Oracle Online

“No one wants to talk about [power] like it really is,” El-Kati said.

El-Kati said that when politicians argue in Congress, they are trying to obtain power. Another way to obtain power, said El-Kati, is by having control over the education system and also the history books.

“History is a political weapon,” he said.

El-Kati says politicians know how to manage people’s emotions, but politics itself is much more than just the Senate. According to El-Kati, “everything is politics...politics is war without bloodshed.”

He told the audience that they have to take politics seriously because the government only responds to social movements but never has and never will create them.

“Power concedes nothing without demand,” he said. He added that changes must come from the “bottom up” instead of “from the top down.”

El-Kati said that he values humanity above everything else-something that he believes the people in Washington do not and have never valued. “I don’t deal with race,” he said. “Everyone has a beating heart.”

According to El-Kati, part of the problem is that our founding fathers themselves owned slaves and thus were “white supremacists.” George Washington wrote in his book Notes of the State of Virginia that Black people were the “species of property.” Even now, there is a problem of making “private prejudice public policy,” he said.

“Black is an arbitrary name [for a multi-colored group of individuals]. I’m not only black...it’s not my only identity,” he said. “We [Americans] are just a tiny part of what it is to be black.”

El-Kati said that representation, in many different ways, would be a step in the right direction for social changečnot only in books, but also history museums and monuments that celebrate African-Americans.

“A lot of people won’t learn anything from books,” he said. Rather, he feels it is time we start learning from other means.