The world doesn’t always have to be “black” or “white.” I don’t get why we all can’t just be humans. That idea isn’t just my crazy fantasy or utopian dream. Why can’t we all come together as humans? Legally speaking, segregation was abolished, yet our lives still seem to be so partitioned. I'm not saying that we just need to all assimilate because there is still value in culture, but everything doesn’t need to be “black” or “white.” At the end of the day, what’s different between my white neighbor and me? Does the history between our two cultures make us incapable of genuine human interaction? Does he or she have an extra lung or eleven fingers that I don’t know about? Why does going to the “white” party have to be so daunting, yet the “black” party is a “comfortable and serene” experience for the whole family? I believe in the Black experience, and I don’t want to undervalue our culture. However, why does the invisible border or force that divides me and my white cohorts never seem to go away? It's like the walls of Jericho. Except that no matter how much we parade around the city, the walls never seem to fall. Perhaps we could learn from the Israelites by continuing to parade around this wall or border between us. I believe, though, we’ve become complacent with the idea that the wall will never fall on both sides. Has the triumphant melody with which we used to parade around the walls been thwarted by the persistence of ignorance and self-imposed “blackness” partly derived from ghetto culture? I shouldn’t feel pressured to act and behave a certain way because that thing is deemed as “white?” When we dictate things as “black” or “white,” all we do is strengthen the walls further. So maybe it’s a problem on both sides of the wall. In the end, no matter how much we bust our “jigaboo jive” around that wall, we’ll probably never see it fall. And people on both sides of that wall are gonna be totally fine with that, but is that the way things have to be?
I don't want a cultureless society; I just think we need to stop treating culture and the social construct of race as some boundary between us. We don’t need to assign racial identities to things that don't inherently have race.
"if there is no struggle, there is no progress." - Frederick Douglas
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