Not a single day goes by where there is not at least one conversation dealing with race on the internet. These conversations range from healthy debates about the use of the N-word to downright disrespectful arguments about how people of color have no societal worth.
One company that has tried to make race a genuine conversation we can all have in our day to day lives is Buzzfeed. Buzzfeed puts out very thought-provoking articles and videos, a lot of which have to do with race. For example, they had a series of videos called "If Asians/Black People/Latinos Said the Stuff White People Say." I personally enjoy many of their videos, and many other people of color do as well.
However, last Wednesday, they put out a video called "27 Questions Black People Have For Black People" (the video below). After this, the Internet blew up. There were so many articles about how this video was "coonery" and just another video of black people trying to say things that would appease white people. This is where I fall in the minority.
I watched the video before all of the backlash came out. I thought it was a regular, well articulated article about black people for black people. After the backlash, I even watched the video a few more times to see if I could understand where these angry black people were coming from, but even then, I still could not see it.
I thought that a lot of these were valid questions. They obviously threw in a few joke questions, like the question about his "dab being on fleek," but all of the other questions made good points. Black people can say all they want that we're not always late, but we're the only group of people with our own time zone (CPT). And while there are more black fathers present in the home then aren't, we have the highest rate among all races of children living in a single mother household.
Black people hate to be criticized, especially when it's from other black people. We always think that every word we say to each other needs to be uplifting because "the white man is always tearing us down." It is true that we are often being torn down by our less-melanated counterparts; but just because they have negative words for us doesn't mean that we should not be able to step back and really take a look at the state of our race in America. So many of these questions really hit home because a lot of people do these things that these black people have questions about. They aren't just pulling these questions out of their butts about things that are not even true.
I will say that the tone of the video did make it seem sort of like they were referring to all black people, but we know that not to be true. Not everyone thinks this way, but there certainly are a large number who think these things and who act just like what they were talking about. That's the real problem here. And unfortunately, those people who instantly dismissed this video missed that.
I think everyone who had a problem with this video missed the big point here. Everyone was making it seem like these black people were saying we are entirely to blame for all of our problems and that systemic racism doesn't exist and blah, blah, blah. But that's not what they are saying at all. These are real black people asking real questions that they have for other black people. The whole point of this video was to start the conversation and get the narrow-minded members of our race to open their minds to every type of black person and to truly love everything about us.
So my question is, when are we gonna stop ducking these issues and these questions and really strive to get these conversations about blackness going?