I am the first
"If you are a citizen why do you have to fight for your civil rights? If you're fighting for your civil rights, that means you aren't a citizen." - James Baldwin - 1979 Berkeley University
This is my dad, born in the early 60s. At the time of his birth he didn't have citizenship rights in America. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 finally made it legal for black people to exercise their rights and receive protection under law against discrimination of any kind, marking them citizens for the first time in American history. This is how Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The New York Times 1619 Project, explained it in a distinguished lecture series I attended.
It was the first time someone said it so clearly; my dad, my mom, my extended family - one generation before me, born here, but not citizens at their birth in the country of their ancestors who were enslaved.
But it was so long ago.
Why do you people still want to talk about this?
I am the first to graduate college and the first generation to have citizenship at birth in my family. And there is an uncomfortable, quivering refusal from people to say the word 'Black'. Because access to education is still based on race and class and the New Jim Crow is mass incarceration and all these things are an evolved form of slavery, one after the other. I think about how people who look like me are shot and killed or harassed for walking into their apartment.
Slavery is the colonizers' history.
It is the founding fathers' history.
It is the foundation of American capitalism.
But the founders didn't take into account that black people would educate themselves, and would come to believe the words, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…," applied to them.
Through the fighting, bleeding, and dying for overdue citizenship, they found a way.
The way they crafted instruments in the backwoods of Mississippi to create blues as an escape from racial violence, the way they took scraps and turned it into soul food.
The way they created movements through art, music, film and influenced American culture. The way they kept showing up to classrooms, built American companies, and proudly served their country even when it was undeserving of their loyalty.
The way they made their own economy building Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The way they took back the six letter word and found intimacy through learning to love the brown, dark, black of their being.
The way we are finding and understanding the truth of our history.
That is Black History.
#blackhistorymonth