Uncle Tom?

I just got back from the polls. Now that I'm 30 I figured I'd be a grown-up and not write my name in for one of the ancillary positions. I still can't believe I didn't win for sheriff a few years back. Anyway, I was standing there in line at Murch Elementary when I realized that I was one of maybe four black people in a crowd of a few hundred. I started to take a picture and update my Facebook status to this:
Reason # 348 why you shouldn't but into the diatribe that white people are evil...they helped elect Obama last time.

DC has been a democratic vote forever. The rich white folks who live in my neighborhood proudly display their Obama paraphernalia in their yards and this morning I saw a sea of Obama hats and bumper stickers. So it kinda pisses me off when I hear people talk like white people only vote Republican and that having a "black" president somehow saves us from imperial rule. First, I like to remind people that Obama is mixed, grew up with his white mom and although he may just look "light skinned," I'm sure that he has love for both sides of his heritage. Second, white people are not the devil.

I don't know why it bothers me so much when I hear black people talk about how white people are out to get them. It started when I was little. When I was little my next door neighbors were white. They had way nicer things than we did, which led five-year-old-me to believe that all white people were rich. They invited me into their house with open arms and I ate dinner with them some nights and watched movies with their family. So one day during Black History Month one of my teachers makes a remark that white people don't like black people. I disagreed with her and she made me stay after class to "talk some sense into me."

She told me that white people shouldn't be trusted and that even if the white people next door to me or the white people at my mother's job were nice to me that it was only because they looked down on me and took pride in being nice to a "nigger." A few days later I had another incident where a different teacher made fun of the only white kid in school and said that his parents must be poor if they couldn't afford to send him to a school with his people.

Now throughout all of this my family was broke as hell and I got the full "inner city black youth" experience. Still, I couldn't understand how white people could be so bad. A few years later I went to college where I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. That put me on this road to Black Pantherism and by the end of freshman year I'd read every speech, essay or book that I could find by anyone who lived through the civil rights movement. I became this dude:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFY2kJ96jNY

Now a funny thing happens when you become afrocentric all of a sudden on the campus of an HBCU. It rarely lasts. I emerged from the library like the character in the Allegory of the Cave. I was ready to lift every voice and sing, march on Washington, and keep our eyes on the prize. Then some girl that I barely knew came by my dorm and invited me to run a train on her with some dudes down the hall. (Um...no) A teacher told me that I was stupid for not cheating on the test with the rest of the class. We had an all-hands meeting in the dorm to discuss the double-digit rapes on campus and the disturbing fact that they had to discard 60% of the blood from the blood drive due to STDs. It was an interesting week.

I wasn't discouraged though. I knew that I was just being tested to see if my convictions were genuine. They were not. After a week back in DC during Winter Break, I decided that not only was the revolution not gonna be televised, it wasn't gonna be starring me. Being in NC had caused a mild form of amnesia. Being shot at and chased down MLK Ave near Anacostia station by some dudes in a car over mistaken identity woke me back up from that amnesia and hammered the final nail in my Black Power coffin.

I'm not saying that all black people are bad just like I'm not saying all white people are good. I'm just saying that I hate blanket statements especially when it comes to race. And I really hate hypocrites who complain about how this country needs to end racism about two sentences before they say something about how white people do this and white people do that. If that makes me an Uncle Tom, then so be it, but to this day I haven't been robbed, chased or jumped by white people. Black people did that...or did they?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3PJF0YE-x4