|
Cosby and Obama have hit the nail square on the head.
Some of my friends and I have spent our youths paying the cost of anti-intellectualism in the black community. In my case specifically I paid the price in seperation from other blacks. When I was young I was constatly made fun of for being "white" because I was well-spoken and intellectual. On top of this I was from a family that was doing pretty well financially, as a result I lived in a "white" area of town. One result of this was most of my friends being white. (There are many other factors of how I was raised but those don't apply as strongly.) This never went over very well in school. It was a good day if I was only called a "sell out" or "white" once or twice. This was all in late elementary and early middle school when I was bussed across town to go to some of the better schools in the district, most of which were located in "black" areas of town. By the time I graduated middle school I was convinced black people hated me. The only good that came out of this was my realization that if black people didn't like me and white people would never fully accept me, then everyone must be pretty much equal and should be treated as such. As a result I picked my friends on terms of character and similarity to myself, skin was never a factor. By the time I graduated high school I was very distant from most of my black peers. But what has got to bother me the most is that even in college I see many of the same attitudes continuing to thrive. I still see the glances and hear what people say behind my back. I love how so many educated blacks still hold onto the same bad ideas they had when they were younger. The perfect example was my freshman year living with two other black guys; we got along great at home but in public they never wanted to associate with me cause I was too white-seeming. I love how there are so few of us in college to begin with and as you advance the numbers grow fewer and fewer. There is so much ot over come that if we do not start early and change our way of thinking, we will never do it.
Tupac said it best in "Changes" when he said "We gotta make a change...
It's time for us as a people to start makin' some changes.
Let's change the way we eat, let's change the way we live
and let's change the way we treat each other.
You see the old way wasn't working so it's on us to do
what we gotta do, to survive." Funny how many people love(d) that song but never hear(d) what it says.
|