Same Sad Song
For those of you who have been following me since I published my very first books, you'll have noticed that I am terrible at blogging. I am flat-out awful at keeping up with it. I get busy eating and I forget.
But, this is something that has been weighing heavy on my mind this entire week. This entire month. Probably for the past couple of years.
Too many lives have been lost. Too many Black lives that haven't seemed to matter, no matter how much our nation wants to pretend that they do. Too many fathers and sons lost for the silliest of messes--selling DVD's, protecting and serving as officers, waiting for help when their car broke down. The list goes on and on--and for whatever reason, so many people in this nation want to deny the motivation behind our nation's most recent events.
It's sickening. It's disheartening. And I'm tired of tiptoeing around the issue.
I never used to speak out about this type of thing for fear of the backlash of anyone who didn't agree with me. However, I came to realize that saying nothing does nothing--just the same as denying pushes issues to the back burner, leaving nothing accomplished in the end. Even more frightening, this could easily be me. This could easily be someone in my family. This could easily be one of my future children. Any one of us could be seen as "some big bad dude," or a criminal, or a thug, or an angry black woman who was overreacting and got what was coming to her. As sad as it is that this could still be happening 20 years from now just as it was happening 20 years ago--take a moment and find a song by Lauryn Hill or the Fugees, and you'll find the same message Beyonce was portraying in her music in early 2016--I know that there will be sleepless nights I will face for fear that my future son won't be seen as "just a kid," but rather "a thug" and the perfect target. These thoughts scare me more than what Sally Jansen (there is no one on my Facebook with that name, for the record) might say because I'm angry someone who could've been my father was killed for doing absolutely nothing illegal.
Even sadder, I know family who have already had run-ins with authorities or hostile people who assumed the worst of them. On several occassions, there are males in my family who were questioned by the police for entering THEIR OWN HOMES because they looked suspicious, or like someone who wouldn't live there. On several occasions, I've had family members FOLLOWED or TRAILED on the way to a sporting event, even after they told the officer where they were headed and why. On several occassions, the word Nigger or Nigga was used to shame me or my family. There has even been an instance when my little cousins--LITTLE, as in CHILDREN--where shouted out to by grown men, saying "don't shoot!" when all they were doing was walking around playing Pokemon.
It starts with the mentality that there are some things that Black people automatically are, and everything else, they cannot or typically do not do. The "typical"Black person is a criminal. The "typical" Black person doesn't use "proper" English. The "typical" Black person is not as intelligent as the "typical" White person. These mentalities are then shattered when a Black person who is intelligent, speaks Standard American English, plays the flute, has an A or B grade-point average in school with a full-ride to one of the best schools in the state and country comes along and breaks that stereotypical view. But, in most cases, you can't see this from the outside--all that is seen is a scary Black man or an angry Black woman who probably has intentions to harm, based on what has been taught as "typical."
I know I've probably been rambling. I know I haven't said everything I've wanted to say. But if you've stayed with me thus far, thank you, as it means you probably--hopefully--see this as a problem. I also thank you for reading the first of what will hopefully be many blogs, books and stories about this issue. It's nothing new to me or my family--I've been Black all my life, so this is just the same mess on a different day in my eyes--but there are so many people who don't know, and won't see. All I'm asking is that instead of seeing "typical," see a person. A mother. A father. A son. A daughter. I want you to see color--YES, SEE COLOR! But don't see color as a negative, see it as a positive. See another culture, another piece of beauty that exists in this world. See the man who just lost his life as exactly that--a man who just lost his life. Not a criminal, not a thug, not his past or what he used to be. See none of that. See color. See a BEAUTIFUL color. See a beautiful PERSON. See the LIFE that that BEAUTIFUL PERSON of color had. See what you can do to make sure that no one else has to lose a mother, a daughter, a son, or a father--regardless of what they look like on the outside.
~Reina
