We have to go.
It's our neighbor and we have to consider the possibilities.
And I want an answer to know, as I share with you.
I know why we have not sent a human being into space.
Everybody's always talking about, oh, it's dangerous.
I live off of I-81.
[LAUGHTER]
No, we call it the coffin.
Because that's what it is between Botetourt County
and Wytheville, more deaths occur than in the--
if you can drive I-81, you can go into space, for God's sake.
It's not about that, it's about what they send out.
And what NASA is worried about-- and I
wanted to share that with NASA as I share it with you--
they don't know if what they send out
will be what they get back.
And I'm in a really good mood--
I'm not trying to hurt anybody's feelings,
but the European mentality does not do well in unknown spots.
They just don't.
These little low-grade panics happen or whatever.
Well, let's consider the history there.
If we considered-- in September, late September,
we had a wagon train that was pulling out of St. Joe.
If they had been talking to the Indians
instead of killing them, the Indians
would have said things like, Kemosabe no go West
this time of year.
You'll run into huge storm.
End up in Donner Pass, have to eat each other.
Very embarrassing.
[LAUGHTER]
You see?
But they're white so they knew everything so they
don't have to ask anybody.
[APPLAUSE]
So they ended up with this problem.
We all remember-- with the Argentine soccer team.
Remember they had the crash in the Andes there?
They had the crash--
before the plane has finished landing all of a sudden,
it's like, what we going to eat?
Right?
And before they stop sliding, well, let's eat Javier.
And so-- it's very embarrassing.
And so nobody wants to--
these were private things.
Can you imagine?
I mean, everybody watches what goes on up in space now.
You can see that they chomping on each other.
So nobody wants that.
So NASA has been trying to figure out, what do we do?
Well, right here in Arizona, of course,
they built the biosphere.
You're familiar with that.
And of course, they put the people in the biosphere
to see if they could live there and not kill each other.
But, of course, that didn't work.
They snatched them out-- and we know just in time.
And I know--
[LAUGHTER]
They did!
You know they did.
And I know you're saying, well, Nikki,
what about the Space Station?
Because we've got a spaceship and it's 250 miles up.
But you can look in the Space Station,
you can look down you can see Earth.
You know exactly where you are and people can see you.
So that doesn't quite work.
And so I wanted to share with NASA as I share it with you.
You know, there's only been one people in the history of Earth
who have been in an unknown spot with no known landmarks
to keep them human, except the Africans
who have come through Middle Passage.
Those are the only people have done that.
And one of the things that disturbs me
is that we teach slavery so badly.
And we teach it badly because we're ashamed,
as well we should be.
It was a shameful period.
On the other hand, very few of us
actually have slaves these days.
So I don't know why we're picking up that guilt.
It's somebody else's problem.
But what we-- no it's true.
But what we need to do is recognize.
Because we teach slavery like the Europeans
went to Africa to get slaves like you
go to Starbucks to get coffee.
They went to Africa to get Africans to make them slaves.
It's a huge difference.
These were free people, these were
people with their own languages, their own gods,
their own communities.
And I tell you, I'm so disappointed
in Skip Gates and the thing that he's
doing, because he's sitting there talking about tribes,
like, what?
Where are you?
I mean, you're supposed to be some kind of scholar,
for God's sake.
These are family groups, these are communities.
These are not tribes.
Nobody's tribes but Indians and Black people.
You get sick of that and you expect a little better.
There are communities all over the world and then it's tribes.
And so you think, oh, Skip.
Do better.
No, that's the truth.
That's the truth.
These were a free people.
They were engaged in a war and they lost.
There's no question about that.
We deal with all of this.
I'm not into it was paradise or not, whether it
was or wasn't, they were still free
and had a right to themselves.
These were people who, in losing the war,
had their villages burned down, had their cities burned down.
They themselves, of course, those who were healthy
were chained, they were force marched to the West Coast.
Now, people like me, I got shot back in the village.
And it's not because I'm a threat.
You can see me, I'm not even in good shape.
I'm not big and I'm not strong.
You shoot me because I'm an old woman,
because I know the stories of my people,
I know the language of my people,
I know the gods of my people, I know who I am,
and I will teach the children.
And I will cause the rebellion, so you just shoot me.
For those of you who remember Roots--
you saw Wrestler on that ship.
Wrestler never made it to that ship, as much as it--
Wrestler looked like LeBron James.
Wrestler's like-- yeah, he's a big guy.
They would have loved to have sold Wrestler but Wrestler's
going to be a problem.
You shoot Wrestler so that you don't
have to be bothered with them.
The slave trade was a trade in adolescence.
We know that.
The most famous slaves that we know were Kunta Kinte, he's 14,
Phillis Wheatley is 12.
This is a slave-- you get rid of everybody that can tell people.
And what a great people they were that they somehow
managed to remember who they were and where they came from.
Because we caught them at a period
that everybody had hoped that they would forget.
It's been an amazing thing when we
watch what happened with that trade
because what happened is the babies that
got on people's nerves were simply bayoneted and thrown.
I'm already dead-- the babies are bayoneted.
And so what we did was we brought
the jackals, and the wild dogs, and the hyenas
closer into the cities and they began
to follow it all the way-- we changed
how wildlife did its business.
We got to the end and, of course, we put the people down
in Cape Coast Castle and Goree Island
and we waited until there was something called a cargo,
until it was really full.
And then we sent a boat and the boat rode out to pick them up
and took them back to the ship.
And they packed them in the ship head
to toe, head to toe, head to toe.
It was a terrible, terrible thing.
Anything that came out of you went down on somebody else,
whether it was tears, whether it was sweat,
whether it was feces, whether it was urine came down.
So as the ship started to sail west, of course
the slavers immediately recognized,
if we leave him down there, you see, they're going to all die.
So they had to bring them up.
On the second day, they bring them up.
And they take saltwater and they throw this saltwater on them.
Of course they have wounds, they have open sores, so this hurts.
But they did something that we said, oh, they danced.
But they didn't dance.
There's a TV show called Dancing.
That's not what the slaves were doing,
what the Africans were doing.
The Africans had people with whips
and the people were whipping them
and they were being forced to jump,
trying to get out of the way, much like Rodney King was
trying to do, just trying to get out of the way.
Just trying to get out of the way of the pain.
Sure.
But when they were brought up, they could look back
and they could see the land.
And of course, Africans could swim.
We keep forgetting that because Black Americans don't
swim because we're worried about our hair.
[LAUGHTER]
Like all my hair go back, you know?
This is not a problem that they were having.