Black Intel

Race has always been something that I have noticed while growing up. Since I started going to school I always noticed how there weren’t many faces that resembled mine in many of my classes. While at Fremont Christian, a private school in Fremont, California, it took an older white student to inform me on the importance of race and that it is still used as a tool to divide people. It was 1989, I remember him asking my white friend if he was a “whigger.” At the time I didn’t understand what he was asking or why he was asking it but it didn’t take much time to understand the meaning of his question.

As a young child my mom would take me to see movies like Amistad and Sarafina, I remember even seeing Roots. From these movies I realized a couple of things. First I realized that Blacks had to endure a lot to be in this country. Secondly I realized that the textbooks that I was learning from really didn’t do justice to explain the horrific torment Blacks went thru during The United States of America’s first steps into existence. Last I found that early colonists thought it was some how their God given right to alienate and dehumanize a people simply based off the color of their skin. Fast forward to 2009 and while some Blacks wear chains around their necks instead of their hands and feet, I still feel race is as prevalent as ever.

William Pickens

“Color had been made the mark of enslavement and was taken to be also the mark of inferiority; for prejudice does not reason, or it would not be prejudice…If prejudice could reason, it would dispel itself,” a quote from author, orator and journalist, William Pickens. The first point of this quote about color being made the mark of enslavement is why I feel we (Blacks) need to get over the color of our skin. “On Xbox live, a network that allows you to play video games online, once players determine my race based off of my speech the “Niggers” dart out of my headphones. I used to become irate at this but I began to notice that these are most likely the same people that wouldn’t dare say this to a Black person if they seen them on the street and it becomes trivial to me now. Fortunately with Xbox Live every gamer has a gamertag which you can use to submit player reviews if they start to get out of line during gameplay. To this point I don’t even argue anymore I simply report them and tell my friends to as well in hopes that they get kicked off the network. Race hasn’t just been made a topic by Whites. I have encountered instances where Blacks focus on race as well, for example I have a female friend whose ethnicity is Black and Filipino. There hasn’t been a time that has passed where I have brought my friend around some of my female friends from my college days and those friends bring up my mixed friend’s ethnicity. I find that most of my mixed friends have a hard time fitting into society because many times neither side of their ethnic makeup accepts them. The unfortunate part is that none of my college female friends consider that society at large looks at her as being Black. So while she identifies with being Black there are some people out here that will treat her like an outcast because they have some warped sense of what being Black actually is. The race card isn’t pulled just on mixed people but I have also noticed my female friends from college also bring up the skin tone of the girls they have known me to date.

school daze

I remember watching Spike Lee’s School Daze, a 1988 musical drama, about campus life on a historically Black college where members of a fraternity and sorority beef with what we unfortunately in the Greek world call GDIs a.k.a. Got-Damn-Individuals. One of the issues tackled in this movie that is very memorable is light skin vs dark skin Black people. The women in this movie were going back and forth clashing with each other based off not just their shades of “Blackness” but also the texture of their hair. This movie came out in 1988 and unfortunately in 2010 I don’t believe this mindset is going away any time soon. Those good ole’ females from my life have taught me that their mindset isn’t isolated to a particular group but runs rampant through our Black community. The irony out of all of this is that outside the Black community we are all considered Black, but this just explains how hung up Blacks are on race and skin color in this new millennium.

Negro on census 2010

I have been trying to figure out a way to reach out to under served metropolitan areas to inspire them to complete the US Census which will take place in March 2010. I have my work cut out for me not just because I am working on such a short deadline but also because some Blacks are upset with the fact Negro has been placed along side Black and African American as an option to declare your racial identity. While I do understand how some people might become offended by this I am not buying into it when there are many of us that still use the word “nigga” to refer to anyone Black, white, red, yellow, friends, even family. I am reminded how our history in this country has instilled such an acute awareness of race within us that from my opinion, can be blamed on the good ole’ Jim Crow doctrine but that is another article in its entirety. Its 2010 and we are entering into another decade of this new millennium and I am not sure if we as a people will be able to get pass race and at my ripe old age of … I am not sure this world will successfully get pass race in my lifetime.