. . . but what? The truth makes you uncomfortable? Facts don’t matter? Or is it because you’re ‘Black’ before anything else? Exactly what is the gross infraction of looking at a matter and your opinion is congruent with a white person’s? These questions point directly at a topic discussed heavily in the community (African American, Black, People of Color, BIPOC, or FBA), that topic being the growingly conspicuous inability to control your destiny as a people or to even control YOURSELVES as a people..
I have decided that what is holding back the evolution and and growth of black peoples, or African Americans, or FBAs (foundational black Americans), is the fear of being IN harmony with our actual or perceived former oppressors. This aversion to being in agreement or in concert or culturally similar to ‘white folk’ and mainstream American culture causes a conflict within us that disables any and all opportunities to identify and fix internal problems. For that matter, if a non-white person, or entity, or even a hypothesis suggests that the most challenging issues Black America faces are generated within Black America, that inference is rejected with extreme prejudice.
The statement titling this essay is not from my lips but from the lips of Blacks who are in a conundrum.
I do not share participation in this conundrum, I found my freedom, preferring not to be part of a comfortable lie. I watch the professing of blackness in the face publicly observable and worsening stupid shit. Rallying to the defense of self-destructive anti-social behavior is a choice many have made but it is not mine.
https://hiphopwired.com/playlist/jamaican-cottage-owner-blasts-black-americans-reactions/
Honestly, criticizing the ratchetness will draw a daunting gauntlet that many people regardless of race, color, creed, or orientation would retreat from. The Jamaican woman above was roasted in the comments by Blacks who blame everyone else for their horrible public behavior.
I know you mean well. And so, you try to smooth over your words with the preamble of “I don’t want to sound like white people, but…” and then attempt to simultaneously identify the problematic actions, behaviors, or words coming from individual Blacks or the community at-large but have your cake and eat to by finishing with something like, “…cause you know them white folks gonna be racist…”
I have NEVER uttered the title phrase. Contrarily, the latest entrant to this phrase I hear recurrently is a relative. A relative who considered themself pro-Black. But like many forward thinking, uplifting, growth oriented Black folk, this family member professed indignation at white folk—while having left his ‘kind’ to move into a majority white world that white people built. Much like those Black Lives Matter lesbians who took ya’lls money and bought a mansion in a white neighborhood, just like the many Black men who TALK Black but show a family picture with a non-black wife, and kind of like the black men who tell tales of Black ingenuity while driving German cars and talking on cell phones supported by the evil white man’s satellites.
See, revolutionaries don’t want to live amongst the nuckas (insert offensive N word) they have unending sympathy for; they move to the community of their alleged OPPRESSORS. They then demand that the rest of society should accept the people that they themselves do not want as neighbors. For this alone I think the Black progressive is the most full of shit and fake of all people in human history.
Black revolutionaries lecture the world about acceptance and are the least accepting. The people they don’t want as their neighbors, the rest of us must accept as ours. And when the whites who accept the black revolutionaries as neighbors aren’t perfect, they are rewarded with arrogant attitude if not outright disdain.
Prove me wrong Black progressive—move to a neighborhood of the ‘disadvantaged’ and help them come up. Start a business there and hire them. Let one of their sons date your daughter, or one of your sons date their daughter, look the other way when they blast that vulgar music they love; shut your ears as they cannot complete a sentence without using the ‘N’ word that we swear is insulting but populates ALL of Black entertainment.
Or, Mr Pro-Black Revolutionary Black Panther…”Kangz” as you address one another, marry and produce children with a black woman. Until you do that, you’re a fucking liar.
My relative uttered the title phrase above as they became concerned about the possibility of a tabled public transportation expansion opening their very nice neighborhood.
A neighborhood they chose filled with white people they distrust, but are concerned about an influx of those they consider to be ‘our people’. They like their fine neighborhood, they don’t wan’t the riff raff, but conceding that problem negroes may infiltrate their harmony ALSO means agreeing with white folks.
AND oooohweee, black people would rather die by gasoline immolation than admit whites might be right about something. This family member will not speak ill of the people he knows will ruin his neighborhood for fear of “…sounding like racist white people and hating my own.” It was amazing to see him walk the tightrope between “these folks is racists”—but– “I don’t want them negroes here either.”
“IDon’t Want To Sound Like White People, But . . .”
So which is it?
