Tag: Ousseynou Kouyate

October is Maafa Awareness Month, a time to reflect on recovery from the residual impact slavery had on the Black community and how the centuries of free labor benefited everyone else. The ritual this year is Sunday, Oct. 10, 5:30 a.m., at Ocean Beach, Fulton at the Great Highway, in San Francisco. Maafa is Kiswahili for “great calamity, reoccurring disaster,” a term used to describe the Black Holocaust of the European Slave Trade and how the post traumatic stress syndrome shows up in our thoughts and behavior unwittingly.

I think I'm still in shock. Imagine, 200 years after chattel slavery was legally abolished in the United States, we have a Black man elected to this nation's highest office: Barack Hussein Obama, president elect, this nation's 44th president as of Jan. 20, 2009.