I no longer wanna be black. No, I'm not going to buy a lifetime supply of skin bleaching cream, blue contacts, and dye my hair blonde. No, I'm not going to check "other" or white on any questionnaire. I'm actually proud of my African heritage and plan to divulge deeper into my background. When I say I no longer want to be black, I mean I no longer want to live under the restrictive ideologies that black people often subscribe to as a mean to validate their proverbial blackness. If that means letting "them" have my black card, I will gladly turn it in. That doesn't mean I'm trading it in for a "white card."
I have lost count of the number of times someone has accused me of thinking I was a white girl. It's not that I check white on my questionnaires, that I bleach my skin, dye my hair, and buy atrocious blue contacts, it's the things I want. I want better. I don't want to live in certain parts of the inner city, I actually want my kids to go to the best "white school," I wanna live in one of the richest counties in America, I don't prescribe to the normal black American ideologies of religion, and a slew of other things I'm sure got my black card revoked years ago. In fact, I'm sure if I look for my black card, I think someone already stole it and burned it.
My gripe with black people isn't the rules we make that restrict ourselves, it's this shuffle that we have been in for the last 50 years. Before the civil rights movement, we could really attest to the fact that there were rules that held us down. Laws were passed that restricted our jobs, housing, schools, voting, and just about everything else. The KKK could come into any black home, kill everyone, confess to it, and walk away with no consequences. People fought to make lives hard for black Americans but we struggled and persevered. You can't tell me my great grandmother didn't persevere when she opened her own business in the 50's despite being a single mom to 13 kids. You can't tell me my other great grandmother didn't persevere despite making $25 a week. She didn't expect anything from anyone, she got up and worked hard for her $25. She even owned several houses and put her kids through school. My maternal grandmother had unfulfilled dreams of being a secretary. Most people view being a secretary has a foot in the door, but that was her ultimate goal. That meant she didn't have to scrub the marble steps like her mother. Black people got up and worked hard. They didn't have black representatives or a black president. Their kids didn't believe that they were owed the false lifestyle that celebrities often portrayed. People didn't complain, they got up and worked hard. When the dogs bit them and their hair was ripped out by the force of water hoses, they didn't complain, they went out there the next day because they had a job to do.
My generation irritates me. We like to complain but we don't do much. We feel like we're owed something when the truth is, we have to go out and get our "something." We have big dreams but we still have to work to get there. We have a black president and we feel like he owes us something. Barack Obama is everyone's president, not just ours. We fall behind in every category that matters but we are at the top of the worst categories. We wanna worry about futile things like someone talking white, light skin/dark skin, whether someone thinks they're white, successful men dating outside their race, and all types of things that don't matter. We like to fight each other and as a result no one gets ahead. Even if someone is ahead and they try to pull their "brother or sister" up they find that they think they're owed something because the person who brought them in is black.
In order for us to get ahead and be the best, we have to come together. We have to stand together and congratulate those who open doors for us, instead of criticizing and downing them. We love to criticize our own. It's not other races, it's us. We criticize Tyler Perry for not being up to par or showing coon images, but no one is out there creating movies, people criticized Whitney Houston, Oprah, they criticized Alek Wek for being too dark. Not white people, but black people and it's sad. We wanna complain about light skin/dark skin, but we're the ones who perpetuate this. To people of other races, you're black no matter the shade. It's really sad and black people will never get ahead as long as we do this. And to black women, if black men won't date you because of your skin color, don't worry, lots of "other" men date the darkest hue of black women.
I say all that to say that no one should restrict themselves because of made up rules that define blackness or some stupid standards created by "they" that defines whether or not a person is black.
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