Here’s a powerful speech given by U.S. House Representation Jamaal Bowman in response to the college board stripping down its A.P. curriculum for African-American studies.
Here’s the transcript of the speech:
“Black history is American history and I wanna speak directly to the Republican Party. Some of the things they say and do, you gotta laugh to keep from punching somebody in the face or to keep from crying.
The Republican party and Ron DeSantis, do me a favor, pick up a book and read a book. Read a couple of books, read an African-American history curriculum.
And we know that you are trying to erase that history because you don’t want black people to have knowledge of self. You want an oppress, suppress, and control us.
But guess what DeSantis and Republican party? It ain’t happening. We ain’t going back to slavery where it was illegal for us to learn how to read and write. And when we tried to learn how to read and write, you chased us, raped us, and lynched us. We not going back to slavery Ron DeSantis.
We ain’t going back to Jim Crow. We ain’t going back.
This isn’t make America great again. To be the kind of America you wanted it to be. We are standing here, enlightened, empowered, and we are woke as hell.
So you can can try to continue with your anti-woke agenda, but the only people who ain’t woke is you.
On the house floor today you are creating socialism with communism and dictatorship. That’s not even what socialism is.
But if y’all read books, you would know the difference. You would know that before we came to this country, we were kings and queens. Never porch monkeys. There were empires in Africa called Kush, Timbuktu, where every race came to give books to learn from black teachers who taught Greeks and Romans, Asian, Arabs, and gave them gold when gold was converted to money and all change.
Money then became empowerment for Europeans. And you’re still using that money to oppress us under the thumb of plantation capitalism.
We know your game. And we are calling your game out. And my bill, African American History Act is a bill we are gonna push hard through the house.
We make better decisions, and then we can solve humanity’s most pressing issues like hunger and climate change and homelessness and poverty and all this stuff you don’t want us to solve because you just wanna remain in power.
Stop lying, read a book, and you are never, ever, ever, going to take us back to slavery and Jim Crow, and you are never going to kill us. We don’t die, we multiply. Get up outta here with your nonsense.”