Dr. Catherine Meeks, Executive Director of the Absalom Jones Episcopal Center for Racial Healing and Author of “The Night is Long, but Light Comes in the Morning” is a repeat guest on, On Point with Juandolyn Stokes and once again she did not disappoint our listeners.
Meeks came to offer her perspective on the misleading lesson the State of Florida is teaching in their curriculum on the so-called benefits slavery offered to enslaved people.
“When I heard Florida’s curriculum, I just cried. How can we be that pitiful to use education to not have people liberated,” asked Meeks?
Meeks realizes many parents already have so many burdens, but she states, “we cannot let the children fall through the cracks,” especially in Florida.
Meeks grew up in rural Arkansas with a father who was a sharecropper and a mother who received her bachelor’s degree in education as a non-traditional student.
“I grew up feeling like we weren’t free people and I wanted to be free,” she said.
This experience put her on her life-long path of trying to live in this country while standing up for right.
“Racism holds people of color down. Racism is the set of systems designed to keep white supremacist thinking that we should be second, and third-class citizens.
White people don’t understand that when you hold someone else down you hold yourself down,” said Meeks
According to Meeks, non-whites were supposed to be servants to the white supremacist in the imaginary space in their white minds they need to occupy.
She added, we have become pawns in a game without even knowing it, in a system that is never going to accept us.
You don’t get free if you don’t tell the truth. You don’t get to make up your facts as you go forward.
“Our kids need to know we will walk over hot coals for them,” said Meeks.