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You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I’ll rise.
Must I have just one home? Must I have just one origin? Is that to make it easier for those around me, or to flat out appease them? To make it simpler for them to put a label on me, measure me, place me, fence me in, and judge me?
Yet I have always carried around the nagging feeling that I am only a guest in someone else’s home. May I really open the fridge and help myself to whatever I find? I have to be careful not to knock over someone’s vase or accidentally break something fragile. May I have permission to stay here as long as I like? Will the color of my skin always follow me like a shadow that can be turned against me at any moment, can become the only thing that defines me? Can I manage not to be reduced to Other?
In the South, black men were drafted at far higher rates than white men, which highlights the degree to which black lives were considered more expendable.
That same year, The Birth of a Nation, a racist film praised by the Ku Klux Klan, was shown on screens all over the country and was, in fact, the first movie ever to be shown in the White House.
fifteen thousand people gathered in Waco, Texas, in May of 1916 to watch as an eighteen-year-old black man, Jesse Washington, was burned alive.
“But in some ways, I abandoned my family,” he says in an attempt to rouse my sympathy. “I had to. Otherwise, I never would have made it out of the ghetto. Out of Harlem, away from the decay and destructiveness. But I’ve never been able to shed the guilt.”
“The problem with hip-hop is that it holds up a magnifying glass to the most dysfunctional parts of the ghetto, and African Americans’ complete lack of a chance in life. They inherit hopelessness. The hopelessness that’s forged into the bricks and concrete of the ghetto, that drips down the facades of the buildings, impregnating everything and everyone that lives there. Even the grass is browner in the ghetto. People ought to tell the stories of what African Americans have managed to accomplish despite slavery.”
The majority of people on this planet are not white. But many people still observe, analyze, and explain the world and themselves through the lens of whiteness.
