For the last two weeks, I wrote about ridiculous racial incidents that I experienced on my spring break vacation. One of the incidents involved a Southwest Airlines worker who seemed to make it his personal goal to keep us from boarding when he allowed a white family in the same situation to board easily before us. The second was about a racially insensitive Royal Caribbean Cruise show where performers made light of the slave song/warning “Wade in the Water.” I wish the last issue was about something external that happened to my family, but in all honesty, my issue was with my family, themselves.
Going to an HBCU, I see minorities all day, every day. So when I go home or step outside of my Howard University world, I become hyper aware of how major the majority actually is. Something always seems off or not quite right when I’m not surrounded by minorities, and I have to readjust to predominately white life I grew up in. It’s actually how surprising how completely comfortable I became with just being surrounded by black people, and how quickly that comfort came. Now, stepping outside of that comfort zone and into the old norm makes me itch. While on the cruise vacation, I brought up the fact that in the whole week we had been on the boat, I had only seen a couple of black people. I could count the black families we had seen on my right hand alone. My family wasn’t surprised by the comment, my entire speech has become more black-focused in my two years at Howard, but they took a strange offense with my implication.
“It’s not a racial thing,” my mom said. “It’s an economic thing.”
But that’s the problem. Black economics is stemmed in racism.
There is a simple anecdote on Buzzfeed that described modern systems of advantage and wealth. It described a teacher who gave all of his students paper balls and told them that if they shot their ball into the garbage can in the front of the classroom, they would get extra credit. A student from the back approached the can and the teacher told him/her to stop — that they had to make the shots from their seats. This left the students in the back at a horrible disadvantage, and only a few were able to make the shot. It was obviously unfair, and the students in the front happily reaped the benefits. The teacher told them that this is how class structures work. Those in the upper class already have the advantage, and are more likely to succeed in the way that the students in the front did. Students in the back are at the disadvantage and most will continue to fail because of their misfortune. It is possible for some to exceed, but highly unlikely, and much more unlikely than their advantaged counterparts. This concept can also be applied to race.
African-Americans were first introduced as economic independents after slavery was abolished and they began working for themselves with share-cropping. The process of share-cropping made it easy for previous slave masters to manipulate them and continue to over-work and use them. African-Americans started off at a disadvantage, and as generations continue, just like students in the back of the classroom, one or two may succeed among most of those who reasonably fail. We started off on the bottom rung, and many continue trying to gain the smallest advantage, anything that will bring them out of the dusty back room of economically unprivileged.
I tried to explain this to my family and was shut down.
How else can I explain?
