Yes!!! Racism does exist!!! Hey Black People you've experienced you just may have missed it because it doesn't look like it does on those two pages in the history books you read in school. One mentioned slavery and Harriet Tubman and the other mentioned civil rights, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Rosa Parks. That book was probably AMERICAN History and all you got was those 2 pages. That is the racism you and the unaware "privileged" missed.
I am little brown girl from rural Virginia. My mother can vividly remember going to the back of restaurants to get her food and not being allowed to eat inside. My aunt and uncle remember being bused across town passing a lot of schools, only to attend the school for blacks. My dad was a part of my high school's first class which was brand new and freshly integrated. I grew up in neighborhood where most of the people look like me which was the same neighborhood my parents grew up in. This is my story...
As a little girl, my mother (and father) sent me to a little private Christian school for the first part of my education. I didn't attend public school until I was 8. My first experience with or realization of systematic racism was when I got to middle school. I went to a middle and high school that was majority black. In middle school, they split you based on level. There were six sixth grade classes: two high, two middle classes, two low classes. In the two advanced classes, there were about 10 black people and the two lower classes were mostly black students. This pretty much remained till I graduated form high school. I could go off here about how the black kids and some of the white kids that were seen as "lower" were lower because of their socioeconomic status (and systematic racism) and not because they were any less smart than those of us in the higher classes.
Then, I got to the eight grade, and I ran for SCA president. I "lost," but it was "really really close." They gave me some BS position that wasn't the position I won and nobody else EVER had. Reminders, my school was mostly black. I was smart, nice, athletic, and pretty popular. Not mention my little bodyguard and her friends were the cool kids and my friends were the cool kids. But I lost.... by a few votes. *side eye* Then there was a boy who tried to come for me and insinuate that I was some poor little black girl who couldn't afford new Jordan's. Just because I don't wear them doesn't mean that both my working parents that live in the same house with me can't afford them. Yea, I still have that pair of Jordan's and they are the only pair I have ever owned. I was 13 and will never forget those moments of 8th grade.
Fast forward to senior year of high school. I didn't make captain of the cheerleader's at my black high school. I cheered 4 years of Varsity (the only one), choreographed many of the memorable cheers and dances, and to this day left a legacy that still gets post to my Facebook wall. But I wasn't captain my senior year?! Don't get me wrong, I don't blame the(non brown) girl who was. I blame the coach. I would've felt differently, if she was more deserving than me. I know when some one is better than me. I'm pretty reflective. She ,as great as she was, was not. I was all things dance and leadership. That was MY legacy. But being soooooo good they couldn't ignore me didn't work here. (Apparently Damon Dash's cousin didn't have this experience.) This same year, I got kicked out the National Honor Society for cheating on a test. It was a bunch of history bull shit that didn't mention anyone that looked like me. Was I wrong? Yes. Should I have cheated? Nope but hell all kids do (at least my entire history class that year (including the teacher's kid who busted me). I just got caught. But I wasn't the only one caught. The boy from the Jordan story was caught too. His hearing ended a little differently than mine. He continued as a member of the honor society. What was the difference you ask? One of us was brown.
Being at a college where most of the people were brown like me, I had the opportunity to miss a lot of my black tax. But I did become more aware other things as I studied to become and urban educator in a very urban city where our law makers made laws for the people. North of the river and west of the park was a term I didn't understand until I went north of the river and west of the park and I realized I wasn't in Kansas (DC) anymore. It's quite unbelievable. I worked in neighborhoods where I could walk kindergarteners to the Capital Building but they were living in poverty. Even when I go visit DC, I see how African American's are being moved out their historically black neighborhoods because they can no longer afford them.
After college, I moved to Richmond to serve what I soon learned was probably the city's worst neighborhoods. Where regardless of how hard I and many of my co-workers worked it wasn't enough to fix the larger problem. A problem much larger than can be fixed in the school. A problematic system of racism that is has a lot to do with the black on black crime that we often bring up when #blacklivesmatter.
Even as an adult in my own life in 2015, I feel like I've had to fight for black girls/ women to be seen as beautiful and equal in situations where they will be the most dedicated and the hardest workers because the black tax they've had to pay has built them to be that way. Even I have had my Harriet/Rosa moment where I've been told that I should be GRATEFUL to work for free and be in the back. Then I'm seen as an #angryblackwoman.
So YES CONFUSED BLACK WOMAN (and anybody else that agrees with her) racism exist each and everyday around you in 2016. Many of us (although I just gave you rundown of the moments that I will remember for ever) don't broadcast it and much of is engrained in the system. The horrible system that keeps the rich rich and the poor poor. The system that sees black males as an automatic threat and gets so many of them shot by the police on the regular.
I am not clueless, but unfortunately, confused black woman you are still are.
No comments:
Post a Comment