Let me see. I’m going to try this short and sweet thing too Ezinne (I’m yoruba but I like that name a lot). I live in Lagos, Nigeria. In the same country you come from incidentally. I’m replying this from my computer powered by a small Chinese made generator that will be on all night because there is no electricity. There hasn’t been all day and there wasn’t yesterday too. The current Naira to dollar rate is N506. A bare five/six months ago it was N125 and we thought it was too damn much then. The Nigerian president has gone AWOL for the last 3–4 months. Presumable somewhere in America or the UK. The common consensus being that he’s sick and there is no hospital in Africa good enough he can check into. What are my chances. Only you can manage the mental gymnastics required to think I live in a bubble at all, talk less of a contented bubble. It must be the same way you manage to make Beyonce look like a suffering saint for losing an award to Adele that will be up for grabs again in roughly 10–12 months.
If I seem calm its because I know who my real enemies are and we have the same skin colour. Maybe I just realize that the massive log in my eyes and in those of my people’s eyes deserves more of my time than the flea sized specks you keep giving all your energy to. No one is deceived though, there is a reason you live in America and not in Africa. I don’t judge you for it (hey even my President is a health refugee too) but forgive me if I don’t have the time of day for your first world problem rants. I’m hoping that by now you can, along with me, see the irony of someone living in the freest and most open and technologically advanced country on the planet claiming I live in a bubble. There may be some value in reminding white skin coloured people of some of their past. They have had to walk back from some truly gory history. I’m trying to get my own people to walk forward for once and people like you keep telling them that they shouldn't have to do anything at all. That gaining any kind of forward momentum isn't their responsibility and instead that somebody else owes them a place at a table because they were forced to come to America 200 years ago.
You see oppression everywhere and I see masochism. A people doing the same things over and over again expecting a different result. You see white flaws and “so called” privileges and I see people willing to wear pins and pink hats in often ill advised bids to do better. And I look around for just one black person who is willing to take other black people to task and ask better of them too. Someone who is willing to say “there is a reason you were so easy to enslave 200 years ago”. Why is it that 200 years later you still are the same ones so easy to enslave or oppress? I mean this is way past “fool me twice” or “let him slap you on the other cheek” territory. There is a reason Israel and Jews in general take such an offensive stance towards any and all adversaries. There is a reason China owns 10% of all of US debt. Yet some how where ever there is a gun, drug, abortion, single-parenting, fatherless-ness or poverty epidemic in America or in the world for that matter, black people are grossly over represented. There is a whole continent call third world for a reason and most people living in it agree it is. Can your reality handle that or do you have a handy bubble to chuck that into too.
As you can see I’m not at all good at this short and sweet thing so i’m going to end my rambling this way. You’ve spent way too much time evoking spirits of the past. Its time black people started conjuring up images of the future. Start with a definition of what racial equality would look like when we “supposedly” finally get it. How will ordinary black folk know they have become “equal”...surely it can’t be as easy as Beyonce sweeping all the awards in a Grammy year?! And when you do, allow your perspective to widen enough to acknowledge that blackness didn't start on the slave ships headed back to America on the high seas. I hear a lot of outrage but I haven’t seen anybody actually presenting any new or refined visions of the black man since MLK (No one cares about his words anymore apparently). That’s how you get a black president for 8 years and all he has to show for it is the predictable rise of another black reactionary group screaming the bleeding obvious. I have a theory that by the time black finally get this “equality” they are so vehemently fighting for on earth, most human life will have moved to mars or some other planet. You saw it hear first #BlackLivesOnMarsMatter.
