As a candidate for Eastern Regional Representative, I envision some basic short and long-term goals towards chapter development, member recruitment, and community accountability, as well as distant goals towards our re-Africanization. First, we can enhance our visibility and mutual awareness through a calendar of events for the Eastern Region. This is already done, in part, through the diligent work of Dr. Faruq Iman in the Mashariki Gazetti and can be further supported through the ABPsi website or a separate website to be created. Second, we need to expand chapters in the Eastern corridor. For example, there exists now a critical mass of ABPsi-oriented Black Psychologists that can form a Maryland chapter that would focus on the Baltimore area and could work collaboratively with the established DC and Delaware Valley ABPsi chapters towards mutual goals. In addition, there needs to be a New England chapter that would encompass the community needs of Africans among New England.  I am confident that we can charter a Maryland chapter in year 1 and a New England chapter within two to three years.

Third, our Eastern region would benefit from participating and offering a quarterly training for a particular skill-set, i.e., disaster and emergency response, to be alternated per chapter. We could organize the trainings or participate with established organizations, i.e., National Prepared Network. A modest goal would be to identify and/or train twenty ABPsi members in the Eastern Region in Emergency and Disaster Response, and then to have at minimum 1 response per chapter to a local emergency or disaster issue per year, i.e., school violence, police brutality, etc. This would proceed towards establishing the ABPsi Eastern Regional Response Network (ERRN) and serve as a model for other regions within four years and remedy the institutional vacuum exposed when the levees were breached.  While I consider these important focal issues, by no means do I believe that these are the exhaustive, central issues for African people and our organization.

The biggest challenge facing African people in the United States and throughout the Global African Community is African sovereignty (Akoto, Hanibal, Hilliard, Nkrumah, Wahad, Fanon, Wilson, Wright, Cabral, Clark). Thus, as would be healer-warriors, we are faced with the challenge of decolonizing, re-Africanizing, and re-sovereignizing the African mind, family, and community towards nation building. This is indeed a challenging task given the vast gulfs created by the devastating effects of sweeping unemployment and displacement through gentrification, environmental warfare and other methods of white terror and its “cide” effects of genocide, mentacide, and communicide. Despite the daunting nature of the challenge before us, there are several societies of African people who have turned towards an all-out commitment towards African society whose models of health we could employ as a blueprint for black power (Wilson) to effectively decolonize and re-Africanize our collective Black minds (Chinweizu; Williams). However, we, as the elite educated ones, stand in the way of our own African revolution (Armah, Fanon, Cabral).

It is clear that our (Black psychologist) claustrophobia in the sovereign, mental quarters of Afro-space (Williams), i.e., the generative Black space of our all-Black communities, has become mired by classtrophobia, our fear of and discomfort with being trapped in the small spaces (read so-called disadvantaged). Auto-colonialism (Bulhan), has led us (Black psychologists) to believe that our job is to use the enslaver’s tools to build the backdoor that Carter G. Woodson told us we would build under the systems of miseducation. Rather than returning internally through that door from whence we left Africa and her cultural traditions of over three hundred millennia in our collective existence, we have chosen the 500 year door of enslavement and 100-plus year European psychology with its African blood-stained glass windows through which to view ourselves. Thus, our temporal myopia has led us to look back through the eyes of Sankofa, but only until we can see our most recent ancestors, ever flying forward until we hit the brick walls of colonial America built by the ingenuity of our African masonry and hands of our African ancestry. We see progress in the distance between us and our ancestors. Yet, while the ancestral alienation gap widens, so too does our alienation from the promise of success in the United States as seen from the educational system to the indices of physical health, home ownership, economic wealth, lingering political prisoners, etc. Rather than pulling the chain of our genetic wisdom to become closer to the original ancestors, as Baba Fu-Kiau instructs, we are allowing the European colonial systems to pull our chains tighter around our necks.

Our ancient and recent expressions of African love have manifested in our attempts to achieve Black power and harness the power and protection of and for our Blackness from the melanocyte and molecule to the cosmos and community. Fists raised and voices lifted we are connected to our people, land, and the cosmos. Let us open up our hearts, minds, and fists to receive the blessings from the deepest recesses of the Black spaces in the universe as we “stand up in responsibility and sit down in humility.” This is the true challenge for African people. Dr. Hilliard proffered, Dr. Nobles refined, and others have stated the challenge: to be African. Dr. Finch reminds us that Dr. Fu-Kiau wrote that to be African is to be initiated (ganda) in an African system. Through adherence to initiation processes we will begin the decolonization and dis-initiation from the European systems of miseducation.

Towards these beginnings, we can institute local chapter Mbongis for ABPsi to capture the year of the Mbongi in the Eastern Region with initiates of African systems. The Mbongi is a powerful institution that will allow us to meet locally on a consistent basis to collectively address issues with the community and plan for our collective initiation. Towards this aim, I plan to assist in the coordination of local mbongis for community development. Our culture is our answer; we need not question the wisdom of over three hundred millennia for two thousand seasons.