It has come to this.

I have been a decades-long witness -face-to-face or vicariously- to racism in America, the kind of racism that has wreaked devastation and havoc on the lives, livelihoods, education, property attainment, business endeavors, children, families and futures of every single Black person in the United States and abroad, whether they are willing to admit it or not.

I have been a witness to an overt attempt, thanks to the horrendous presidency and racially divisive legacy of Ronald Reagan, to make “reverse racism” a fact simply because Reagan lived in Hollywood LaLaland and had no lucid thoughts about the fact that Black America had made only a modicum of progress in race relations and economically. He actually made up a humongous lie about “welfare queens” and said that if Black people had come so far that they could now live like “Heathcliff and Claire Huxtable,” that “white people had helped Black people enough” and it was time to get rid of Affirmative Action (which helped no one except white women) and even the Civil Rights Act.

We watched him set race relations in America backward 20 years and it was during his term of office -on Reagan’s watch- that the first public lynching of a Black man, Michael Donald of Mobile, Alabama, took place on America soil in over 18 years.

I have been a witness to white people in this nation actually thinking that their “help” to the Black community surpassed anything that Black people had already earned for themselves for centuries before the radical reconstruction. And…

I have been a witness to the self-implosion of the Black community, on themselves and their own kith and kin:

That everlasting need to “go back to Egypt to enjoy the leeks and melons” of pharaohonic slavery, that pervasive internalized need to rise up against and help to slay the Marcus Garvey’s and the conscientious amongst us who seek to apply the true meaning of freedom only because TRUE independence is “too much work”; and the inherent need for so many more in the Black community to feel as if the only thing that validates them as a person or as a whole people is the presence of a ‘white elephant in the room’.

White America can do “white only” all day long and hope we never show up and be perfectly comfortable with it. They do not give a flying ham sandwich if they never see a Black person, ever.

However, for reasons peculiar to many of us, too many Black people feel out of place and lost without a white person somewhere nearby to validate and confirm anything another Black person has to say or wants to do.

Many of these types of Black folk will use words like “I am not even going to get into the race piece,” but at the same time will question the credentials of a Black man or woman and make a socio-political upheaval to move the Black man out of his rightful place and put a white man in his position just to satiate their own comfort level.

“Well, we must encourage diversity and be more ‘diverse’.” Never mind the fact that the only and most diverse people in the world are Black people, and we always have been.

As the parents of the entire human race, we are the only ones on the planet who procreate in every color from “light bright damned near white” to “you so black you blue.” Never mind that if you see nothing but a room full of Black people, you should be thinking “this is as diverse as it gets.” And never mind the fact that some Black folk, like the Stephen character in Django, are just NOT going to let anything Black people do take righteous flight until they’ve got their drug-like euphoric dependent needs on white-skinned people in check.

The question now becomes … well, since you have an obvious aversion to Black people who feel like their only validation in life rests on the child-like dependency of having a white-skinned person to co-sign everything we do, what would you suggest be done about untangling this historical ages-long social malady?

I’m a writer. I have no answers.
I have encountered many benevolent benefactors “of the persuasion” in my lifetime, and I can only be grateful that they were in position in my life when and where I needed them to be.

But…

I can say, without recoiling from the truth, that Black people are starting to look real asinine and incapable of functioning as a uniform consistent independent whole without this endless slave-minded need to validate white superiority (the “sugadaddy” gene) by acting as if we can’t do a damned thing without begging, or without turning our lives and fates over to their jurisdiction just so they can let us know that we all look like a bunch of ‘signifying monkeys’ who can’t get anything right without their presence, regardless of how many times they have told us “go do it yourselves”.

Or at least their corresponding responsive actions seem to do all of their talking for them.

Part 6