I’m a young black American woman. It feels strange to say that, to take ownership of my ethnicity.
It’s Black History Month. I come from a bi-racial family, and I’ve never felt connected to anything African-American, or even Mexican-American really. I just feel like an American kid. Slightly politically minded, indoctrinated into the consumer culture and jaded about life in general.
As such, I found myself watching late night TV when I could have been doing something productive. The program I happened to watch was “The Boondocks,” a controversial cartoon that is now an animated show on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim. The episode was “Return of the King,” which played out a what-if scenario where Martin Luther King did not die when he was shot, but went into a coma instead. He wakes up to a world very different from the way he left it.
It was just a cartoon, but I was moved. For the first time I felt black, and I felt sad.
He awoke to a culture that was shallow and mindless. Ideals of pursuing equality, civic mindedness and improving our minds with classic literature are replaced with a drive to get cars, money and women. It would appear as if Americans think racism is something that is over and the civil rights movement isn’t worth remembering, and I can’t say I disagree with that picture.
Hip-hop culture, even as I embrace it, I know it’s a distraction to our potential as human beings. There are some in the genre that do question and encourage thought, but they are in the minority. As a society, specifically as a black people, we have become complacent, creating our own worst enemy from within. Are we really still free or just placated?
I know that in my own life I have forgotten the work of those who came before me so I could go to college, vote, or have friends whose ethnic backgrounds are just as diverse as my own. It wasn’t that long ago that I wouldn’t have had these opportunities.
The civil rights movement is proof that brute force is nothing in the face of collective will power. George W. Bush has become a joke to many in my peer group. We complain about what our countries’ policies, yet how many of us voted? Civil rights advocate Medgar Evers once said, “Our only hope is to control the vote,” but nearly half of the country fails to engage in it.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 64% of U.S. citizens age 18 and over voted in the 2004 presidential election. For those 18 to 24, the voter turnout was 47%. If your professor gave you 47% on a project, it’s an F grade. That isn’t something to be proud of.
In terms of persuing the higher education others fought so hard to gain access to, only 8.7% of the degrees conferred in 2003 were earned by black students.
How have we made any effort to pick up where our forerunners left off? If we could all collectively wake up from this social stagnation, we could change the world.
I may be waiting for a revolution that will never come. But I will wait and work toward something better. Being a concerned and informed person making reasoned decisions is something we can all do. It benefits our society as a whole. Part of that is remembering who we’ve been and what we want to come.
It goes beyond being black, beyond the month. This is our life.