We Matter
The history of the United States has made it next to impossible to love yourself as a black person.
Our beginning was as slaves. Cattle. Play things.
We were psychologically made to feel “less than” in more ways than one.
Time marched on…
But it didn’t get better for us, during the jim crow era. Whenever we tried to educate ourselves and prove our worth, we where hung and our towns were burned down. Propaganda filled the air saying that we were not intelligent, we were lazy and thieves.
At this point the constant image was cemented into society that the standard of beauty was white women and standard of power was white men.
Time marched on…
Blacks and whites fought to prove that those things were false. They shouted “we are equal” and the civil rights movement was born.
Some were for peaceful protests, those leaders, killed.
Some were for “any means necessary,” those leaders, killed as well.
But their deaths, created a guilt of the true ugliness of racism in this country. So as a society we said, “maybe if we all are FORCED to be together things will change.”
So places began to be desegregated. But as blacks, our appearance was not welcomed. Our intellect constantly threatened.
My mom for example was one of the first students to integrate her high school. She remembers vividly when one of her teachers chastised the class by saying, “you let this colored girl be better than you in math? You oughta be ashamed.”
We had to protect ourselves in those days because our presence was a threat. My mother-in-law was given a blade and was thought how to use it by her father, to protect herself in case a white person tried to harm her.
We tried our best to better ourselves and accept where we were. We finally decided to accept this country as home for once, and began to create our own culture. Hip Hop, different fashions, made our own languages and names, sang our hearts out. We wanted our kids to be safe, so we had them do cheap activities such as sports.
At first these notions where deemed ridiculous by people not within this community. They saw these things as jokes. Fodder for mockery.
But it sort of backfired.
Society started to get intrigued.
So what better way to make money than from this intrigue.
So record labels, sports teams, fashion industries camped out in our neighborhoods. Got teenagers “off the streets” gave them lots of money to be their gladiators and musical prodigies and made a TON of money off of them.
Time marched on yet again...
But the only image of black worth was in us being a commodity, yet again.
What made things worst is that as a society, we started to accept it.
Some blacks started to believe, “maybe we are only destined to be good at sports. Maybe we should try to have a rap career, it seems the only way to make money.”
I went to a predominately black high school and it hurt me to see that in the advanced placement classes there were almost no black kids in them. Me and a few other students felt alone.
We never saw the same recruiting from scientists, startups, major corporations as we did the military and sports scouts.
My generation pushed on regardless and went to college to better ourselves. I went to an HBCU that taught me that I had to work twice as hard than anyone if I ever wanted to make it.
And I did. I was fortunate that women, both black and white, where far more apt to accept someone different. And Job wise I was lucky.
But many of my peers were not. It wasn’t until the recession occurred that I realized that racism is far from dead.
Corporations had a glut of people looking for work so they could show their true colors. They could say they didn’t want Jamaal. When I tried getting back in the workforce I applied for over 100 jobs. I got called back 10 times and for 6 companies made it through 3 rounds of interviews.
And at the end some vague thing made me “not good enough” for the job and they picked someone “more experience.” What was funny, weeks later those same jobs were open yet again. Some of them still open 2 years later.
But many of us matured. But now a little bitterness is starting to creep in. Especially when the things we created to keep us sane no longer belong to us.
We see our neighborhoods, with lapse of police enforcement, becoming coffee shops and boutiques and are now heavily protected.
We see words we made up now common lexicon.
We see our fashion everywhere.
We see our music replicated.
And we are no longer credited for it.
Fast forward to 2015.
We now have these police brutality cases.
Fast forward two weeks ago.
I hear my 3 year old daughter say that she doesn’t like to be black she wants to be white, when we never talked about race around her. Her class filed with Elsa toys and princesses. Her hair not as easy to comb as the huge barbie doll head she has in class.
And I say to you today, BLACK LIVES MATTER!
America needs to see the impact of what the past has done.
We can only move forward if white and black people work this out. No placating, no politically correctness, but us facing the ugliness and moving beyond it.
I said all of the above and didn’t even mention how medical experimentation, drugs within our communities, debt slavery, socioeconomics, politics and many other things factor in.
I refuse to let my daughter not see value in herself.
And I refuse to let this society ignore it.
This was a long one. But I’m glad I got this off my chest.
