Today's a day that will live in history forever... This is like witnessing the first man to walk on the moon, or more appropriately MLK's I have a dream speech. Growing up black, you don't really think you're anybody special at first, you're just one of the stupid kids trying to carve out a place in society, but as you get older you realize things are much more complicated than that. There's an entire history of racism to think about as well as tons of overt and subtle racism that's yet to come. On one hand you can ignore it and just live your life or on the other, fight it and try to do whatever you can to prove it's not good to hate people for stuff like skin tone or genetic origin.
But I too find it hard to simply conclude racism = bad. I've met every kind of black person, the complete dumbass, the nerd, the fake nerd, the super genius, the regular dude like me, and they all have something in common, they're crazy. That makes me scared. I'm already crazy, but I don't want to end up totally mentally impaired by the way things are in the world. How do I become strong enough to protect myself? My answer is to join the military and work my ass off to get strong and live a life of some kind of use beyond the ordinary 9 to 5. Kids and all that stuff can wait until I finally know if I can make it in this cruel world. If my weird father can, why can't I? But then again, he's not totally sane and was a horrible influence on me... I know that you have to be damn crazy to want to bring black children into this world, but hey, that's why I'm here I guess...
A thing I was thinking about, since I can't shut my brain off, is how I've never really noticed how blacks, real blacks, not just caramel obama blacks are not very prominent in the media outside of big gruff tough guy characters. Now I get what's going on with all the race complaints towards movies these days. I grew up watching white people in movies and just naively looking at them as whatever character they were, not necessarily as a race, but now my eyes are open... there were contious efforts made during the 80s and 90s to get more minorities roles in movies and tv shows, but the way the world works is that you won't find many minorities as anythng but token characters added to assuage certain ethnic groups... So now whenever I watch anything I'm kind of annoyed by how there's not a single black in the show or whatever. I notice too there's few spanish people or asian and on and on... It angers me to see because here in New York, you can't go anywhere without finding someone at some level who's not just like you, yet that's not what's represented. And I think for kids especially, who do they have as role models? It's funny to see Anime shows after all these years and realize the culture that made them is obsessed with caucasian looking characters. Why? I suppose it's to give their product a wider appeal for the overseas market, but I'll watch anything that's good, black, white, asian, green, whatever.
I look at movies and everything's still the same as it was years ago. While I'm on the subway I see posters for movies that don't have a single minority in them. I think, why do they expect me to watch this when it has nothing to do with my life? And then I realize that's the same kind of thought that goes through most whites when they look at some meet the browns poster etc. Touche then... Still, I'd love to see more movies catering to minorities. I love white people movies, tv, comics, whatever. It's all I had. And I looked beyond race to enjoy them and still do.
Today though I wonder, as does most of the nation I'm betting, what are we going to go through in the much greater debate over race and power and freedom that will no doubt be brought forth under a black president. Raised by whites or not, he's had to go through the same school teasing, no doubt the same racial tensions that always happen until you've known someone long enough to hate them for some other reason ;), so I'm just kind of stunned now how America's taking the hard road...
I LOVE AMERICA.
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