Marcus Brown
Finding myself halfway through Black History Month with the end of President’s Obama second term fast approaching, I can’t help but feel sentimental. Every now and then, my own blackness washes over me and reminds me of the subtext that has informed and shaped my reality.
It isn’t the moments in which I look around my class and see myself in the third person omniscient, a black trash bag floating atop a sea of mayonnaise. It is not when I read books written by old Germans with passing descriptions of the shiftless, simple-minded American Negro and must convince myself that it is still beautiful prose. I must convince myself that the author was a just of a product of his time. No, my moments of lucidity come when I scroll through my news app and read things such as Bill Clinton saying, “We are all Mixed-Race,” or how Meryl Streep said, “We’re all Africans, really.”
Maybe it’s all true; I’m not a scientist. I don’t know much about genetics. I’m sure you’d love to explain to me how when you think about it, we’re all the same on the inside. Bill Clinton made the same good-natured mistake. While being introduced by Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., at a campaign rally for his wife, Bill Clinton was described as “a heck of a stand-in” for the first black president. Clinton went on to explain how race is basically a social construct and the issues surrounding it could be solved if we “fixated on the other 99 and a half percent” of the human genome we all share. Streep stated something similar in Berlin as part of an international film jury. Streep spoke on the “core of humanity that travels right through every culture” before sliding in the apparently little known fact that “we’re all from Africa originally.” But I would ask: Are we really?
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I couldn’t name half the countries in Africa, and I’m not even 100 percent sure of my own ancestry, so I can’t help but feel skeptical when people try to persuade me about the universality of the human condition. My humanity has nothing to do with Africa. I don’t consider myself African. I’ve never been there and probably never will.
I’m black, and the problem is that these statements always come from the right place. I cannot criticize the intentions of Clinton or Streep for what they said. What they are saying is probably factually correct, but what is being ignored is that American society was built and mounted on that “one half of 1 percent” of the human genome that the compassionate and racially aware want us to look past. The reasoning behind the atrocities committed as a result of racism may be arbitrary, but the consequences are not. The voices that scream “All Lives Matter” over “Black Lives Matter” do a greater disservice than those wearing white robes and burning crosses.
I know you loved Beyoncé’s “Formation” video, and you always remember to check your privilege. I’m not being sarcastic. I truly appreciate it, but do not try to make us out to be the same. Do not sweep centuries of society’s failings under the rug because the idea of false equality is easier to look at than the grainy footage of black boys being shot to death.
We can be different and still get along. We don’t need to wear the same skin. We don’t need to live the same lives for me to treat you with respect and understanding. Trying to ignore our differences will not result in equality. The only way our society will ever truly be equal is if we see, accept, and accommodate each other’s differences in that order and work from there.