The State of the Black Union

(this is something i wrote, a performance piece so to speak,being a queer womyn of color, analyzing her race's current situation. WARNING : It criticizes black people, points out our flaws, and makes subtle references to our current politicians such as Jesse Jackson. Not obama though...i love him!)

This is a report coming to you live, not from the white house, not from Camp David, or any other place in America that has been pre-decorated to perfection. This report is coming to you from the suburbs, reported merely by an outsider looking in. Now usually how these things have gone down is, I, being the speaker will try to appeal to your need to feel like justice hasn’t been served to you; the man has been putting you down for years and doesn’t have your best interest at heart. My sentences that rhyme are suppose to dance inside of your eardrum until your dizzy with the glee that knowing that someone has finally heard your plea, answered your prayer, a disciple of God has finally decided to pick up the other end of the phone. The following statement would be true if I were conventional, a politician hungry for the food that is a voting ballot to fill my proverbial plate. Yet I’m not a politician, I’m merely an educated black woman who’s fed up with the progress of her race.

I walk through the hallways of my school and I wonder how we have fallen when our predecessors spent their lives trying to bring us up from the oppression of which our race was born into. It still feels like the shackles of slavery are weighing me down when I read books about the academic state of our children. We are, as of 2007, officially left behind. Our children cannot read the required high school material, compose the majority of the regular or below level English courses, cannot do the math, nor score decently on state or national examinations. Our solution for bridging the gap; give them books meant for 6^th graders and below relating to their similar socio-economic situations, and hope to god that when the time rolls around for them to read Dickens or Chaucer they are equipped to handle the work. When that falls through the cracks we implement African American literature, which doesn’t seem like a bad idea at first, it’s only until later we realize most curriculums are euro-centric and trying to appease the need of a student not to read the literature of a “dead white guy” is enforcing a fallacy of reality. I no longer want to be one of four black people in an English honors class, one of three in an advanced placement humanities class, and one of ten black people in an astronomy class that actually pays attention. The denominator for the following fractions needs to be increased so that we can finally begin to fit into the equation that represents American education as a whole.

This is a report coming to you live, not from the white house, not from Camp David, or any other place in America that has been pre-decorated to appease the aesthetic eye. This report is coming to you from the center of a free aids clinic, where the majority of the people waiting idly in chairs for their test results are black people, our sisters; our heterosexual woman who are getting infected at a larger rate than any other minority population in the United States of America. And while our women are getting infected, our clergymen sit back and continue to tell us that AIDS is a gay white man’s persuasion, and to get it would mean not only have you engaged contact with our racial enemy, but began a tango with the devil of homosexuality only repentance and prayer can cure. Regardless of the information out there, our women, our men, and our children are still dying from this pandemic, because we as a people turn a blind eye. Our only cable channel, meant for the sole purpose of “black entertainment” even cuts off the wrap it up commercials, because obviously advertising Baby Phat will erase all the red ribbons that are pinned to our chests. The length of your artificial appendages called nails, the labels you have tattooed somewhere below the waistline of your pants, the way you “rock your hips” to a song; anything advertised to get the minority to be a consumer will not be your 99.9% guaranteed protection that a condom would. The Juicy Couture, the Rocawear, the Phat Farm, the Jordan’s, and the many other brands aimed at minorities will only be a mere token of your ignorance if and when you do catch this disease, because somewhere along the line, fashion became more important than safe sex.

This is a report coming to you live, not from the white house, not from Camp David, or any other place in America that has been pre-decorated to cover up the poverty that is afflicting us, the welfare that is constricting us, and the consumer mentality that fuels our desire to be apart of the American dream. We’re still living in the ghettos designated for us during the creation of “white suburbia”, and while some of us have managed to climb to the mountaintop and infiltrate the land of white picket fences and apple pies at windowsills, we are still calling government allotted properties not fit for roaches to live in our “home sweet home.” The violence in these areas increases more than the number of schools or parks for our children to play in. Businesses trying toe establish themselves to have an ethnic clientèle pack up and leave as soon as the shot of a gun rings louder than a house doorbell. Instead of being recruited to be girl and boy scouts, our children are being recruited to sell drugs, be gangsters, and hustle their lives away. Now something deep down in my gut is telling me that Martin Luther King didn’t have a dream for his people to still be living in squalor, not be able to afford school supplies for their children, be grossly unemployed compared to other minority groups, and have drug affiliations larger than the number of African Americans attending college. I know that racism still runs deep, but you would think with anti discrimination laws in place, a black person could work somewhere other than Mc Donalds or a check cashing joint, actually go to college, or be in a position to support themselves and not be on welfare. Even those who have a job aren’t better off because we’re still tempted to have the latest item on the market, it is a thing that afflicts all Americans, but rarely do I see a white person trying to use a link card to pay a cell phone bill. And if we can afford cell phones, why do our kids come to school with not even the granite to make a pencil to their name? Its time we had another great migration, not geographically, but in our priorities regarding what’s truly essential and what’s a materialistic desire.

This is a report coming to you live, not from the white house, not from Camp David, or any other place in America that has been pre-decorated to look like the American dream, but the black reality.