You were not born believing you were less than.
A newborn does not think about whether their skin is the right shade. A toddler does not wonder if their hair is acceptable. A child does not naturally believe that people who look like them are less intelligent or less capable or less worthy of good things.
Those beliefs were taught.
By a world that needed you to believe them to stay in your place.
Bob Marley called it mental slavery.
Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds.
He was not speaking about chains you can see. He was speaking about the chains inside — the internalized messages about your worth, your limits, your place in the world that run so deep they feel like facts.
The belief that you have to work twice as hard just to be considered half as good. The voice that says your natural self — your hair, your voice, your way of moving through the world — is too much or not enough. The automatic distrust of other people who look like you. The assumption that white institutions are inherently more credible than Black ones.
Those are not opinions you formed from evidence. Those are messages planted by a system that needed you to carry them.
The first step is noticing.
Not judging. Not shaming yourself for what you find. Just noticing.
When you hear an automatic thought about your own worth or capability — pause. Ask: where did I learn this? Is this mine — or was this handed to me?
You cannot release what you cannot see.
Today’s Liberation Question:
What is one belief about yourself or your people that you have never questioned — that might not actually be true?
LEGH.org — Love Enabled Growth & Hope. For the people the system was never designed to serve.