Depth Perception

Maybe it's me or maybe it's really happening. It seems to me that the level of discussion around meaty topics, real things is deepening. It seems that for the last ten years or so, our (Americans) intellectual interrogation of the media, the government, authority in general has been very low. We get information and accept that information as fact with little or no questions, or if we do ask questions, they are superficial and meaningless.

We watch reality tv to find out what real life is like. Real life is what we experience, each of us as individuals have our own experiences that make up our lives. What is disturbing to me is that the television is in too many cases, the main socializer ouf the youth. I have this expression; "They learned to be Black from TV" I am, more and more meeting people who feel alienated from their own communities feeling like they don't fit in, because they are not like the people on television. Even worse than that would be the alienation of another because that person does not fit into what someone else thinks should be.

I have lived most of my life in Black communities. I have lived on both coasts and spent a lot of time in the South. I come from parents who were both born in and lived for significant amounts of time in the segregated South. My parents were activists. I was named after Malcolm X. I've been to Africa, and I am usually the darkest person in any room that I enter, no matter who else is there. I am about as Black as you can get, culturally and complexion wise, and I have had my identity questioned more times than I can count. I learned how to be Black from my family and our friends, not from TV or books or any second or third source.

What I know is that Black folks are the same whereever we are. We are the same not because we all watched the same thing on BET, but because we really do have a deep culture that permeates our social lives. We all know that the mother is the spiritual head of the Black family, that our God is at the center of that, we all have skin color issues, we trip off the grade of our hair, we cut consonants out of words, we love music, dancing, and storytelling. We do indeed have a common culture, but fewer and fewer people know what it is, because, I believe we adults are letting television raise our kids and not spending enough time on cultural transmission.

We are letting corporate America teach our own kids what their culture should be. We are truly in a battle for the minds and hearts of our kids and we are losing.

No doubt there is a lot of hard work to be done. It took a long time for us to get into the situation we find ourselves in now, but if more of us start doing the work that needs to be done, we will succeed. Success means that our children will not go hungry, we will eradicate that 70% high school dropout rate, we will have healthier families, incarceration rates will go down, domestic violence and drug addiction will go down.
okay, I have some more work to do....

Si se puede.
-M