On April 11th 2016, BuzzFeed released another one of it's BuzzFeed videos. This time it was "27 Questions Black People Have For Black People".
Being black, and bored, I watched the video.
As a wonderful YouTube star, Evelyn, points out in her response video to BuzzFeed's, the video is saturated with microaggressions and stereotypes given to the black community by white history. However, instead of having a response to the video, I instead had questions and a few comments, of my own, for the Black Community:
- Why don’t we celebrate Malcolm X more? The man was brilliant, spoke more eloquently than Martin Luther King Jr., AND wasn’t cheating on his wife with various women all across America.
- Why do we allow the remnants of slavery to affect us today? Light skin blacks are no better/worse than dark skin blacks and vice-versa. We need to quit it with this division.
- Why aren’t we, as a group, as confident, and willing to challenge anyone who denies us? The great leaders of the Civil Rights Movement didn’t tear down other races, they educated them. Why aren’t we using our power as a people to educate the ignorant?
- Any black individual, who has studied our people’s history, knows that Martin Luther King Jr. was not the center of the Civil Rights Movement…so why are we allowing him to be the figurehead for it? Why does there need to be a figurehead when the movement itself was comprised of numerous men and women who better represented equality than Martin Luther King Jr.?
- Who the hell decided Black History Month should be in February and why haven’t we changed that yet? I’m done celebrating my history for one month out of the year AND not even be taught the actual accounts of what occurred during the Civil Rights Movement.
- Why do we allow professors to briefly touch on a part of this nation’s history with such…disinterest? The Civil Rights Movement played a great role in this country's history and history should reflect that. I shouldn't have to go my entire educational career learning and re-learning about the Holocaust (which didn't even happen in America) when I gain no knowledge or insight as to the events that occurred during the Civil Right's era.
- The issues within the black community continue due to the lack of education around our history and the continuing whitewashing of the black community.
- To Black Women: we have so far to go in terms of society allowing our hair to just be that—hair. The reality of the situation is that yes, some of our hair is slowly becoming part of the “norm” but women of true African descent don’t yet have that luxury, and those of us with a little more white, Native American, or Mexican in our bloodlines have to be voices for them in addition to their own voices.
- To Black Men: Society’s standards of you may be low, but that doesn’t mean your personal standards have to be. The stereotypes: gangbanger, prisoner, drug peddler, and absent father, were put in place by people who recognize your potential of greatness. Regardless of your situation, you are worth more than society has deemed you worthy of.
I believe racism has become a front-and-center issue again in our society, but because it's not what it was historically, people don't see day-to-day things as racist because it's not slavery and it's not Jim Crow.
Racism, whether I or anyone else wants to admit it, is alive and well in this country.
No longer is racism solely related to blacks, but simply minority individuals in general. AND, in addition to racism reappearing in our society as a front-and-center issue, so has sexism, and xenophobia.
To black individuals everywhere:
You are beautiful. You are handsome. You are intelligent. You are skilled. Your hair isn't always a political statement. You do not judge other black people based on their shoes. You are not the only people in this world who want a discount if a discount is available. Watermelon is not our people's "thing". We are not always late. There is nothing wrong with interracial dating for either of the genders. I'm pretty sure black people would support black businesses if there were more black businesses in our neighborhoods to support. We are not the only ethnicity that has fatherless homes. We are not less. We are human.
That BuzzFeed video, as one nice YouTube commenter said, was ashy, and did not in anyway represent actual questions black people have for one another.
