BLACK KIDS DON'T WANNA LEARN

What a shocking statement, but what is more shocking to me is that a twenty-something African American young person made this declaration in mixed company, as my mother would say. The young woman prepped the classroom for what was to come by saying, “You’re not going to like this, but…Black kids don’t wanna learn.” A young African American male roughly around the same age backed her up by uttering, “Speak on it,” as she continued to explain why she felt that way. What she said after that, I couldn’t say because I think I must have stroked out for a moment. I remember initially saying, “Only you could say something like that.” I wanted it to be crystal clear to the class that the only reason her ass hole was still intact was because she was Black (I’m kidding---not kidding 😊).

Anyway, after I came back to myself, I raised my hand, and my response when called was, “Perhaps the Black kids in school with her had become disillusioned with the education system. A system that lied to them and expected them to fail.” I also went on to tell her how dangerous it was to make broad, general statements about a race of people.

Instead of telling you how sad her statement made me, I want to do something different with this topic. I want to ask you a few questions.

1.      What was your initial thought when you read the blog title?

2.      Do you agree or disagree with the statement?

3.      Are you surprised that a young person feels this way?

4.      Are there topics that should not be discussed in mixed company?

BE COURAGEOUS

I recently turned sixty-five, and the word courage kept popping into my head. This birthday and one other made me stop and ponder my life. When I turned thirty, I felt as if I should have been further along in life. Thirty, for me, was a rite of passage where I fully entered into adulthood. At thirty, I had a child, a good job, and a mortgage. However, I still didn’t feel like I had measured up to the standard of success I had set for my life because I didn’t have a husband. Looking back, I could see how silly it was to feel that way, but emotions have a way of crushing you and blinding you to all the wonderful things that you have. I can look back now and see how much I had accomplished on my own and how courageous I was.

A few days before my sixty-fifth birthday, the icy hand of fear touched my spine and remained in the background even after my birthday had passed. However, a word rose up in my spirit to combat the fear, Courage. One meaning of courage is “strength in the face of pain or grief.”

Pain and grief were exactly what I was afraid of. Sixty-five is a big number. One could say, “Your days are numbered.” I know I don’t have sixty-five more years ahead of me, so one has to face one's mortality and make peace with it. Fear comes with not knowing how and when it will come and whether it will be a lingering, painful death.

Getting older requires courage. It is not for the faint of heart because your heart will be broken every time someone you love leaves this world. You will need to be strong when you are no longer able to do the things you once did. You will need courage to face the uncertainty of life.

One day, I will look back at my sixty-fifth birthday and think how silly I was. Until then, I gather the courage needed to tap down my fear so that I can enjoy each day and make plans for the future.

REPARATIONS

It’s funny how reparations to descendants of the enslaved are not discussed, even during Black History Month. America has paid reparations to Native Americans, Japanese Americans, and Holocaust survivors. America indirectly assisted Japan in rebuilding its economy after World War II. Every year, billions of dollars are spent on Humanitarian, Developmental, Military, and Economic Assistance to foreign countries. Still, America cannot bring itself to right a wrong that it embraced as an expedient means to birth a nation allegedly based on personal and religious freedom.

America would have been a failed ideology if it were not for the strength and knowledge that the enslaved brought with them from Africa.

Reparations would not be hard to do, but America does not have the will to do it. Paying reparations would be acknowledging all the lies that America has told itself. The truth about the founding fathers, the distortion of religion, how racism and classism work to maintain the status quo, etc.…. The U. S. Government used slaves to build the White House and other federal buildings. The government also used slaves for canal improvements. Every area of American life benefitted from slave labor. Banking, shipping, railroads, insurance, textiles, universities, etc.....

Reparations should be paid by the families that accumulated generational wealth from slavery but also from the government and institutions that made money off the broken bodies, hearts, and spirits of people torn from their homelands and worked to death on American plantations. Reparations to the descendants of the ones that survived the beatings, near starvation, rapes, separation once again from familial ties, and the denial of basic human dignity. These are the truths that reparations would acknowledge and begin to right a devastating wrong.