The internet scratch pad drove free Black expression in 2018.

Every creative person you meet can cite a person who influenced their work if you asked them. It took a village to raise early African societies to levels adored, cut, pasted and copied by individuals all around the globe. Examples of their influence leaked into worldwide architecture and construction, artwork, games, music, fashion, the math and sciences, literature, government design, medicine, food, faiths and so on.

Today in Egypt, a massive new one billion dollar museum is being constructed to hold the expansive history and culture of its ancestors, while a call out to the world is been programmed to ask for the return of all the good stuff taken without authority. Great Britain, France, and Italy took away a lot of it.

Thank goodness the Internet exists for without it so many of us would not know as much as we have learned about African kingdoms and the sophisticated dynasties built by their rulers before present times.

Thank goodness for INSTAGRAM because in that channel stands the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture who share and teach us details about the complex 500-year history of Early Africans in America who became African Americans along the way to today. Find them on Instagram at  www.Instagram.com/nmaahc

People have inadequate history classes in school. Little about Black Africa and African Americans will be taught in the grades.

The internet attracts over 80% of Black America. Its where people go to connect to everything everywhere. This fertile digital soil is becoming the primary source educator for Black, Brown and White people. But it impacts Blacks more. The internet is the most important liberator in today’s Black Movement and the Black Internet has a larger audience than the Black church.

On too many scratch pads to count, Blacks in America invented new paths to fulfillment. There were significant Black-owned entrepreneurial internet centered breakout brands in 2018. But not one of them has grown into large enough company sizes that produced multiple millionaires out of their employee and early adopter tribes, in the same kind of way a Dropbox or Facebook unicorn was able to do. But it is going to happen in your lifetime.

Previously unknown artists, creators, thinkers and doers are striving on the internet because access barriers are small, but challenging none the less.

The Internet replaces the institutional knowledge graph elders had been passing down. The Internet as mentor is not so far fetched. Its ability to connect you with information you want is what matters. Seek and you shall learn. Google doesn’t know everything but it knows a lot. Community griots get distracted. When they are not available to share and teach, the Internet is there.

Sharing what you know is the currency that does more than money. For what reason do made men and made women share so much on the internet? They reach a pinnacle of success then they want to give back, seems to be the common answer, and the internet makes it easier to share with the masses than any other means.

When you want to learn how to do something or how someone else like you are “doing it,” there’s a Youtube video for that that can teach you. There’s a Podcast for it, a Blogger describing it, and Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook posts explaining it.

The proof is in what @NMAAHC does with its INSTAGRAM posts. They use the medium effectively to share their $600 million scratch pad. It became a physical reality. Black America is smarter because of it.

The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture is posting their exhibits with sufficiently illustrated descriptions. It is great content. A lot of other institutions like them do it too.

Good for them!

We’re looking forward to seeing more Black scratch padded concepts turn into reality in 2019. And we will be looking on the Internet for them.