From Royalty to Victimhood

There's a narrative that's been making the rounds for decades now—one that tells black Americans they're descended from African royalty. Kings and queens, the story goes. Noble warriors from powerful kingdoms. Wakanda before Wakanda was cool.

It's compelling mythology, I'll grant that. And it's been remarkably effective at doing exactly what mythology does best: obscuring truth while flattering the ego.

The problem isn't that African kingdoms never existed. Mali, Songhai, Ethiopia—these were real. But here's what the Afrocentric narrative conveniently omits: every people group since the beginning of time has had mostly paupers, mostly peasants, with some royal elements at the top of their sociological hierarchy. That's not unique to Africa. That's not even particularly noteworthy.

What is noteworthy—and deeply troubling—is how this self-aggrandizing fantasy gets weaponized. Not to liberate. Not to dignify. But to keep people dependent on the very systems that profit from their perceived victimhood.

The Wakanda Problem

I call it self-aggrandizement because that's exactly what it is. This false sense of Afrocentricity, this Hollywood-inspired mythology that Black people come from some land where almost everyone is either royalty or descended from royalty, carrying royal demeanor and royal pride passed down through genetics—it's fiction dressed up as heritage.

And here's the danger: when you tell people their dignity comes from ancestral kingdoms, you've given them a dignity that can be taken away. Lost kingdoms mean lost worth. Conquered empires mean conquered people. The mythology that's supposed to elevate actually enslaves, because it ties human value to historical power structures rather than divine decree.

Scripture offers something radically different. Being made in the image of GOD—the imago Dei—confers a dignity that no historical kingdom ever could. It's externally granted, not culturally inherited. It comes from the divine, not from man. And because it's rooted in GOD's creative act rather than human achievement, it can't be conquered, can't be lost, can't be diminished by the rise and fall of empires.

That's true liberation theology.

The Iron Triangle

Vince Everett Ellison, in his book The Iron Triangle, identifies three groups that have profited enormously from keeping black Americans dependent: black preachers, politicians, and civil rights leaders. Not all of them, certainly. But enough to form what he calls an "iron triangle" of control—a system that enriches intermediaries while keeping the supposed beneficiaries in perpetual need.

Sound familiar? It should. We saw the same pattern in the Great Society's perverse incentive structures. We see it in the professionalization of grievance, where Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and Shaun King make merchandise of overwrought sentiments. We see it every February when corporate America dusts off its black history month symbols while doing precisely nothing to address actual dependency.

The con works like this: Tell people their dignity comes from African royalty. Then point out that royalty was conquered, colonized, enslaved. Now they need you—the preacher, the politician, the activist—to restore what was lost. Government programs become the new kingdom. Dependency becomes the new royalty. And the people who profit from administering the system never, ever want the wound to heal.

Because healing would put them out of business.

Government vs. GOD

Human dignity. Personal autonomy. Agency. License to build, to create, to become. These don't flow from cultural institutions or government programs. They're not conferred by ancestral kingdoms or restored by political movements. They're granted by GOD in the act of creation—and no human system can supplant that. This is something the Afrocentric mythology and the dependency industry both obscure.

When man becomes over-dependent on how his culture dictates his view of himself, when he leans on external power structures for his sense of worth, there's a danger. Not just of disappointment when those structures fail—which they will—but of missing the actual source of dignity entirely.

The freedmen who emerged from slavery understood this better than their descendants do. They didn't demand reparations—they built schools. They bought property. They started businesses. They looked forward, not backward, because they understood something profound: the only person who can truly hold you back is yourself.

That's not bootstraps mythology. That's theological reality. GOD grants agency. Culture and government can only support or suppress it.

The Cage That Locks From Inside

I've said it before: if you think you're a victim, then you've victimized yourself.

That's not dismissing genuine injustice. Historical wrongs happened. Slavery was real. Jim Crow was real. But here's what's also real: the cage of victimhood locks from the inside. You can choose to remain there, or you can choose to recognize that whatever dignity you possess comes from being made in GOD's image—not from how your ancestors were treated or how your descendants might be.

On a spiritual level, yes, we're all born in bondage to sin. We cannot choose freedom from that until CHRIST intervenes. But on a human level, when it comes to adopting false ideologies and cultural mythologies that keep us dependent—there's choice involved. Real choice.

The old had the will but no way. The young have a way but no will.

That inversion didn't happen by accident. It happened because there's an entire industry—that "iron triangle"—that profits by keeping people convinced they're victims in need of perpetual rescue. The Afrocentric mythology serves that industry perfectly. It creates a sense of lost nobility that can only be restored through the right programs, the right activism, the right dependency on the right intermediaries.

But here's the scandal of the Gospel: you don't need rescued royalty. You need recognized reality.

You're made in GOD's image. That's not mythology, not cultural posturing, but ontological fact. And it doesn't matter whether your ancestors were kings or peasants, conquerors or conquered. Your dignity comes from the One who made you, not from the kingdoms that rose and fell while your bloodline passed through them.

Act on intelligence, not color or ethnicity. Ignore the mythology that flatters while it enslaves. And recognize that the only throne that matters is occupied by the GOD who granted access to royalty by breathing life into dust.

Everything else is just well-marketed bondage.