I
have spent the last few decades trying to convince my friends and
relatives, who are vastly Black folk, that “Mainstream USA,”
i.e., “Mainstream” White America, at the end of the day,
doesn’t really want a racially inclusive
and culturally diverse
nation. I’ve tried
to persuade my peers, since I was President of my Black Student Union
at the University of Northern Colorado, in the early 1980s, that a
significant slice of White people simply doesn't want any form,
shape, or manner of a
colorized America.
It’s
been an uphill struggle to get folks to see the light … from
the burning cross.
It’s
been particularly more challenging to do based on the individual’s
academic achievements and how much money they make. The more
successful the person, the quicker they are to tell me my upbringing
in South Central LA, the 213, Crenshaw,
had painted and stained
my ability to recognize the fact most racist White folks had to live
below the Mason Dixon
Line, be missing a few
teeth, drive a Ford pickup and be a fan of NASCAR and Bass fishing.
I
was informed I only really must know “White Trash”
because inside their circle of hipster/Yuppie White friends, who were
“professionals” like themselves, they just didn’t
see the world like blue-colored White folks.
So
when Trump was gearing up to run, and I said he’d win, he was
merely saying what most White folks thought, they all laughed at me,
told me I was far too paranoid, angry, and frustrated with life in
general, and too negative. White America would reject Trump, and the
nation, now colorblind after Obama, would simply understand they
couldn’t stand in the path of progress.
I
told them, “you Negroes are cra-cra.”
So
of course they were “flabbergasted,” “mystified,”
“baffled,” "surprised,” and “shocked”
when King Trump assumed the Oval Office.
Then,
after 4 years of Trump’s tyrannical reign, these same
well-dressed BMW wheelin’ hifalutin House Negroes were even
more shocked when Trump almost won in 2020. They were dismayed that
he received more votes this time than the last. They can’t
believe he’s not gone away. They can’t believe the
support he maintains within White America, and with other dumb,
delusional Americans of color. They are, if they’re even
watching CNN
or MSNBC during
the Special Committee hearings, amazed at how close Black folks came
to being re-shackled on January 6th.
Seriously,
the games
are on, and the Housewives
of East St. Louis can’t
miss that for the news.
Now,
as the rigged Supreme
Court acts to put women
back in their proper place, and are posed to put gay folks back in
the attic or root cellar, these moderate Blacks mouths are wide open.
Today, they want to abolish and strip away the validity of their
same-sex marriages, and the hard-fought benefits that come with that
designation… They are astonished. And as we all see, Trump’s
Stormtroopers are but baby steps away from abolishing basic
20th-century methods of birth control … they are shocked!
Shocked I say!
Brown
vs. Board of Education, Plessy vs Ferguson - on the chopping block!
And of course, Black
America is shocked!
We
didn’t see anything ’bout that on TikTok....
Then,
and it’s a no-brainer, soon they’ll want to rehang the
“NO Negroes/No
Mexicans/No Jews & No Dogs”
signs over restaurants, hotels, grocery stores, malls, the whole
gamut - and here sits my generation of assimilating and accommodating
pawns befuddled, bewildered and dazed. They just didn’t think
the blind hatred was as deep, high, widespread, and entrenched as it
is.
I’ve
always been told by racist White folks and everyday Black folk that I
focus on “race” too much. Really! Really! Are you
serious? Perhaps as Black folk, we don’t, to our detriment. We
don’t know what time it is. White America appears to be fixated
and focused on race.
What
time is it?!
I
struggle to understand “how,” and “why” Black
folks have had such a naive and delusional
perspective of race
relations in America. Is it because so many of us grew up in 85%
Black environments and simply didn’t “know,” “get,”
or “understand” the thoughts and viewpoints of White
folks? Because that matters in this rat race.
So
when they say to you in the workplace “wow, what a Cinderella
story that is,” and
the Black boy says “who dat?” Yeah, you probably won’t
be recommended for that promotion you desperately want. Sorry, that’s
the way it is in the White man’s America.
Our
lack of academic and intellectual curiosity is killing us.
Is
it our fundamental lack of a good, solid formal education? We just
don’t have the overall skills to understand the “game?”
And that’s a compounded thing, generations of Black folks who
just don’t understand how this thing swings? However, I believe
our grandparents and great grand folks had much more common sense and
understood that most White folks didn’t want Black folks as
neighbors, bosses, their child’s classmates, or god forbid,
in-laws.
This
“woke” generation just seems to be shocked by the actions
of White America. That’s in part because my generation
tragically thought all that Black militant crap was unneeded. We’d
overcome and could live in the burbs, marry White women, go on a
cruise, ski, and swim in the Las Vegas resort’s pool….
We’s
moved on up, got over.
Two
lost generations, maybe three.
Black
folks didn’t put Obama in the White House, White folks did; we
just did what we were supposed to do - our job. Beyond that
historical marker, I don’t know. Black folks have acquired more
materialistic possessions, mostly stuff that depreciates like cars,
clothes, TVs, and phones but our kids’ academic skills are
years behind their Caucasian peers. The possibility of our children
buying a home is more stacked against them right here and now, than
it was yesteryear, and that’s the prime element in amassing
wealth, generational wealth which can be handed from generation to
generation.
Black
America is at a critical point in our story, here in a hostile,
unwelcoming land.
What
does Trump’s cult really want? How ridiculously far will they
go to get it? And please note: there’s not much we can put past
them. I personally can’t say they’d halt at 1953
“separate and unequal” in every
matter which really matters. Do
they want a “totalitarian” society, ruled by a
fundamentalist regime that treats women, folks of color, and the
Rainbow people as the semi-human property of the state?
Isn’t
that really where we are? What in the hell do these crazy people
want?
Today
it’s a full-grown woman’s right to choose, tomorrow it’ll
be the right of two people of the same sex to marry. Then they’ll
move on to outlaw contraceptives like Plan B and the Morning After
Pill.
Why?
Because they want to. They never wanted to stop the oppression, the
exploitation.
Call
it spite, malice, resentment, envy, or maybe just plain old nastiness
and meanness.
Yes,
this is your official “2:37 in the AM wake yourself up call!”
Uncle
Clarence T. has already fired the warning shot for Trump’s
troops. He’s already alluded to this moment in time being but
the beginning. His master, Donald Trump, wants to turn back the hands
of time to yesteryear. Thomas is Samuel L. Jackson’s character
“Stephen” in
Django Unchained, to the
absolute “T” in “Tom!”
I
don’t know about you, but I’m having one of those
incendiary Michael Jackson moments when his California curl ignited
and burst into flames!!!
“Tito,
Tito, save me!”
