I took AP Government in my senior year of highschool.

There was a chapter in the textbook titled “Political Strife and the Radicalizing of the Colonists.” Everyone has heard of the Boston Tea Party, America repeats it throughout her textbooks from elementary school to high school. The leader of the Boston Tea Party, Samuel Adams, is looked upon as someone who fought for America’s independence.

A passage in the chapter reads, “By dumping the East India Company’s tea into Boston Harbor, Adams and his followers goaded the British into enacting a number of harsh reprisals…these acts of retaliation confirmed the worst criticisms of England and helped radicalize Americans and move them towards collective resistance.”

Like the colonies under British rule, today the Black community is nothing more than a colony under American rule. Here are two quotes by the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that proves how the inner cities of America where Blacks reside are nothing more than colonies.

In Minister Farrakhan’s 58-week lecture series delivered in 2013, The Time and What Must be Done, he said in Part 49 titled Separation and Independence, “…the Blacks are in a separate area, but that area is controlled from Whites outside of their area.” He goes on, “The definition of ‘colonize’ means: ‘to send a group of settlers to a place and establish control over it; come to settle and establish political control over the indigenous people of an area; to appropriate a place or domain for one’s own use.”He then asks the question, “Is it an accident that everywhere you find Black people in America, you find us living in an area appropriated to us by that which has the power to do so?”

In 1967, Dr. King delivered a speech titled “The Three Evils of Society.” In the speech he said, “We must also realize that the problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power. We must further recognize that the ghetto is a domestic colony.”

So, now that we have established that the Black community is, in fact, a colony, let’s move on. The Boston Tea Party was all about resisting British rule. In essence, the colonies took a step towards freedom by boycotting the tea, because getting rid of it could be seen as a form of boycott.

Many stores during the 2015 holiday season saw a decrease in sales because a large population of Black people decided to boycott Christmas and holiday spending because of the lack of justice. 2016, many have still and are still boycotting.

After the Boston Tea Party, Britain punished the colonies.

Let me stop right there. How many Sandra Blands, Tamir Rices, Laquan Mcdonalds, Trayvon Martins, Mike Browns, and Emmett Tills have to die in order for the Black colonies of America to become free?

So, Britain punished the colonies, and as a result, the colonies moved towards collective resistance. In other words, the American Revolutionary War was born and they gained their freedom.

The decolonization of the Black community has to first begin with those that live inside of it. For true freedom, war must be waged against the forces that keep the Black community colonized.