This is probably going to be an ill-advised response, but what the hell… let me put on my asbestos overalls first.

Remember that old adage about how many people it takes to properly tango? Part of the problem, IMHO, is the black community’s wanting one thing but manifesting that want in a completely different way that does nothing to accomplish your stated goal. You dont want to be like Whitey, and yet you seem fixated on Whitey’s supposed forms of success: money, power, getting all the women. You wonder why Whitey is afraid of you, and then you let your culture be hi-jacked by “singers” who talk about little but making everyone’s life miserable, through guns or objectifying women or any other low-life message possible. You complain about living in poverty and then insist about the only way for young black men to escape it is by becoming a professional athlete.

Do you see where I’m going here?

It’s like you *enjoy* being invisible. You *like* being a victim because it’s safe and comfortable and the whole concept of being anything else, of taking those steps to change things for the black community at large is just seen as “selling out to Whitey”. You cant even decide who the real enemy is sometimes: when it’s patently obvious that conservatives are holding you back, you rush to herald “Get Out” because, somehow, it’s taking liberals to task for not being supportive in the way you want (even though, sorry, I didnt see that family as anything near liberal in its approach to race relations, but that could just be me, I suppose). The people opening the door for you and trying to push you through are being met with howls that it’s not good enough, and yet I have yet to hear any sort of real response as to exactly what it is that would be. You want success on your own terms, which is admirable, but isnt it time to figure out just what those terms are?

Like looking at conservatives, I look at a lot of the black community and see people almost desperate to live in the past, without really knowing what that past was. When marriage equality was discussed in the US, I noticed that black evangelicals were screaming about how awful it was… and, from my vantage point across the border in Canada, this left me bewildered: shouldnt the black community, of all groups in the US, understand what it’s like to be held back just because of the way you were born? There were howls of complaint that LGBT rights were riding on the coattails of the black civil rights movement, as though rights in general were some kind of board game competition, and one of the other players got an extra roll of the dice.

Is that supposed to make any kind of real sense?

Look, just my 0.02, and I’m sure to you worth every half penny Canadian, but it seems like everyone in this discussion, black and white both, need to turn down the posturing attitude and figure out a *genuine* path to resolving this issue. Otherwise, a century from now, everyone’s going to be stuck in the same place, with the same talking points, and no one’s going to be making one whit of real change.

And who knows, maybe that’s what everyone wants anyway, right?

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    Sean Stephane Martin

    Written by

    Cartoonist, "Doc and Raider" (docandraider.com); illustrator; Canadian, @doc_and_raider