it’s funny because people think i’m quiet

but i’m just listening to everyones conversations

and figuring out your weaknesses

and i’ll use them against you to get further in life

because i hate everyone

(via musicaloutlet)

I just spent about an hour sitting here watching Jane Elliott’s Blue Eye/Brown Eye Experiment videos. The kids version hit my soul the most. I literally noticed that I was sitting here crying. 

Growing up in Maryland, I honestly do not really encounter racism and therefore I have pushed it out of my mind as if it does not really happen. However, the videos brought it right back to the forefront of my mind. In Louisiana, when I would in WalMart, there could be a white person in the aisle with me and they would stand there and not say excuse me for me to move or they would push past me as if they did not see me. That’s racism and yet I said nothing about it. I sat there and let it happen. The biggest problem is that I didn’t see the problem in it.

I realized that I have tried to make myself fit in in America by being “not Black.” I have noticed that I don’t act like My Black is Beautiful. When I went to school in Louisiana, every person I encountered would happen to notice that I don’t talk like a black person. But why do Blacks and whites have to talk differently,. I can think that it goes back to slavery times and the fact that blacks were not allowed to be educated like the whites but that’s not my ultimate goal of this post. But yeah. So of course I have been put in the category as being an oreo, white on the inside but black on the outside. Basically, I am black no matter what I do, I can change the color of my skin in my mind and I can try to educate myself like whites and talk like whites but I will still always be black. 

I want to know why I have to change who I am so that I fit in more and so that I can try and seperate myself from being a “real” black person. The thing is that I honestly don’t know and yet I continue to do it on a daily basis. I felt as if I had become more of a black person by being at an HBCU and when I came back to Maryland, I needed to hang around whites so that I could change myself again. 

The whole issue always boils down to the racism issue in America. I wrote this post because I realized that although I am a Black American, I tried to think and ultimately be a White American and I find that I am not being true to myself in doing this. I want to be myself, I want to be Black, I want to be Cierra and most of all, I want it to be enough so that I DON’T want to change me. 

(Source: youtube.com)