With all the violence that has transpired over the last couple of weeks in Dallas, Baton Rouge, Minneapolis, to name a few, I had to put aside “fluffier” conversation for more time-appropriate thoughts. Growing up in the 60’s and 70’s, having a front-row seat to the shift in racial changes, I like many of you I’m sure, believed things would only get better as we got older. I experienced my share of the racially charged vitriol; being handcuffed at 13 for a petty crime I didn’t commit, being spit in my face on occasion, and being called f***ing n**ger b**ch more times than I can count. But things were changing and I believed race relations were improving as the years rolled on. Surely the life of Malcolm X hadn’t been in vain. Certainly the work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his death hadn’t been for naught. The lives of Medgar Evers, Stokely Carmichael, Rosa Parks, Ralph Abernathy, Angela Davis, and countless others, their efforts had to have stood for something and made significant differences in the treatment of people of color. I think most of us believed things were getting better with each passing decade. By the 2000’s racial issues seemed something we were on the up-swing from. Although I wasn’t naive. I knew there still remained some people on the planet that viewed Black people as not only inferior but less than human. And even though I could sit at a lunch counter with a white person and drink from the same fountain, and engage in all of the outward shows of equality, there were always the underlying, subtleties of racism; you know, the kind you knew existed in your gut but you couldn’t really prove it. The double-standard on the job, the woman pulling her purse closer to her when you stand behind her, the department store clerk that ignores you standing and waiting for service while addressing the white person that has just walked up, the having to be two times better than your white counterparts to even be considered or the continual denial of business and home loans. Not always, but many times. I just expected even this form of that mindset would eventually become a thing of the past. With an ‘every now and then’ foul, I was reminded that there was still much work to be done to win over the last of it’s kind to real equality, real justice and real freedom for all. At almost 55 years of age I am stunned to find out that I have been duped.
The years we seemed to have been improving were just a façade, masquerading as progressive racial impartiality. Enter the first Black President of the United States, and while many would say and have said “my, my, my, look how far we’ve come”, myself and many others would begin to say “not so fast.” It didn’t take long before we began to see the masks come off. I liken the winning of the Presidency of Barack Obama to that of a wound with a scab that you think has healed until you pour some hydrogen peroxide on it and the underlying infection causes the peroxide to bubble up. Our first Black President was that peroxide on that wound we thought was further along in healing than it actually was. Tensions began to bubble up and bubble over. Since that historic election I’ve watched the same racial tensionsreminiscentof my past some 30-40 years ago come back to the surface. With the escalated, popular use of cell phone cameras and social media, we’ve witnessed the evidence of what has always been happening. The images eerily mirror those from the 60’s Civil Rights Movement. Dogs, clubs and water hoses replaced by tasers and guns. Rifles pointed directly at peaceful protesters and street-lined SWAT teams in full riot gear complete with machine gun tanks. The narratives and the images presented in the media are manipulated and it’s the same old thing as before. I’m very sad. I feel the progress was superficial and nothing really has changed. I feel duped.
