Towards An Afrocentric America

Two summers ago, my son and I got in a cab in Meriden Connecticut en route to Wesleyan University in Middletown. It was a perfect day. Breezy, yet bright and sunny and as my son hurried from the cab to return to his dorm, I'm sure I was beaming. He looked so inspired, his shoulder length dreadlocks bouncing as he rushed back to complete a five-week photography program he'd already begun. My motherly reverie was rudely interrupted by the cab driver as he coasted off.

"Your son goes there? Wow." He began. "Black people lazy. Very lazy. No computers. No studying. All they want is to steal and sell drugs. You're lucky. Your son is different ."

I instantly regretted having asked him to take me back to the train station, was outraged and peered into what I could see of his face in the rear view mirror to try and make sense of him.  He was gold-brown with a coif of jet black hair and an equally jet black unibrow. I wasn't able to assess if he was aware he was making the most racist observation one stranger can make to another, and intentionally insulting me or was someone so out of touch with the American mainstream, he considered this acceptable small talk with a black female passenger.

"How long have you been in this country?" I asked.

"Not long time." He shrugged.

"Obviously, because you don't know very much about America or about African-American people," I fired back, adding in afterthought, "Are you a citizen?"

You can find my maternal grandparents on passenger lists at ellisislandrecords.org, so I'm not exactly Captain America myself, but my reasoning was that if he had been given the educational materials on U.S. history and society that immigrants are required to study to become citizens, he wouldn't be so ignorant.

"I am a citizen, miss." he sang in an impatient tone.

I tipped him the same amount I would have tipped a driver who had not ruined my afternoon, fearing that by not doing so, I would somehow make his negative perception of black people worse. Noticing the angry stare he was giving me as I got out, I realized I shouldn't have given him a dime. It occurred to me that I should place a complaint with the dispatcher. Too overwhelmed by the whole thing, however, I merely boarded my train feeling upset.

I think it's safe to say that as 2009 and the Obama era begins, unregulated, each-man-for-himself capitalism has run out of steam, but what about this each-man-for-himself culture of ours? The prevailing myth is that on entering the US, an immigrant is granted economic opportunity unequalled anywhere else on the planet and that possessing this unlimited economic freedom in and of itself is what will then make them an American.  

Still, there's a little test that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services requires that an immigrant pass that is written in the same disinterested voice as a driver's manual. I was able to find 100 of its sample questions online. Only one, which asks who Martin Luther King was, alludes to black people having played a crucial role in the creation of not just the physical, but ideological foundations of this country.

The correct answer simply seems to be: a civil rights leader. I'm not sure, however, how tangible the words 'civil rights' are to someone who may come from a society where minorities are discriminated against or even methodically raped and murdered as a social strategy.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 stopped lots of evil, extremely backwards behavior in this country.  More importantly, it set a standard -- see MLK's  "I Have A Dream Speech" for the most eloquent example of this -- that we haven't reached entirely, (some might say at which we've failed miserably) but still puts us light years ahead of so many of the countries from which immigrants arrive every day.  So you'd think it would be absolutely essential to make it understood by immigrants and Americans alike, that the source of some of our countries most cherished ideals are the African-American community -- or more simply put: this great open access society would not exist without thousands upon thousands of black people having visualized, protested and organized it.

Yes, having a black president helps but not if he can so easily be classified as, "different."