Blacks as Amnesia Victims

My grandmother has begun to age, and it is the norm that her memory is beginning to phase out. Maybe the stress of losing her daughter at the young age of 50 or burying two sisters in two years is the cause. But whatever the case, her memory is shifting to a more demented state.

Our memories are what remind us of what we experienced, the joy and even the heartache.

With that said, Blacks in America are also encouraged to be amnesia victims … the pain of a harsh past of mistreatment, slavery, lynching and civil rights violations just supposed to be forgotten and erased from the memory based on the granting of affirmative action and equal opportunities under the law, which should have been natural born rights to begin with.

This country would like Blacks to forget the maltreatment of its people in a country that has accepted and embraced outsiders and called its own Black citizens refugees in the case of Katrina. This country would like Blacks to forget about their women being raped, children sold and often cut from the wombs of their mothers, body parts mutilated and sold for souvenirs and men snatched from their families beaten and sent far away to damage the Black family dynamics, which continues to have an impact today.

That same amnesia that America wants Blacks to move past is being called Nigger and having separate bathrooms and water fountains, being beaten and jailing young kids to seniors citizens just for pleading for civil rights which was guaranteed to every citizen under the Constitution but not honored or given to Blacks until new legislation was passed in the mid 1960s.

That same amnesia that caused Blacks to be beaten and killed by the police for being Black in America and being seen as a threat or profiled based completely on race, that same amnesia is encouraged to forget the image created through society as the stigma of Black men painted as thugs and animals and Black women as welfare queens, considered easy sexually and lazy otherwise.

See, we repress memories when they are too painful. We experience PTSD when those same experiences reoccur. The expectation of Blacks is to let it go, move forward and forget about the past. But the past remains a challenge when these things are a constant part of the present.

Food for thought … keeping it real.