Peace. One of the more disappointing, albeit not surprising nor ironic responses to my white Liberal privilege post, wherein I included video footage of me being profiled by the local police, did not actually come from white liberals, but a black man whose advice to me was safety above all else, stay in the house. Which made no logical sense for myriad reasons, none of which was he open to listening to in the comments, as he was passionately arguing from the safety of his basement. Literally. I say that it wasn’t surprising because this state of mind, safety above all else, is not something that I haven’t heard before, typically by older and or affluent black folk. It’s not uncommon among any marginalized group for some to adopt that philosophy. Fiddler’s philosophy. Fiddler was a character from Alex Haley’s roots, a character that the actor Luke Gossett junior originally didn’t want to play because, as Luke Gossett junior said, there’s all kinds of wonderful part. Why choose me to play the Uncle Tom? I took it personally. Fiddler was an Uncle Tom. When Kuntikinte arrived, Fiddler was tasked by his master to break Kuntikinte because Fiddler enjoyed certain comforts that he cherished and did not want Kuntikinte to make things bad for him on the plantation. I’ve been stretching and scrambling most of my days to get where I got. Now I eats in the big house kitchen. I got pine boards on the floor of my cabin, and It don’t take much coffin for the master to make me have a cup of corn whiskey for my medicine. Now, that is fine living for a nigga. And I’ll be if any African Guinea man is gonna make me lose all I’ve been working for. Now you take my meaning. Fiddler had become compromised for comfort and relative safety. But even one of the most famous colonizers himself, Benjamin Franklin, once a slave owner, said that those who would sacrifice essential liberty for safety deserve neither essential liberty nor safety. Yet they created scenarios that would force enslaved people to do exactly that, thus doing the dirty work for them. To render ourselves undeserving. When I quoted that Benjamin Franklin quote to you, you dismissed it because it came from a white man. And so I offered you the words of MLK junior himself, who talks about the importance of courage and the lack of character of a coward. You are a coward. You are compromised. You will die 1,000 deaths before I die once, and everybody dies. But not everybody lives. And those of us who truly live will live on after death. Oh, I don’t worry. I tell you, I’m a man who believed that. I died 20 years ago, and I live like a man who is dead already. I have no fear whatsoever of anybody or anything. We outcha