulating books
so that people can study on their own and begin
to understand the real history that is associated with them,
and then to show them how to use this information
to advocate for the children in your household, the children
(13:25):
in your community. So I'm a firm believer of the
fact that education begins at home, and more specifically, education
begins in the womb. Education begins in the womb, and
that if you have more video games and more televisions
in your home, then you have books. There's going to
be problems in your household. If you spend more time
(13:45):
playing video games watching television, then you do reading. There's
going to be problems in your communities and the classrooms
in your communities. So I'm an advocate of working within
and outside of the system, and that knowledge specifically, knowledge
of self is the best is the best means by
(14:06):
which a people can know who they are and live
up to their potential and change how they move through
what It's still a racist and self destructive society, and
if we want to save ourselves, we're going to have
to assume responsibility for saving ourselves because nobody else would
(14:26):
do it. Our so called belief system, the god of
our belief system, is not going to save us. If
that were true, then we probably would not have been
enslaved in in the first place. We wouldn't have been
lynched in the first place. As a whole an other
subject matter, but the reality is politicians are not going
to save us. Any civil rights legislation can be undone,
(14:50):
just like the Supreme Court is in the process of
undoing some important educational rulings that have stood for several decades.
So we see the rug is being pulled out from
under black folk right now. As I mentioned, I'm seventy
one years old, and this racial climate that we've been
experiencing here in America, particularly over the past seven years,
(15:14):
has been the worst I've ever seen in my life.
And I've seen some pretty horrific things and So something
is coming, and if you don't know what's coming, if
you don't know how to prepare for what's coming, you'll
be like the victims of Katrina who didn't have the
(15:36):
resources to get out, and you'll be standing on top
of a roof the sign that says helped me, but
there'll be no one to come to your assistance. So
history can teach us cycles of the past how those
same cycles are manifesting themselves today, and those people who
are good stewards of history can then use that knowledge
(16:00):
to prepare themselves for what they know is coming based
on the cyclical nature of history. So I've been advocating
for years through through my ag that black people study
black history and more specifically, our relationship with white people,
so that we can better determine who is for us
(16:22):
and who is against us and use our time, our talent,
and our treasure to ensure that we not only survive
what is coming, but we thrive because of specific decisions
that we made and specific information that we have passed
down to our children, so that they're able to benefit
(16:45):
from this knowledge and continue to perpetuate information that will
ensure our continued success and our continued ability to thrive
in the United States of America, which is based in
my study, the United States of America's the wealthiest, most
powerful nation in human history. If you can't make it
in America, there's something wrong with you, right, And that's real.
(17:08):
Despite the racism, despite the prejudice, despite all the opposite goes,
we have a better chance of making it here in
this country than any place in the world. And they
with the knowledge of how this country works, and how
the world works, and our place in the world, we
can use that knowledge to not only survive in America,
(17:30):
but to thrive in this country and be a benefit
to other African people all over the world who look
to African Americans for models of how to live. You know,
not only follow our music, they not only follow our
cultural traditions. They admire us because we've been able to
(17:53):
accomplish with no other oppressed people on the planet have
been able to accomplish. And once a significant number of
young African Americans such as yourself, understand what's at stake
and shift your thinking to commit yourself to something bigger
than your own individual lives, then we will find ourselves
(18:16):
in a position to adequately direct the future of this
country and ultimately the future of this world based on
how we've shifted out thinking, how we've shifted our action,
and how those actions are now shifting the course of
the world. That's what's at stake. That's why people like
(18:37):
the Santos and others don't want this information to be
taught in the classrooms because it changes how you see yourself,
It changes how you think, it changes how you act,
It changes everything. And they are literally fighting for their
survival because they know that they know that the time
(18:58):
of rule is rapidly come to an end. Yeah, they're
holding on to power for as long as they can,
and they are they are in their minds justify to
do whatever they have to do to hold on to
power for as long as they can. We are here
today with author, publisher, historian, artist and educational consultant, director
(19:22):
of the ASA Restoration Project and founder and director of
IKG Cultural Resource Center Cultural Memory specialist Mister Anthony T.
Browder discussing the original architects of civilization, African history and culture,
learning more about his educational organization as well as his
extraordinary body of research collected over three decades and with
(19:46):
sixty five plus trips to Egypt and other international destinations.
It's a very scary thing to witness. You're absolutely right,
and to add to that because it's the way let
me let me just let me just take you on that. Right,
one of the things that the Christians would teach you
(20:09):
is that fears the absence of God. So it's not
about being scared, it's not about being afraid. It's about knowing,
and that knowledge cancels about fear right and knowledge empowers
you to do the things that you've always had the
capacity to do and that you were born to do
(20:29):
by virtue of the fact that you have taken a
breath on this planet. So my suggestion, brother, is to
don't look at it as something to be fearful of.
Look at it as an opportunity for you to step
into the full glorious to why you were born here
on this I'll take that, And that's actually where I
wanted to go with the h the next question. You
(20:53):
mentioned something earlier about the word psychology being connected to
an African word, right, And you know, because I've I'm
familiar with a lot of your talks, I realized that
there is a lot of connections African connections in Christianity
and indeed a lot of the Abrahamic religions around the world.
(21:17):
And I think that making those connections live for people
is significant because indeed, you know, how I grew up,
our reward was always in heaven. We were to turn
a blind eye and just endure our suffering because suffering,
because at the end of our life great would be
(21:37):
our reward. This sort of thinking and that can be
very problematic in my view because it kind of allows
us to kind of accept our reality and not really
move up. It doesn't really move us to change things
(21:57):
in a way that perhaps a different religious outcome might. Right, um,
our our job is to let go and let God.
Our job is to you know whatever. And I believe
if people knew the connections to the African traditions, and
(22:19):
I'd love for you to tell the story of the
virgin birth and any others that come to mind. But
I know that when I heard those connections, I recognized, Wow, Okay,
there's something deeper here. So please we can start with
the virgin birth narrative that made its way to Christianity,
but I know that there there are many others. Okay, Well,
(22:40):
before I do that, let me just say that you
have accurately described the purpose of Christianity here in the Americans. Yeah,
and I'm a Christian too. I grew up Christian. I
want to make sure I said I'm not. I'm not.
I don't hate anybody. I'm not, But go ahead, please,
I grew up in a Christian environment as well. Okay,
virtue of the fact that our parents, our grandparents were
(23:03):
Christians who inherited their belief and so, without without going
into a long history of that, the purpose of religion
as it has been presented to us here in Americuca
by the very same people who stoled us and enslaved us,
lynched us, raped us, they taught us how to cultivate
(23:25):
a relationship with God. Now, if they were true Christians,
true followers of the faith, and had not violated one
of the ten commandments, thou shalt not still, we'd be
having this conversation under the mango tree somewhere in the
west coast of Africa. Right. So, religion has been used
(23:48):
as a tool to subjugate the subjugated. That, there's no
question about that. And to make you believe in the
pie in the sky slaves, obey your man master was
part of the religious doctrine that was given to enslaved people.
Only after white slave owners in the South, specifically in Georgia,
(24:11):
became fearful of the seeds of the Haitian Revolution in
eighteen oh four spreading throughout the Americas. They decided then
that it was time to introduce African people to slavery.
Prior to that, it was illegal for Africans to be Christians.
They didn't believe. First, they didn't believe that Africans had sold.
(24:33):
Popey Genius the Fourth in the fifteenth century issued a
papal bull which gave Portuguese and then Spain permission to
steal Africans because the pope said that Africans had no soul,
they're not human beings. So we have to understand first
and foremost the road that religion has played in the
(24:53):
establishment of the slave trade, which lasted for four hundred
and forty four years. As a matter of fact, just recently,
the Church of England has issued a paper apologizing for
their role in expanding the slave trade. The British were
the most financially successful in slavers on the planet. They
(25:16):
made more money than any other European nation selling African flesh,
and the Church of England has just recently acknowledged that
and said that they're going to pay some form of reparations. Right. So,
the reality is the religions of the Abrahamic faith, Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam were derived from spiritual traditions that originated in
(25:43):
the Now Valley at least two thousand years before Abraham
was born. So you asked me to tell the story
of the Assarian drama. Once you understand foundational African history,
it shifts your understanding of everything else and neither your
(26:04):
mind becomes open and you begin to pursue more of
this information, or you suffer from cognitive dissidents and the
information that you're hearing conflicts with what you have been
socialized to believe in, and you've shut down and reject
(26:24):
that information because it makes you psychologically, emotionally, and maybe
even physically uncomfortable. So the story that I'm going to
share with you is the foundational story of kimm It
ancient Egypt. It is a story that is at least
six thousand years old, and just recently, about a decade
(26:45):
or so ago, I found out talking with an Ethiopian
colleague of mine that this story actually originated in Ethiopia
and is more likely ten thousand years old. But the
short version of the story is this the civilization that
we know of, kim It A ancient Egypt was founded
by a man by the name of Assar, who united
(27:08):
the two lands, established the first government. He introduced agriculture,
he introduced writing, and also established the first theology, the
first religion, if you will. Assar married a woman by
the name of a Set, and we're talking about two
African people, indigenous African people. And if the story of
(27:31):
the Ethiopian origins of the story are true, we know
that they came from northeast Africa, which is the region
where paleo anthropologists have determined the first humans lived. Right. So, Assar,
after he established the nation of Kimmi, which is the
original name for the country we now call Egypt, decided
(27:54):
to travel to other areas of Africa and share this knowledge,
share this technology with them to bring them into the light,
and left his wife to run their nation, which means
that he his wife a Set was not subservient to him.
She was his coequal, coequal, and she had enough bandwidth
(28:16):
mental bandwidth to carry on the operations of this nation. Now,
according to the story, there's multiple versions of the story.
Assar was murdered by his brother Set and then one
version of the story, Set dismembered Assar cut his body
into fourteen pieces and scattered them throughout the land. A
(28:38):
Set was forced to flee for her life, and she
went searching for the missing parts of her husband's body.
She found thirteen of the fourteen parts of Assar's body,
and she found each body part, she washed it, she
anointed it with oils, and then literally a Set remembered
her husband. She reassembled his body and then rapped his
(29:02):
body and bandages, thus creating the first mummy and recorded history.
And she then proceeded to bury her husband. It took
a Set seventy days to find the missing pieces of
her husband's body and to prepare his body for burial.
So in kimm It in Egypt for the next three
(29:23):
thousand years, the process of mummification lasted for seventy days.
So that's how important this story which I have to
share with you and your listeners. This story is a myth.
It is not true, but it contains truth. It is
(29:43):
a myth So according to this myth is documented myth
a set as she was about to bury her husband
grieve because she was still a virgin. She and her
husband and never consummated their marriage before he left to
go on his journey and was murdered. So the spirit
of Sar visited his wife a Set and impregnated her.
(30:06):
And if you you said you had gone to Egypt
on your forty birthday, So if you went to did
you go to the temple of a Bidos on that trip?
I'm not sure. I can't remember the name. I went
to the temple where the sphinx is, I know that,
all right, Well, no, that's that's in. That's in geezer.
A Bidos is south, about two hundred miles south before
(30:29):
you get to lux Or. Okay, no, I didn't. Abidos
is where the oldest existing temple in Egypt still is.
It was a temple that was started by SETI the first,
the father of Rameses the second, the father of the
man that you were named after. It's one of the
most remarkable temples in Egypt. It was built around U
(30:52):
thirteen say thirteen fifty BC, and in that temple is
an image of a Set being impregnated by her deceased husband.
So this story, this myth, becomes the first story in
recorded history of what Christians referred to as automatically conception.
(31:18):
And then nine months later, the virgin a Set gave
birth to her son, Haru. Haru was born of a virgin.
Haru was born on the same birth date as his father, Assar,
December the twenty fifth. Haru was born to avenge the
(31:40):
murder of his father, and his responsibility was to reclaim
his father's throne. Ultimately, if you went to on that
trip to Egypt, if you went to the temple of
et Foud, then that is a temple on the way
to ask Juane that is dedicated to Haru, the son
(32:00):
of Assar and a Set, And in that temple you
will see carved on the walls images that depict the
story of Haru as an adult battling his uncle Set,
the man who murdered his father, and defeating Set, and
then becoming the legitimate heir to the throne of his father.
And as part of that story, as part of that narrative,
(32:23):
when Haru ascended to the throne and became the King
of Kimmitt, his father Assar was resurrected from the dead
and took his place in the ancestor around on the
throne of Judgment. So Assar then became the person who
judged the souls of all the dead, all the deceased
(32:46):
people who came before him on Judgment Day. Now, these
elements essential elements of this myth, this African myth, which
is at least two thousand years older than Genesis in
the Torah, served as the foundation for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
(33:09):
And this story of these faiths were derived from an
African myth which has had the African essence stripped away
from it and has been reinterpreted first by people who
classified themselves as Hebrews, and then later reinterpreted again by
(33:33):
people who classify themselves as Christians, and then later still
reinterpreted by people who classify themselves as Muslims. So what
I know, based on my study of history is that
through an accurate interpretation of historical events, you can find
(33:54):
the African sea, the African DNA in many aspects of
lives or traditions, cultural traditions that have been attributed to
other people. And that's one of the reasons why this
information is suppressed because if you find out that the
(34:16):
story of Jesus Christ is a reinterpretation of the story
of an African family, then that will cause you to
look at religion differently and ask yourself what else has
been coopted from African stories that we've never been taught
And if Europeans were responsible for teaching you the story
(34:38):
of Christianity, you have to ask yourself what other information
African information have they not told you that if you
were aware of and applied in your life, could radically
alter your trajectory through life here in the United States
of America. So people are control is that said? People
(34:59):
are controlled not so much by what they know, but
why they don't know, which is why you know. For me,
acquisition of this information and dissemination of this information is
so critical to me because I understand its ability to
dramatically alter the thinking of millions of people throughout the
(35:20):
world and ultimately change the trajectory of the world. That's
what's at stake. This concludes part three of our four
part conversation with author, publisher, historian, artist and educational consultant,
director of the ASA Restoration Project and founder and director
of IKG Cultural Resource Center Cultural memory specialist mister Anthony T. Browder.
(35:45):
Check back in with us tomorrow for Part two with
your host rams This jaw right here on the Black
Information Network Daily Podcast
And now part three of our four part conversation with author, publisher, historian,
artist and educational consultant, director of the ASA Restoration Project
and founder and director of IKG Cultural Resource Center Cultural
Memory Specialists, mister Anthony T. Browder. I am Maggie B. Noan,
and this is a Black Information Network Daily podcast with
(00:24):
your host Ramsas Jah. You know, I think that this
you're making, you know, there's a lot of people who
are in support of educating our youth, and you're making
as good a case as anyone I've ever seen. And
I realize this is why I kind of went into
(00:46):
my own experience humbly knowing that there are a lot
of things that I've learned that may not be true, right,
they may, like you said, you feel good you know things,
and this is why I was like, you know, you
know better than me, of course, Um, but of course
that thirst for knowledge, that that thirst for just the
(01:07):
basic understanding that there may be something else to the
story that was profound and again something that I found
very early on. Um, just kind of you know, coming
across your your conversations with you know, Rock Newman, and
you know, just the many, the many works that you've
done and that were available to me online. UM, so
(01:27):
that brings me to, you know, a point that you
were making earlier about what we're doing about our youth.
So I definitely want to get your thoughts, you know. Um,
I believe it was stated by DeSantis and the governing
educational body in Florida that, um, the ap African African
American Studies class lacked significant educational value. I believe that's
(01:50):
exactly what they said. UM, I want to get your
thoughts on why African and African American education is important
and why you think there's such a push back when
(02:11):
we're trying to educate ourselves when there's not as profound
of an attack on Holocaust education or you know, the
eradication of indigenous tribes, its whitewash stories, but it's not
completely you know, gone from the curriculum. As an educator
and as a person with such you know, monumental insight,
(02:31):
I want to get your thoughts. Well, I would say,
let's go to the words of doctor CARTERGI. Woodson, who
wrote the book on this process and minist education. As
a matter of fact, that book is ninety years old now.
The book is entire of the miseducation of the Negro.
(02:53):
And the whole purpose behind miseducation is, to paraphrase Woodson,
if you control the person's thinking through the process of miseducation,
you don't have to worry about their actions. You don't
have to worry about what they do. If you control
the person's thinking through miseducation, you won't have to tell
that person to stand here or to go there, because
(03:15):
they will find their proper place and they will stay
in it. A person who has been miseducated will not
have to be ordered to go to the back door
of any society, because they will find their proper If
there is no back door, they will create one for
their special purposes. That's the purpose of education, to instill
(03:40):
in the mind of people a sense of superiority or inferiority.
And when it comes to people of African descent here
in America, people who were forcefully dragged from their homeland
in chains and enslaved for over two hundred and fifty
years in this country and then subjected to Jim Crow
(04:04):
segregation and lynching for almost a hundred years, and then
went through thirteen years of a civil rights movement before
they were given the basic rights, freedom, justice, inequality. And
then once that legislation was introduced in the nineteen sixties
and blacks integrated into American society, that integration, as doctor
(04:27):
King correctly theorized, that integration was the integration into a
burning house. And as a consequence, people of African descent
today in twenty twenty three are in worst shape educationally
and we've been in the last one hundred years because
we no longer have those black schools that I was
(04:48):
telling you that I had grown up being where there
were teachers who looked like me, who had invested interest
in making sure that I understood the value of education
and that I learned to read, to write, and to reason.
That's not happening in school systems anymore. If you talk
to any educator or any administrator, they would tell you
that schools now have been preoccupied with teaching to the tests.
(05:12):
So there's certain core information that they are mandated by
law to make sure that a significant number of teachers
within their classroom, within their school or their district must
pass a test in order for them to continue to
get funding from the state or the federal government. So
there's no education going on anymore. It's preparing students to
(05:36):
remember certain lessons so that they can pass the test,
so the school districts can get money to continue the
process of this education. That's what's been happening, and it's
happening now on steroids. And so as a consequence, people
like the Santos and other right wing Republicans are fearful
(06:00):
of the type of information that my colleagues and I
have dedicated our lives to researching, documenting, and making accessible
to school systems because they know that this information runs
contrary to the acceptable narrative. And if you recall last year,
(06:21):
as this debate was going on in school districts throughout
the country, particularly in the South, one of their justifications
for limiting this so called African centered information is because
it would make the white students in the classroom feel bad.
They didn't want to hurt their feelings. So essentially, what
that says is they don't give a damn about how
(06:44):
black and brown people feel in the classrooms. Learning that
Christopher Columbus discovered America, learning that slavery was referred to
by some folk as involuntary servitude, right, so they don't
care about our feelings. That's clear, that's obvious. And given
that reality, then what should we care about How should
(07:11):
we care about that? And so my position has always
been to look after our family first. So if if
you are not actively involved in going to the school
board meetings in your community, if you're not actively involved
in holding schools accountable to ensure that your tax dollars
(07:34):
are used to make sure that in your child's classroom
there's information that uplifts the psyche of your child and
makes them feel good about themselves. In a school is
more than just feeling good. But when a black child
is in a classroom. And here's about the fact that
(07:55):
Africans had traveled to the America's twenty five years before
Christopher Columbus is born. And they see the physical evidence
of the twenty Samad statues in Mexico, of the people
who are classified as the Old max who brought technology,
who brought architecture, who brought engineering, who brought a knowledge
of theology and the calendar to the Indigenous Americans, And
(08:19):
see how the Indigenous Americans acknowledge their presence, that those
are real historical facts that everybody needs to know, not
just black children or brown children, but everybody in every
classroom needs to know this information, and they need to
know this information not just during February Black History Month.
This is world history, Okay. So one of the things
(08:41):
that I've been concerned about is raising their awareness of
young people like you and elders like me, so that
we can become responsible advocates for our children and for
those who yet to be born, so that we can
insist that our tax dollars be used to educate everybody
in the classroom so that they can have a different
(09:02):
understanding of themselves and their potential. And trust me, but
that none of this information has anything to do with
making white folks feel bad. It's about telling and teaching
historical truths and teaching the young folks in the classroom
how to be objective in internalizing that truth right, and
(09:25):
how they can use those truths to empower themselves and
assume responsibility for making sure that this nation lives up
to its creedy. That all people are created equal and
all people have a right to freedom, justice and equality.
That's what's at state. So helping students become good civil servants, right,
(09:48):
responsible citizens of society is really what this This movement,
if you will, is all about and that only happens
when you know the truth and you can bind yourself
to that which is such a transformative entity. You know,
there's um something I was going to say. I came
across recently a meme on you know, my social media feed,
(10:10):
and it was a photo of David Banner. It was
in MC okay, you're familiar, and David Banner was it
was like a like an artistic photograph, you know, an
esthetic photograph of him, just kind of with that powerful
frame of his and he was reading a book and
it was one of your books, right, beautiful photograph, very
(10:31):
powerful image, and you know, as you were speaking right now,
it brought me the thought and I hope I don't
get this wrong, but I believe that there was a
group of people, maybe you were involved, maybe not, but
they were trying to get your book involved to a
degree or something like that in some sort of curriculum
(10:51):
right for students to be able to read. And there
was some pushback against that. So before we get too
far from this point in the conversation, I would love
for you to help us circumvent those traditional avenues and
educate our children by ourselves. So please plug you know,
(11:12):
any any books anything like that that you've written that
you feel like we need to know. Right now. We're
certainly going to circle back, but I'd love to make
sure that we touch on that while we're here. Truly,
the picture that you're talking about is is this picture
that's it? Reading the Browder File and about Oh gosh,
(11:32):
I guess about eight or nine years ago, I received
a call from from David called me up out the
blue and just said, how much reading that book as
a teenager. I think he was a sophomore in high school.
How much reading that book changed his life. He said
it was the first book he ever read. From cup
to cover. I think he said he was a sophomore
(11:54):
in high school going to high school in Mississippi. And
so he has made to the point to buy cases
of that book to give to sophomore students in his
former high school, so that some of these students could
have the same transformative experience that he had upon reading
that book. So Banner is a difference. Banner is a
(12:18):
brother who understood how people in his line of work
have been socialized to focus on and expand the worst
of African people, the criminality, the abuse of women, and
once he learned something about who he was as a
perfect person of African descent, he shifted. He said, I
(12:41):
can't do that anymore. And and so what we're looking
at is creating a movement among people whose consciousness has
been awakened. And I don't particularly like the term woke
because you know anyway. So what we have been doing
(13:02):
is through kh specifically writing books, publishing books, dissimulating books
so that people can study on their own and begin
to understand the real history that is associated with them,
and then to show them how to use this information
to advocate for the children in your household, the children
(13:25):
in your community. So I'm a firm believer of the
fact that education begins at home, and more specifically, education
begins in the womb. Education begins in the womb, and
that if you have more video games and more televisions
in your home, then you have books. There's going to
be problems in your household. If you spend more time
(13:45):
playing video games watching television, then you do reading. There's
going to be problems in your communities and the classrooms
in your communities. So I'm an advocate of working within
and outside of the system, and that knowledge specifically, knowledge
of self is the best is the best means by
(14:06):
which a people can know who they are and live
up to their potential and change how they move through
what It's still a racist and self destructive society, and
if we want to save ourselves, we're going to have
to assume responsibility for saving ourselves because nobody else would
(14:26):
do it. Our so called belief system, the god of
our belief system, is not going to save us. If
that were true, then we probably would not have been
enslaved in in the first place. We wouldn't have been
lynched in the first place. As a whole an other
subject matter, but the reality is politicians are not going
to save us. Any civil rights legislation can be undone,
(14:50):
just like the Supreme Court is in the process of
undoing some important educational rulings that have stood for several decades.
So we see the rug is being pulled out from
under black folk right now. As I mentioned, I'm seventy
one years old, and this racial climate that we've been
experiencing here in America, particularly over the past seven years,
(15:14):
has been the worst I've ever seen in my life.
And I've seen some pretty horrific things and So something
is coming, and if you don't know what's coming, if
you don't know how to prepare for what's coming, you'll
be like the victims of Katrina who didn't have the
(15:36):
resources to get out, and you'll be standing on top
of a roof the sign that says helped me, but
there'll be no one to come to your assistance. So
history can teach us cycles of the past how those
same cycles are manifesting themselves today, and those people who
are good stewards of history can then use that knowledge
(16:00):
to prepare themselves for what they know is coming based
on the cyclical nature of history. So I've been advocating
for years through through my ag that black people study
black history and more specifically, our relationship with white people,
so that we can better determine who is for us
(16:22):
and who is against us and use our time, our talent,
and our treasure to ensure that we not only survive
what is coming, but we thrive because of specific decisions
that we made and specific information that we have passed
down to our children, so that they're able to benefit
(16:45):
from this knowledge and continue to perpetuate information that will
ensure our continued success and our continued ability to thrive
in the United States of America, which is based in
my study, the United States of America's the wealthiest, most
powerful nation in human history. If you can't make it
in America, there's something wrong with you, right, And that's real.
(17:08):
Despite the racism, despite the prejudice, despite all the opposite goes,
we have a better chance of making it here in
this country than any place in the world. And they
with the knowledge of how this country works, and how
the world works, and our place in the world, we
can use that knowledge to not only survive in America,
(17:30):
but to thrive in this country and be a benefit
to other African people all over the world who look
to African Americans for models of how to live. You know,
not only follow our music, they not only follow our
cultural traditions. They admire us because we've been able to
(17:53):
accomplish with no other oppressed people on the planet have
been able to accomplish. And once a significant number of
young African Americans such as yourself, understand what's at stake
and shift your thinking to commit yourself to something bigger
than your own individual lives, then we will find ourselves
(18:16):
in a position to adequately direct the future of this
country and ultimately the future of this world based on
how we've shifted out thinking, how we've shifted our action,
and how those actions are now shifting the course of
the world. That's what's at stake. That's why people like
(18:37):
the Santos and others don't want this information to be
taught in the classrooms because it changes how you see yourself,
It changes how you think, it changes how you act,
It changes everything. And they are literally fighting for their
survival because they know that they know that the time
(18:58):
of rule is rapidly come to an end. Yeah, they're
holding on to power for as long as they can,
and they are they are in their minds justify to
do whatever they have to do to hold on to
power for as long as they can. We are here
today with author, publisher, historian, artist and educational consultant, director
(19:22):
of the ASA Restoration Project and founder and director of
IKG Cultural Resource Center Cultural Memory specialist Mister Anthony T.
Browder discussing the original architects of civilization, African history and culture,
learning more about his educational organization as well as his
extraordinary body of research collected over three decades and with
(19:46):
sixty five plus trips to Egypt and other international destinations.
It's a very scary thing to witness. You're absolutely right,
and to add to that because it's the way let
me let me just let me just take you on that. Right,
one of the things that the Christians would teach you
(20:09):
is that fears the absence of God. So it's not
about being scared, it's not about being afraid. It's about knowing,
and that knowledge cancels about fear right and knowledge empowers
you to do the things that you've always had the
capacity to do and that you were born to do
(20:29):
by virtue of the fact that you have taken a
breath on this planet. So my suggestion, brother, is to
don't look at it as something to be fearful of.
Look at it as an opportunity for you to step
into the full glorious to why you were born here
on this I'll take that, And that's actually where I
wanted to go with the h the next question. You
(20:53):
mentioned something earlier about the word psychology being connected to
an African word, right, And you know, because I've I'm
familiar with a lot of your talks, I realized that
there is a lot of connections African connections in Christianity
and indeed a lot of the Abrahamic religions around the world.
(21:17):
And I think that making those connections live for people
is significant because indeed, you know, how I grew up,
our reward was always in heaven. We were to turn
a blind eye and just endure our suffering because suffering,
because at the end of our life great would be
(21:37):
our reward. This sort of thinking and that can be
very problematic in my view because it kind of allows
us to kind of accept our reality and not really
move up. It doesn't really move us to change things
(21:57):
in a way that perhaps a different religious outcome might. Right, um,
our our job is to let go and let God.
Our job is to you know whatever. And I believe
if people knew the connections to the African traditions, and
(22:19):
I'd love for you to tell the story of the
virgin birth and any others that come to mind. But
I know that when I heard those connections, I recognized, Wow, Okay,
there's something deeper here. So please we can start with
the virgin birth narrative that made its way to Christianity,
but I know that there there are many others. Okay, Well,
(22:40):
before I do that, let me just say that you
have accurately described the purpose of Christianity here in the Americans. Yeah,
and I'm a Christian too. I grew up Christian. I
want to make sure I said I'm not. I'm not.
I don't hate anybody. I'm not, But go ahead, please,
I grew up in a Christian environment as well. Okay,
virtue of the fact that our parents, our grandparents were
(23:03):
Christians who inherited their belief and so, without without going
into a long history of that, the purpose of religion
as it has been presented to us here in Americuca
by the very same people who stoled us and enslaved us,
lynched us, raped us, they taught us how to cultivate
(23:25):
a relationship with God. Now, if they were true Christians,
true followers of the faith, and had not violated one
of the ten commandments, thou shalt not still, we'd be
having this conversation under the mango tree somewhere in the
west coast of Africa. Right. So, religion has been used
(23:48):
as a tool to subjugate the subjugated. That, there's no
question about that. And to make you believe in the
pie in the sky slaves, obey your man master was
part of the religious doctrine that was given to enslaved people.
Only after white slave owners in the South, specifically in Georgia,
(24:11):
became fearful of the seeds of the Haitian Revolution in
eighteen oh four spreading throughout the Americas. They decided then
that it was time to introduce African people to slavery.
Prior to that, it was illegal for Africans to be Christians.
They didn't believe. First, they didn't believe that Africans had sold.
(24:33):
Popey Genius the Fourth in the fifteenth century issued a
papal bull which gave Portuguese and then Spain permission to
steal Africans because the pope said that Africans had no soul,
they're not human beings. So we have to understand first
and foremost the road that religion has played in the
(24:53):
establishment of the slave trade, which lasted for four hundred
and forty four years. As a matter of fact, just recently,
the Church of England has issued a paper apologizing for
their role in expanding the slave trade. The British were
the most financially successful in slavers on the planet. They
(25:16):
made more money than any other European nation selling African flesh,
and the Church of England has just recently acknowledged that
and said that they're going to pay some form of reparations. Right. So,
the reality is the religions of the Abrahamic faith, Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam were derived from spiritual traditions that originated in
(25:43):
the Now Valley at least two thousand years before Abraham
was born. So you asked me to tell the story
of the Assarian drama. Once you understand foundational African history,
it shifts your understanding of everything else and neither your
(26:04):
mind becomes open and you begin to pursue more of
this information, or you suffer from cognitive dissidents and the
information that you're hearing conflicts with what you have been
socialized to believe in, and you've shut down and reject
(26:24):
that information because it makes you psychologically, emotionally, and maybe
even physically uncomfortable. So the story that I'm going to
share with you is the foundational story of kimm It
ancient Egypt. It is a story that is at least
six thousand years old, and just recently, about a decade
(26:45):
or so ago, I found out talking with an Ethiopian
colleague of mine that this story actually originated in Ethiopia
and is more likely ten thousand years old. But the
short version of the story is this the civilization that
we know of, kim It A ancient Egypt was founded
by a man by the name of Assar, who united
(27:08):
the two lands, established the first government. He introduced agriculture,
he introduced writing, and also established the first theology, the
first religion, if you will. Assar married a woman by
the name of a Set, and we're talking about two
African people, indigenous African people. And if the story of
(27:31):
the Ethiopian origins of the story are true, we know
that they came from northeast Africa, which is the region
where paleo anthropologists have determined the first humans lived. Right. So, Assar,
after he established the nation of Kimmi, which is the
original name for the country we now call Egypt, decided
(27:54):
to travel to other areas of Africa and share this knowledge,
share this technology with them to bring them into the light,
and left his wife to run their nation, which means
that he his wife a Set was not subservient to him.
She was his coequal, coequal, and she had enough bandwidth
(28:16):
mental bandwidth to carry on the operations of this nation. Now,
according to the story, there's multiple versions of the story.
Assar was murdered by his brother Set and then one
version of the story, Set dismembered Assar cut his body
into fourteen pieces and scattered them throughout the land. A
(28:38):
Set was forced to flee for her life, and she
went searching for the missing parts of her husband's body.
She found thirteen of the fourteen parts of Assar's body,
and she found each body part, she washed it, she
anointed it with oils, and then literally a Set remembered
her husband. She reassembled his body and then rapped his
(29:02):
body and bandages, thus creating the first mummy and recorded history.
And she then proceeded to bury her husband. It took
a Set seventy days to find the missing pieces of
her husband's body and to prepare his body for burial.
So in kimm It in Egypt for the next three
(29:23):
thousand years, the process of mummification lasted for seventy days.
So that's how important this story which I have to
share with you and your listeners. This story is a myth.
It is not true, but it contains truth. It is
(29:43):
a myth So according to this myth is documented myth
a set as she was about to bury her husband
grieve because she was still a virgin. She and her
husband and never consummated their marriage before he left to
go on his journey and was murdered. So the spirit
of Sar visited his wife a Set and impregnated her.
(30:06):
And if you you said you had gone to Egypt
on your forty birthday, So if you went to did
you go to the temple of a Bidos on that trip?
I'm not sure. I can't remember the name. I went
to the temple where the sphinx is, I know that,
all right, Well, no, that's that's in. That's in geezer.
A Bidos is south, about two hundred miles south before
(30:29):
you get to lux Or. Okay, no, I didn't. Abidos
is where the oldest existing temple in Egypt still is.
It was a temple that was started by SETI the first,
the father of Rameses the second, the father of the
man that you were named after. It's one of the
most remarkable temples in Egypt. It was built around U
(30:52):
thirteen say thirteen fifty BC, and in that temple is
an image of a Set being impregnated by her deceased husband.
So this story, this myth, becomes the first story in
recorded history of what Christians referred to as automatically conception.
(31:18):
And then nine months later, the virgin a Set gave
birth to her son, Haru. Haru was born of a virgin.
Haru was born on the same birth date as his father, Assar,
December the twenty fifth. Haru was born to avenge the
(31:40):
murder of his father, and his responsibility was to reclaim
his father's throne. Ultimately, if you went to on that
trip to Egypt, if you went to the temple of
et Foud, then that is a temple on the way
to ask Juane that is dedicated to Haru, the son
(32:00):
of Assar and a Set, And in that temple you
will see carved on the walls images that depict the
story of Haru as an adult battling his uncle Set,
the man who murdered his father, and defeating Set, and
then becoming the legitimate heir to the throne of his father.
And as part of that story, as part of that narrative,
(32:23):
when Haru ascended to the throne and became the King
of Kimmitt, his father Assar was resurrected from the dead
and took his place in the ancestor around on the
throne of Judgment. So Assar then became the person who
judged the souls of all the dead, all the deceased
(32:46):
people who came before him on Judgment Day. Now, these
elements essential elements of this myth, this African myth, which
is at least two thousand years older than Genesis in
the Torah, served as the foundation for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
(33:09):
And this story of these faiths were derived from an
African myth which has had the African essence stripped away
from it and has been reinterpreted first by people who
classified themselves as Hebrews, and then later reinterpreted again by
(33:33):
people who classify themselves as Christians, and then later still
reinterpreted by people who classify themselves as Muslims. So what
I know, based on my study of history is that
through an accurate interpretation of historical events, you can find
(33:54):
the African sea, the African DNA in many aspects of
lives or traditions, cultural traditions that have been attributed to
other people. And that's one of the reasons why this
information is suppressed because if you find out that the
(34:16):
story of Jesus Christ is a reinterpretation of the story
of an African family, then that will cause you to
look at religion differently and ask yourself what else has
been coopted from African stories that we've never been taught
And if Europeans were responsible for teaching you the story
(34:38):
of Christianity, you have to ask yourself what other information
African information have they not told you that if you
were aware of and applied in your life, could radically
alter your trajectory through life here in the United States
of America. So people are control is that said? People
(34:59):
are controlled not so much by what they know, but
why they don't know, which is why you know. For me,
acquisition of this information and dissemination of this information is
so critical to me because I understand its ability to
dramatically alter the thinking of millions of people throughout the
(35:20):
world and ultimately change the trajectory of the world. That's
what's at stake. This concludes part three of our four
part conversation with author, publisher, historian, artist and educational consultant,
director of the ASA Restoration Project and founder and director
of IKG Cultural Resource Center Cultural memory specialist mister Anthony T. Browder.
(35:45):
Check back in with us tomorrow for Part two with
your host rams This jaw right here on the Black
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