Around this time, many of our young black women and men are getting their first apartment as they move away from home to find work or continue on to higher education. Ain’t that a victory! A victory indeed considering the strides and sacrifices made to get here.  Yes, we are still living within the white man’s institutions, however, it ain’t what it used to be.

Think about it. Why are you so happy to be in your first apartment? Is it the feeling of finally having something that you can call “mines”? Or is it the fact that you can think, say and do whatever, whenever, and however you want while inside your apartment? I am starting to think that we are so caught up in naming our oppressions that we help to marginalize ourselves.

We override the evidence of the outcomes that show how the efforts and dedications of previous generations to have a voice in America were actually successful. To be allowed to take up space and sit where you want and when you want to is an example of that success.

The year right now is 2014. In the decade of the 1960’s, we lost a number of leaders back to back. Medgar Evers died 51 years ago, Malcolm X died 49 years ago, and Martin Luther King, Jr. died just about 3 years after Malcolm. Now ask yourself, how old is your grandmother? My grandmother is going to be 99 years old this year. The difference between her age and the year in which Malcolm X died is 48 years. We take all this little bit of time and place it into a dichotomy of past and present; bad times and good times; and whatever pair of words displaces us away from our close connections to what we refer to as the “past”.

We must treat ourselves to a reality check: this life that we live and the privileges we own are not simply due to our hard work during our lifespan.

It’s bigger than that. When a black individual signs the lease for his very first apartment, he is not just signing a regular piece of paper. He is signing his respects to his elders for the life that he lives today. Our generation is so far gone in common culture – white culture that is – that they have no clue of what “consciousness” means. Does a conscious black woman look into the mirror and see only herself? No! She looks into the mirror and sees all the black woman like Ella Baker, Shirley Chisholm, and Aretha Franklin. A conscious black woman sees the women like whom she aspires to be.

The purpose of me writing this article was to show how a simple experience like getting one’s own apartment is only one of the many common progressions of our people; it is an existing metaphor for the longevity and perseverance of our “past” leaders. I fear that the desire to regain and maintain the ambition and motivation of those black people we refer to in the past is dwindling. When we are given the opportunity to smoothly transition over into the next stage of life that involves getting our first apartment, we tend to take it in ignorance.

We must wake up and keep waking up. Don’t wake up and complain about cleaning your apartment and doing laundry on a Friday. Remember, you could be cleaning a white woman’s home and washing her husband’s clothes for a living. When we talk about history, we aren’t talking about Baker, Chisholm or Franklin. History means we talking Abraham.