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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsBlack History Month Isn't Making Life Better for Black Americans
Heroes like Frederick Douglass and Rosa Parks feel like characters in a novela world away from the clicking locks and nervous glances that plague millions of ordinary people.
Id experienced it before, but it was especially palpable one morning when I had to run around two white women out for a walk at a high school track. I felt the need to shrinkto make myself small and move past them at a distance comfortable to us all. If they perceived a threatalbeit, one clad in a Harvard shirt, Go Navy shortsit could turn out rather poorly for me. So my body language, involuntarily and quite naturally, conveyed passivity. Of course, Id done or said nothing that should have made them feel endangered, but the presence of my blackness in a space where they hadnt expected to encounter it placed the onus on me to make them comfortable.
This is what it feels like to be black in America. It sounds like the symphony of locking car doors as I traipse through a grocery store parking lot, armed with kale chips and turkey bacon. It looks like smiling when I dont feel like it. Its the instinct to enunciate differently, to use acceptable methods of signaling that I am safe to engage, or at least to disregard. We wear the mask that grins and lies, wrote the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. I feel that mask covering my soul, never allowing me to just freely exist.
I could argue that any negative reaction to my skin is a problem for others to grapple with and of no concern to me. Ive tried that approach before; one memorable attempt ended with me being pulled out of my car by two police officers and handcuffed for the felonious infractions of having a blown headlight and insufficient self-abasement. It is an unspoken rule that blackness first and most important task is to make everyone feel safe from it. We ignore this mandate at our own peril, realizing that a simple misunderstanding is a life or death proposition.
Jonathan Ferrell ran towards police seeking help after a car accident and was given a hail of bullets for his troubles. Renisha McBride went in search of a Good Samaritan after her accident and a shotgun blast answered her knock. Teenager Trayvon Martin walked home with candy and tea and was greeted by the nervous trigger finger wrapped in an adults gun. Jordan Davis sat in a car outside a convenience store listening to music and a man who objected to the volume cut his life short with the boom of a firearm. The principal crime all of them committed, like countless others over the centuries, was being black and not sufficiently prostrating themselves to ensure the comfort of others.
Read More: http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/02/black-history-month-isnt-making-life-better-for-black-americans/283767/
Solly Mack
(90,762 posts)loyalsister
(13,390 posts)The point is to talk about the history that has been missing from what has historically been written by white men. The same goes for Women's History.
Cha
(297,137 posts)raven mad
(4,940 posts)I do remember "Black" history month for my daughter in Alabama. She said, "is Rosa Parks IT??" I said, no, look it up.
She did. And still does.
sheshe2
(83,739 posts)Your daughter sounds like she takes after you.
"Look it up...and she still does."
William769
(55,144 posts)sheshe2
(83,739 posts)That quote speaks volumes for so many of us.
arely staircase
(12,482 posts)Number23
(24,544 posts)sheshe2
(83,739 posts)I went to the link in AA.
We wear the mask that grins and lies, wrote the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. I feel that mask covering my soul, never allowing me to just freely exist."
I hope someday that the masks are no longer needed.
Jamaal510
(10,893 posts)the "symphony of locking car doors", I honestly never really read much into that gesture. I give people the benefit of the doubt whenever I hear them locking their cars, since it is the safe thing to do, anyway, and because I'm not a mind-reader and don't know for sure whether or not they're doing so out of habit or out of prejudice.