I recently realized how little I know about a majority of the people that I am constantly around on a day to day basis. I know almost everything about them in terms of what classes they are taking, what they like to do for fun and whether or not they are politically involved in the black community on campus. Yet, I don’t know shit about the way that they think. Most of our conversations revolve around current events in the world or current events that carry some type of critical significance in a predominantly non-black environment. In retrospect, I know a lot about what my peers think, however, I do not know much about how they came to those thoughts nor do I ever ask them what they think the solutions are.

I recently realized how little I know about a majority of the people that I am constantly around on a day to day basis. I know almost everything about them in terms of what classes they are taking, what they like to do for fun and whether or not they are politically involved in the black community on campus. Yet, I don’t know shit about the way that they think. Most of our conversations revolve around current events in the world or current events that carry some type of critical significance in a predominantly non-black environment. In retrospect, I know a lot about what my peers think, however, I do not know much about how they came to those thoughts nor do I ever ask them what they think the solutions are.

I feel like we limit ourselves in discovering each other. We engage in the office, in the classroom, in a protest or in a cafe. However, we fail to know how one another thinks. We are so consumed with ourselves that we naturally project our own morals and beliefs onto each other in the form of what we call “advice”. We lack listening skills and we are so quick to respond to everything that we don’t allow the ones we love to even teach us what we can’t teach ourselves. What I want to say is that we are more than what meets the eye. Why is that?

Listening and responding with a reply that is comprehensive in relations to what was said is good. Still, it is not as good as challenging those you love to go beyond the passivity of what is inherently normal – just talking. Black people do not challenge their close counterparts enough. We support one another in our goals and ambitions and we lend a listening ear to personal reflections on the way major events happened. In addition to what we do do, we also should feel obligated to evoke problem-solving tendencies of our sisters and brothers. We need to invoke such a spirit in ourselves that causes us to question our sisters and brothers about what they believe to be true. Why do they believe that black people should start their own schools? How did they decide that protesting was a better option than writing a formal letter to the oppressor? What do they propose we do to move forward?

Simple interactive dialogue is inconsistent among the black community. We tend to only engage in critical dialogues when something critical happens. What I am proposing is that we take initiative to invest time in our fellow community members’ intellects. Whether it be through speaking, writing, telephoning, or texting, we should be curious about how the black man or woman sitting next to us feels about something as simple as why the sky is blue. We should feel inclined to ask how they really feel about things that we naturally assume we already know how they feel about.

Dedicating ourselves mental interactions amongst our personal social groups and other intimate spaces opens the door to truly understanding what it means to be in tune with the masses. It’s a very-baby-step, but along such a journey, it also opens doors to building relationships with the people we care about most in which we are not so quick to override their autonomy with our self-righteousness for the sake of hearing ourselves. By holding ourselves and those around us accountable to purposeful accountability in intellectuality, we avoid on-the-surface conversations that are aimlessly spontaneous. How about we not make critical dialogue a habit rather than a conversation for the sake of mere conviction?