Living in this world is a struggle. From the people down to the economy, life just isn’t easy. It is so sad that we as a people can’t feel safe walking down the street. I also feel that there are many reasons why the lives of our people, blacks to be more specific, are in the situations were in. Some of these reasons are because we aren’t aware of what we do wrong in these hectic situations, we don’t act out in the right way when it comes to our anger, and we don’t know any of our history.
Black people, in my opinion, and coming from a black person, we victimize ourselves on many occasions. I’m not say that we aren’t victims but I am saying this shouldn’t be an excuse we use to prevent us from being successful. We as a people have to start holding ourselves accountable for what we do individually and stop making everything a “we” thing. We have minds of our own and we don’t have to conform to the stereotype that has been placed on us.
Another thing that hinders our people from being as successful as we could is our quickness to anger. We allow every little thing that is said get us out of character. A person only has control over what is allowed to them. The more we allow peoples words and actions affect us, the more we will suffer. I understand that we are tormented and bullied constantly and sometime breaking things and causing riots seem like the best thing we could do, but it really is. Something I just don’t understand is that when we cause riots and burn things down, we always do our neighborhoods. This is so stupid to me because I feel that if we’re going to destroy something, it shouldn’t be something we need. But that’s a whole different discussion.
The largest thing that I feel affects us as a race is our lack of knowledge about our past. This has been an issue from the beginning of time. This isn’t completely our fault. In schools, when history is taught, we are taught what I like to call “Selective History”. This meaning that they only teach us what they want us to know. This way of teaching is partially the reason why we know nothing about our struggle. What really angers me is that the majority of our younger generations don’t even know what their angry about. We are programmed to be angry by people who aren’t teaching is the reasons behind our anger.
There was an incident that I went through that really made me sad. I was speaking to another black person and we were discussing the reasons why we are oppressed and hurt. Then she begins to give her opinion of how she hates other races and that we should all be angry. So I then asked her why she felt that way, but she couldn’t give any concreate reason or fact that supported her view. I then asked her if she ever heard of The Middle Passage. She responded, “I don’t think so, is that a book?” What was said next is what really angered me. I then asked had she heard of The Holocaust and she responded, “of course, who doesn’t know about that?” This made me so angry. To think that the black community doesn’t know about the huge fights and obstacles that our people endured, but we know about the struggles of other races and people. We have to educate ourselves and stop feeling that were entitled to being angry because you can’t feel angry about something that you know nothing about. I just feel that we as a people have the potential to be great if we take the steps needed to accomplish greatness.
