African people in America getting lessons from a teacher

In the space of time I need to write this someone will be sending me or asking me a ridiculous question.

Yes, I am complaining.

I would like to think that I have matured enough over the years to explain this.

It used to get on my nerves but I have mellowed.

And, yes, if you are picking up on the fact that I have less “stuff” than you, you are right.

I didn’t like people rushing me into anything at age seventeen and I don’t now.

In 1976 somebody told me America had a 200^th birthday; that freedom had been ‘ours’ for that long. Just about everyone I knew agreed: where was this fantasyland?

Come on and celebrate America?

In fact, it was a whole society that pressured me to accept this. Deep down, adults sucked this with a straw. And most of us youth just didn’t handle the mental assault too well. You couldn’t get any more stuff if you were branded by race a second class citizen. I wouldn’t agree, just like I had not when the White Jesus was put before me to praise. And I caught hell because I said the guy with the same nose, Richard Nixon, was surely the devil for us, Black people.

All around me was the death America systematically pumped into minds, hearts and souls: lose yourself in buying stuff, trying to get stuff, self hate (guns always near to even the score with someone looking like you) and glorifying people with stuff. In their history books, on television, they claimed that we were saved from Africa to help them get stuff.

In the prime of climbing the cliffs of early adulthood, ‘youngbloods’ two to four years my senior, were dying in droves in Viet Nam. I remember thinking, “Damn, that Nixon got caught and was still going to be rich.” Shortly, Jimmy ‘Peanut farmer’ Carter started grinning in our collective faces. He was from the lynching pogrom town my mother was raised as a toddler in, Americus, Georgia.” Hmmm, I am not going to pretend I am something I am not–an American citizen.” Being true to myself was difficult but worth the battle.

They don’t stop, these folks. Lots of people are still asking me, almost four decades later, “what’s my problem?”

Why am I complaining, they want to know?

Soon, by letter, online and in person, I predict someone is going to ask me a question about this again.

Yeah, it is a fact — by the time I stop writing this, I’ll get another one.

They will be better served going off to buy some stuff.

20 September 2007

From Exile,
Bankole
www.geocities.com/exiledone2002

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