Day 14: Can't Tow the Party Line (My view on Black America, p.1)

As a child, i was constantly referred to as a white girl, or many other less than colorful euphemisms to somehow suggest I'm not black or not black enough. The laundry list of reasons were ever mounting:
- I could speak the king's English, so somehow that made me less black because I'm going to take a wild guess and say that real black people don't speak proper English. I guess our vernacular is Ebonics, and since i didn't recognize it until adulthood i was "the white girl who spoke like the dictionary"
- My parents were both college educated people working in corporate America. having both grown up in poor Chicago communities, once their got their golden ticket they saw no reason to look back. They moved to the suburbs to give their kids better opportunities then they ever had. So i literally am Uncle Tom's children, so to speak.
- I'm going to a predominately white college, which makes no bones about academic rigor, cost, or their need to make their school more diverse with each incoming class. Its not an HBCU, its percentage of minorities resembled the real world of America (12%). So therefore, because I decided not to kick it with my homies, I'm a sellout.

When i was younger, it would bother me, and i didn't understand how people could operate under the impression that there is only one way to be black in America. It wasn't until I started watching BET that I came to understand how the politics of a race had dramatically changed since the civil rights movement.
The way my mom describes the civil rights movement, it was a movement not only to gain legal rights, but driven by a desire to succeed or fail on our own merits. We weren't asking for special treatment, but the same treatment everyone else got. We wanted to go to the colleges which had been denied to us, live in the suburbs which for so long had been safe heavens for white people escaping the colored infested cities, give our children everything people had dreamed about since the days of plantations. we wanted to stop dreaming and exist in a new reality.

Today, things are radically different. its almost as if the majority of a race has no desire to be better then themselves. there is no overwhelming desire for higher education, better living conditions, no violence in our communities, no more overabundant teen pregnancies or HIV. its almost like we want a reaffirmation of our current lives so we don't feel bad about a lack of personal progress.

Take the education gap for example. It wasn't until i got to high school that I understood why freshman were reading Walter Dean Meyers, a young adult author we read in middle school at King Lab. the idea behind reading the kind of books meyers writers is if kids who read below grade level can read books related to their own experiences, then maybe they'll magically gain an incentive to read books required of them for a normal English education.
This bullshit theory really urks me. Use the books to catch students up, fine by me. Don't tell them then can spend the rest of their educational career reading the things which relate to them. Not only are you really not helping them going down the road, you're building up a false sense of confidence. I mean do we really want to send this message, that the solution to the black education problem is not challenging our students more, but lowering the standards all around. its like we'd rather sit in school and read books about people just like us then try and understand the global perspectives classical literature offers us.

Trust me, as a literature major, I don't get all excited over the Scarlet Letter, but it does offer me insight into a historical time period through a literary lens. its unrealistic to believe education should placate our sensibilities about our own lives. that's not preparation for the real world, that's basically adult continuing education in ignorance.

The other thing which urks me in terms of the popular attitude about education is the idea of self segregation. I was raised to believe HBCU served a purpose when not much else was available, but in this day and age it seems counter productive to the goals of the civil rights movement. I honestly don't believe self segregation in education. I'm sure there are studies out there which say people thrive N times more when they are placed in environments with people similar in race, religion, ect. But if there is one thing i can say having been a token minority in A.P classes, the best learning came from a diverse group of people, and not just in terms of race either (and the best laughs too).

I'll never be able to tow the party line when it comes to my race. I can't blindly agree with politics/philosophies i don't believe in simply because it may help me to appear "black." I'm not going to
-speak ebonics
-act like i'm not middle class or that i don't enjoy being middle class
-self segregate myself just to belong
-excessively blame "the man" for every fucking problem that African Americans face today. when are we going to take responsibility for our actions? for our future?

Answer me black America: when are we going to accept responsibility?!