soulpundit.com

I recently visited a good friend’s Facebook page and sat stunned as I watched a group of white high school kids sing “Shout” by Otis Redding in Black face and wigs. What’s worse is that it was my high school and I remember the performance. As I sat there watching, all the emotions which had been wrestled into submission since high school came rushing back. I remembered that my graduating class of 320 counted only 6 blacks in its graduating class. In the jumping and gyrating of disrespectful caucasian coons, I saw years of black jokes, and curly hair jokes, and burnt people jokes crawl back into my ears as my heart beat louder and louder. The denigration of generations for a cheap laugh, justified as nostalgia, history and good humored fun. The high school I remembered was the one I struggled to forget.

My breath quickened and my stomach dropped remembering deeply seated friendships growing into romance only to be butchered by obscene words like, “my parents won’t approve,” and “my father would kill me.” The isolation that some of those years brought about settled into my bones as though I had graduated only yesterday. That strange feeling of being in the midst of people but somehow keenly disconnected, reattached itself. Within me, the rage swelled. Growing up I learned to distrust people. Period. I distrusted blacks because when I spoke, I pronounced my words like “white people.” That made you square and ineligible for the in crowd. White had their own version of you are out. As I remember how cool I was with many, there always seemed to be that one black joke they had been dying to tell since they met you. There was a fundamental inability to recognize the destruction of trust their jokes engendered. Not that they cared, but their ability to highlight the difference eroded the commonality you had hoped would be there.

The desire to crush and obliterate trembled in my fingers which pulsated to the rhythm of the sledge hammer now driving the thump of my heart. As I searched for words, my mind flew past minority feelings of inferior expectations and landed in the open arms of Howard University. With fumbling fingers, my anger leaked onto my keyboard, painting underlined letters, supporting big exclamation points. Like a mother whispering to a child, ancestors spoke to me reminding me how such a negative experience had pushed me into a world filled with giants like, Langston Hughes, Thurgood Marshall, Toni Morrison and Ossie Davis to name a few. Without these high school slights I would never know people who looked like me birthed civilizations lasting 15 times longer than the age of the US. The pages of Alex Haley’s “The Autobiography Malcolm X” may have never graced my eyes had I not been set apart. As I began to fall in love with black people, I found myself and a whole universe that had been hidden from me in the suburbs. In loving this sense of self I received a wife who embodied all that I was and could be.

Without the experiences of high school I would have never found my voice. I wouldn’t have known that it was OK to speak up and set boundaries. Without those experiences, I might not understand how to deal within an industry that after 12 years has never graced me to work directly with someone who as actually shaded like myself. As I typed terse words, I weighed old friendships against a newer voice.

As luck would have it, there was no need to decide, it was all a mistake, but someone somewhere is fighting this Facebook battle when the new and old worlds collide.