Dr Amos Wilson's open letter to a son and daughter of a coloniser

When you are a beneficiary of slavery and colonisation...

How do you tell a man, slavery is over, drop the chains of your slavery? It's okay to take off those chains now? They really think that all of us are miseducated and intimidated by their arrogance.

So the experience of slavery is not supposed to be operating in the mentality of black folks and you'll hear a lot of our youngsters say that as well: "Why do you talk about slavery? That was back there." Or you'll hear whites offer: "Well, we don't have anything to do with that anymore."

It's an amazing situation because you have to remind them: "You are still living off the interest of the wealth that your forefathers earned from slavery. You are still enjoying the accumulated wealth that began with the enslavement of our people. If you're going to enjoy the wealth that was generated by evil, then you must take the curse that comes along with it.

“Therefore, even though you personally had nothing to do with it, because you have received stolen goods you must pay the price as well. And because you fight and struggle to protect those stolen goods and you defend them and organize your society to maintain them and to continue to enhance them, then you must pay the price. That's why you live in terror; that's why you are robbed and stabbed in these streets; that's why you're going to suffer, no matter how 'good' you are, no matter how 'liberal' you are.”

Ladies and gentlemen, when we behave as adults we must recognise that our behavior will be visited upon our children and that our children will pay for our sins. As we say and act does not end at the point of its occurrence; it continues to reverberate into the future and down across the generations. That's why when you behave in a particular way you have to think in terms of seven generations from your behavior as to how what you're going to do is going to affect those generations later on.

Even though those children may appear to be so called innocent, they will still pay the price of their parental misbehavior. This country, whose parents and whose adults have misspent its treasure and while they have enjoyed that treasure, ultimately their children will have to pay the taxes and have to pay the price. So we have a bunch of people out here who think they can rape and rob the world, think that they can enslave the world, then delude themselves that they're going to sleep well at night. It doesn't work that way"