I’ve noticed something about my people and even society as a whole. Not something that is an overarching truth; I for one hate gross generalizations, but it is something that applies to most. People are not interested in fighting for an ideal in our age. Back in the day a black man who had never been discriminated against would more than likely still participate in the Civil Rights movement. Why? Because his people were suffering which meant that he was suffering. Of course there were some who had found a niche to be able to succeed and did not want to lose their footing by associating with the blacks who were demanding social justice, but as a whole I believe that there were more people who were willing to fight for equality regardless of how they had been treated personally. The selfish sentiments have spread to become the majority in 2012 though. Blacks seem to have found that the easiest way to survive and make it is to make it as an individual. We rarely fight for the social injustices of anyone else and if we do it is usually for the social class that we most closely associate with. The plight of the “lesser” African American is rarely the concern of an African American who has gained some status or clout in his community. They try to tuck our blackness away behind our success and hope that no one realizes that they are connected to the people in Section 8 housing and the people on welfare and food stamps. I would even venture to say that they don’t believe that they are connected to those people.
The problem is that to many white people we are still connected by the same chains that they bound us in to bring us to this country. That is where stereotypes come from. That is why they always name black people in your major and expect you to know them. That is why they try to talk about ‘black’ music and impress you with the artists that they know. It is the source behind the conversations that they have behind closed doors about black people that we don’t even know about. Most of the time it isn’t blatant racism so don’t get me wrong. But for the most part we are still a group to them and we are not just connected by our skin color. We as African Americans on the other hand, have tried to separate ourselves from each other and pave our own individual paths to success. We have our rights on paper we feel that the “dream” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had has been realized. I’m not saying that it hasn’t…but has it?
I am not limiting my disappointment to just African Americans. My generation as a whole is grossly unaware with what is going on in the world around them. With the globalization implications of the internet and always being connected through smartphones, you would think that young people would be the first to know about everything going on in the world and in society. Instead it is the opposite. Most young people are too busy tweeting their own lives and following celebrities to look on CNN.com and see what is happening around them. Until celebrities started showing support of Occupy Wall Street most young people had no clue what it was. It is sad that are so self absorbed that we don’t pay attention to what is happening around us. Facebook, Twitter, and other sites like them are creating, fostering and encouraging a narcissistic generation who is more concerned with how they look and what they are wearing than the war in Afghanistan or U.S. prisoners in Egypt.
This is a rant. Don’t look for any grand suggestions on how to fix this. I just hate that society is deteriorating in this manner. For all the connectivity that this generation has, we seem to be drifting further and further apart. As for my original point, no is willing to fight for the ideal partially because no one knows which ideals need fighting for. We are too self absorbed to see injustices going on right under our noses and when we do see them we think that a tweet or blog post is going to help fix it.
