We half-heartedly label February as Black History Month and provide public service announcements celebrating benchmarks of mostly dead key figures.
We turn quotes into clichés.
Marvin Gaye’s music will undoubtedly be an entrance song.
A prominent black politician will come out of hiding as if the Bat signal just lit up the sky of Gotham City and Commissioner Gordon nodding in approval.
Somebody will preach about a black president and Martin Luther King Jr as if they were brothers with different fathers.
No one will discuss the Negro as the problem.
We continue to echo the same basic sentiments since slavery — to be equal and free.
It has everything to do with present-day circumstances.
It’s why children do not take education seriously.
It’s why a life of crime is a viable lifestyle choice.
It’s why addiction and self-medication become viable coping strategies.
Some Negroes have stopped the fight because they believe free and equal are one in the same, yet to be free without equality reduces slavery to that of the mind.
We will dismiss the concept of civil war, but only to highlight Lincoln’s Hancock on a piece paper that was only meant to incite southern revolts, never officially law. There was no unity in the states then and now.
America has not yet figured out how to deal with this problem of the Negro.
She has yet to reconcile with the sons and daughters of the night. The burden of granting freedom came with the visible scars of hypocrisy, death, inhumane treatments that violated the Geneva Convention and the creation of an entirely separate social and economic class.
It becomes a blame-the-victim rhetoric.
Would you ever blame a rape victim?
I am American, son to the brother of the night, son to the daughter who birthed the nation that bore the whips of mental degradation.
I am the problem that America refuses to solve.
I am the whitewashed version of history masked as a month that took centuries to create.
I am the pillar of the prison industrial complex that began to spike just after emancipation, not after the war on drugs.
I am the personification of someone viewing themselves through the lens of someone else, the seventh son in the writings of Dubois.
We continue this striving of uniting two-warring souls.
It is burned in our psyche that we are second-class citizens dealing with psychosocial issues unique to a specific socioeconomic experience, and yet we assume the blame.
How the f— can you blame an entire people for a problem that a whole country created yet wants no parts in fixing?
Equal and free. Nothing Less.