Thursday, May 28, 2020

Being Black in America: I Am Black, Not A Person of Color



I am a Black American, not a woman/person of color. What’s the difference? Being a Black American whom ancestors went from :
✔️ slavery
✔️ sharecropping
✔️2 parts Northern migrations due to lynching and harsh Jim Crow laws 
✔️Segregation to the Civil Rights movement
✔️Limitations of Affirmative Action policies
✔️Redlining 
✔️Limited or no wealth
✔️Environmental racism such as broken school systems/toxic waste sites/food deserts
✔️Job discrimination due to hair texture and ethnic-sounding names 
✔️Bank and mortgage companies predatory practices and blatant racism
 ✔️400 plus years of holistic brokenness 
✔️Institutionalized racism, including racist policies and laws
✔️My brothers and sisters getting gun down
✔️Genocide
✔️Lack of quality insurance and medical needs
✔️Aging 7 times quicker due to holistic stress
✔️A constant state of rage
✔️Lack of Safety and Security while breathing, exercising, attending school, sleeping, chilling, and etc
✔️Highest Birth and Child mortality/Medical Apartheid 
✔️Mass incarceration of Black Men
✔️Drugs and other addictions ravishing my community/Still recovering from the Crack epidemic, three-strikes policies, and '94 Crime Bill
✔️Pandemic ravishing and killing my people at an alarming rate

We are owed reparations, restitution, repair, and restoration! We have been owed this debt since we have been violently snatched from our original place. You owe my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-grandparents, and the list continues. We are still being feared, don’t have a place of refuge due to my ancestors being violently forced into slavery, breeding camps, plantations,  and the list continues.

Excuse me if I don’t claim or say people/women of color! My experience as a Black American woman is unique, unadulterated, and unapologetic. We have been here for 400 years and counting. We are the alchemist, and we aren't going anywhere. Our stories are historic and damn near paramount, and I refuse to water down my lineage to blend in and be forgotten.

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