Economic Suicide

Tastes, Interests and Values:

Stop Eating Pizza, You're not Italian The first step in perpetuating economic violence against a people is to change their tastes, interests and values to the tastes, interests and values of the invading culture. Tastes, interests and values are the sole determinative factors in the decision to purchase a service or product. This is extremely important as all products and services spring from a cultural landscape.

Here are some extremely basic examples to illustrate my point:

(1) An overwhelming amount of people in America, purchase turkey on the third week of November, every single year. The turkey is an imperative for a Thanksgiving dinner.

Thanksgiving is a white cultural holiday designed to celebrate white conquest and genocide of the Native American population, but is masked as a day of family togetherness and thanks. The people who own turkey farms are white poultry farmers. They are the direct economic beneficiaries of the values of this particular cultural holiday. If Native American and Black people were the owners of turkey farms, you can bet your last dollar that turkey would not be a requirement of that holiday. White people understand economic violence and under no circumstance would they allow anyone other than whites to benefit from a white holiday.

2) This is the same reason why U.S. federal, state and municipal government cars must be American cars. They understand economic violence. Have you committed economic violence on your behalf or against yourself today?

(3) Selling beef to Hindus will not work. The Hindu religion absolutely forbids the killing of cows as the cow is sacred to them. Therefore selling beef products to this crowd is not economically feasible. However, if you were able to convert the Hindus away from their religion into say, Christianity, you would have not just brought a new group of people to the priest or the pastor on Sunday, but a new group of people to McDonalds and Burger King, because their tastes, interests and values concerning cows would have changed.

A further examination of tastes, interests and values reveal that once you adopt or are coerced into perpetuating the tastes, interests and values of another group of people you will not only be committing economic violence against yourself but you will be committing violence against your health.

Example 1:

In Hawaii, over 50 percent of native adults 40 years old or more were diagnosed with diabetes. The Hawaiians are a Polynesian people who have for centuries flourished on a local diet of vegetables and fruits from their land. After the U.S. invasion and displacement of the Hawaiian Queen Liliuokalani, the tastes, values and interests of native Hawaiians were changed to the tastes of white people. Hawaiians began eating Hamburgers, Pizza, etc., became zombies of American fast foodism, and forgot about their traditional foods. Something interesting happened: Disease in the form of Diabetes.
Diabetes was never a problem for Hawaiians until their tastes we re changed. In effect, Hawaiians were funding their Diabetes. A Hawaiian doctor trained in western medicine and traditional healing sciences went on a crusade to save her people from Diabetes. She did not prescribe insulin, controlled by white pharmaceutical companies, which is a band-aid to the real problem, but she prescribed a traditional Hawaiian diet and forbade her patients to eat European made food. As her patients ate green leaves, fruits and root vegetables from the place where they evolved, their diabetes was wiped out completely. Additionally, in this manner, Hawaiian farmers benefit from the purchase of food grown on their own land, thereby restoring economic and physical health simultaneously.

Example 2:

I was at a supermarket in Miami, Florida buying a yam. Not a sweet potato, but a real yam, brown and hard. The black cashier said, "What's that, a turnip?" I was startled and had a serious epiphany. Black people have been so oppressed in America, that we do not even recognize our own ancestral foods. The implications again are self-inflicted economic and physical violence (disease). A major disease that affects Black Americans is Sickle Cell Anemia. However, this disease does not affect Black people in Africa nearly as much. The reason: The shifting of tastes, interests, and values much like the Hawaiian example. The sickle cell trait is a trait that helps Africans fight off malaria. The sickling of the red blood cell helps prevent the malaria parasite from binding to the cell due to the peculiar shape of a sickled cell and its hemoglobin. Since Black Americans are literally from West Africa, they have this trait just like any other West African. The difference is the West African diet contains root foods from the Africans soil like cassava and yam. Studies by Nigerian researcher, Dr. Ogi Agbaihave, shown that thiocynate in cassava and yam and their leaves alleviate the symptoms of Sickle Cell Anemia. Black Americans do not eat cassava or true yams, so Sickle Cell Anemia is rampant. Instead, Black Americans have been forced to develop a taste for everything other than African root food therefore the disease is present. Disease is defined as imbalance. When a person or a people have tastes, interests and values outside of who they really are, all types of imbalances occur such as economic and physical health imbalances. Recalibrating a Black American diet from chitlins and fried chicken back to a West African diet of plantains, cassava, yams, etc., will create a necessary economic balance by supporting African commodities markets and enriching personal, group economic and physical health simultaneously. Have you committed economic violence today?