You Can Be President, You Can Be a Ballerina… Now Shut The F*Ck Up!
In an age where one can now marry who they want; dance as a principal dancer; or rise to lead the free nation; is then juxtaposed with the images of churches lit on fire by man and not the Holy Spirit, one has to wonder what we’re all doing wrong. It’s a testament to the many freedoms and many prisons that make life an impossible journey to sanely wander about.
Life is better now right? Like I, a black woman, can walk down the street without someone calling me a nigger (to my face) or telling me to go back to Africa right? So like what’s the point of it all, we’re all one now. There’s no point in holding on to the bloodied and disgraceful past of enslavement- that was then. I can just forget about all that and join the rest of the world in this 21st century lovefest. Everyone is welcome-ish. Everyone is ok. We are all moving toward being “Just American”.
With as much buy in as I can give to this concept of “Just American”, I still gotta ask, ‘Who am I?’. The amalgam of identifiers is muddied by what it means to actually be an American. To be white. To experience America. To shed my past and experience whiteness and privilege and acceptance. So no matter how much I opt in to this, I’m still on the outside looking in because the stories that pop up in the media show us a vastly different experience for people of color. But more importantly, the theme of these stories makes you feel like you chose not to go to the ball. You decided to be a consensual dissenter in the American Dream. So as we buy into the American Dream and the idea that hard work will take us to places our ancestors could never know; we are still subject to the injustices that they all knew too well. It’s an insane experience that makes life’s journey impossible to wander through.
I woke up one morning and the words that involuntarily fell from my mouth were “I’m so depressed, it’s like the 60s and 70s all over again… But worse”. And then I caught myself as I came out of the unconsciousness of subconscious thought. Why did I just say that? The words naturally came out of me like a yawn, without thought or pretence. I was in fact surprised I woke up. Sleep rarely comes and lately, I wake up in cold sweats from nightmares of mutilation and abuse. But when I click through my social feeds or dare to watch the television, I don’t know if I’m dreaming or if I’m awake. The images and storylines are so vividly aligned and otherworldy. Are my dreams just a nighly manifestation of consumed media or are my worst nightmares actually coming true?
In the 60s and 70s the harsh reality for people like me was blatant and in your face racism. It was a ‘we don’t want you’ said to your face (or over the phone as my grandparents have told me)… which I respect more- keep it real and say how you really feel. Now it’s a mindfuck… You sit and wonder, did I not get that job because I wasn’t qualified enough or was it because the person was racist, sexist, classist? You sit for a while and go back and forth, over and over and over again about your qualifications, and you compare yourself with your white friends and wonder… ‘Maybe I did something wrong’. Maybe you did, maybe you didn’t- you’ll probably never know. But you’ll recall it every-once-in-a-while when you feel that same shade thrown at you in the all white wherever you are: “Why the fuck are you here; but I guess we are glad because it makes us feel and look better. But seriously, what the hell are you doing here?”.
When you have the message continually fed to you in school and through the media that you can be all that you can be, superimposed with the horrors of an ugly past you’ve watched on documentaries every February… you wonder if you’re going insane. We are a country transfixed by the motivation of personal responsibility. You begin to believe that it really is your fault that you aren’t ahead or on equal footing as your liberal arts college classmates. You begin to abuse yourself and hate yourself and not the constructs of a long history designed so that you and your lineage will never feel the warmth of success. Because when you see the people with these horrible childhoods or hardships make it, you really believe that you must be doing something wrong. The blame is on you and you alone.
And then, I read the Bloomberg article on Copeland’s mentor which shed light on her road to success. For a ballerina to stay at the top she must have a team of people supporting her financially- in order to keep dancing, a ballerina must have a sponsor which includes a donation of at least $25,000 to the dance company. The media feeds us all these images of one man or one woman Charles Dickens-ing their way to the top in a rags to riches, I did this with hard work alone novella, when it’s not so. All of these people you see had supporters and mentors and financial backers. These people in the background that through networking and building relationships and trust were able to promote a dream that was bigger than that one person. This is a much more inspirational tale.
When there are instances where going to church is not a safe choice… When your cultural experience can be whitewashed and sold as the new pop culture “it thing”… When your brown skin, your round ass and your plump lips are seen as beautiful, just not on you… When you feel like you’re continually at war inside because the external world tells you all you have to do is keep working… have faith. Faced with this and the reality of your circumstances, you have to wonder if the psychotic rage that burns so deeply is the result of this dichotomy or just a personalized grappling with mental illness.
Keep fighting because you’re not going crazy. Keep yelling because you’re starting to be heard. Keep questioning because the answers are falling all around us. Keep networking and building positive communities that support the daring of one but the dream of “the many”. You can still rise to greatness in the whitest of roles, but that does not mean that everything is equal or fair or just… it just clarifies (for you) that you’re not going insane.
