Everybody

I remember. I had to have been maybe 15 or 16, the point in our life’s when we decided that we got a handle on the inner workings of society and the people that are involved. It seems almost abruptly so, we are close to getting our licenses and exploring what kind of freedom that entails. I would imagine now, why this is the reason he chose to sit me down. I didn’t know much about my father. We had moved away from his home when we were so young. I wasn’t surrounded by people that looked like me, and honestly I didn’t truly believe that it mattered of course it did to some extent but it was harmless in the sense that I didn’t believe that there was any ill will behind any comments or remarks made to me. A lot of my life I have been told that I “act white” or that I “talk white” and you have to let it pass because if I reacted I was unreasonable. Any reaction would have been an overreaction, and that stifles your voice. It wasn’t until I was older and my sister and brother began to enter adolescence that I realized the injustice that I did to them. I wronged them, and my parents who worked extremely hard to give me the tools to be able to speak properly to feel like I can command a room and that I deserve too. I don’t “ talk white” and I don’t “ act white” . It’s extremely damaging to tell a young black kid or any minority something like that because he values something that traditionally isn’t characteristic of his race. It was the greatest insult that I’ve ever received for someone to tell me that something that I worked for and that obviously isn’t easy is synonymous with someone’s color. I am not without empathy though, I can understand how they truly don’t believe it’s an insult and that is what scares me the most, sports, intelligence, music, literature they don’t belong to anyone person or any group of people they’re all expressions of yourself, free to your own interpretation. That’s not to say that the origins don’t carry significance because they do and they always should. It’s important to know where you come from, but its not all of who you are. We are products of our environment and we use those lessons and the skills to make the most of what we believe success means. If all you see is MBAs and dress shoes your energy is more likely to be moved in that direction, but if all that surrounds you is struggle, poverty, and violence, then unfortunately that is what you know. Of course people have made it out of their situations but it so rarely happens and the children are blamed, accused of not trying or “accepting” the hand they were dealt. The difference for the latter is that success is relative, and everybody who was raised in affluent or “middle class” neighborhoods doesn’t become the president or a CEO, because that would be “rising above” their situation. Staying where they are, not pushing to rise above is accepted more so than the aforementioned. Your situation doesn’t define you but it is so much of who you are. I have been lucky I have no resentment toward anybody because I refuse to let a small percentage of a group dictate the narrative for the whole. All races are guilty of this, even if we don’t want to admit it but that isn’t my point with all of this. Nor is my point to act as if minorities are the only people who struggle, the United States Census Bureau in 2019 estimated that 76.3 percent of the United demographic was accredited to “ White” Americans which I understand is overgeneralizing a race of people but they define it as “A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East or North Africa”. With that being said if one group of people accounts for almost 80 percent of the population I would be ignorant to think that struggle belongs to one group or groups. My point is that if everybody stopped thinking they so badly deserve to claim their hardships if only to demonstrate that it’s not that bad for someone else we would see that we are all contributing to the societal problems that we face and have been facing for decades, its just only now coming to light because with the rise of social media there are rarely secrets kept and situations undocumented. I didn’t want to talk about profiling, or media bias, or other topics of that nature because those all cause controversy and it violently sways us from what we really are trying to say. It has, is,and will always be about everybody, not just one group of people. When my father had sat me down he talked about how I should act when I’m pulled over, how to speak to police officers, not to wear my hood in neighborhoods, but the real message I got out of it all was that we was afraid, and that he hated having to tell me things like this because no kid needs to have their innocence taken at 16 by being told who they are is grounds for unreasonable behavior, so if they are lucky enough to still have held onto it by then any trace dissipates with this talk. Terrible things happen everyday to people but if we don’t learn the right lessons from them it becomes a cycle. Tupac Shakur all though more radical than most he wasn’t wrong with his acronym “THUG LIFE” the hate you give little infants f*cks everybody, and if you notice, there was no mention of race or creed or religion. “Everybody” which is the most important part of the message, nobody is born with predispositions to hate anybody it comes from learning the wrong lessons from those who came before us, but just as easily as those lessons are absorbed the right one could be as well. Not one specific person, not one specific group. Everybody.