I was walking through the Club Fair at Student Orientation at my high school when a strange club caught my attention. It was called Armaggedon. Armaggedon? Really? For 36 weeks, we would talk about 2012 and the Mayan Count Calendar? How lame... intill I looked at it close up.
Armaggedon was a club in which people would do stepping, modeling, and work with fashion. I waited in line to sign up when an old classmate saw me.
"Uh... Breanna? What are you doing?" She asked.
"I'm signing up! You know, at first I thought it was a club about 2012, but boy, was I wrong!"
"Its about dancing and stepping." She said, bluntly.
Umm, I can read, thank you.
"I know! It also says singing!"
"There's-there's no singing." She said quickly. I had already signed up--she couldn't do anything about it.
Why did she sound so skeptic of me? I remembered her from freshman seminar--she believed that her and I working together would result in absolute domination. Why wasn't she so enthusiastic about me being in Armaggedon?
Just because I didn't speak ebonics or play basketball or whatever black people do nowadays, it means that I can't dance? I can't step? I can't do anything that blacks do?
I was born to a black Mother and a black Father who's roots can trace back to Africa. I wear micro braids to control my crazy, untamable hair. My skin is dark...
So I'm still not black, because I don't use ebonics in my speech? Because I don't wear Adidas and funky, rock t-shirts? Because I believe if Lil Wayne does the crime, then he does the time and I have never had the urge to rap along with Snoop Dogg?
Not all of them are like that. Not all of them steal your bikes or break into your car. Not all black women scream and raise hell when they're angry. We Blacks can be educated. We can use big words. We can use English orally and verbally--and in good terms!
Dr. King, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and more activists of way back had given us the right for all of these things! So when you turn away your own kind because they're different from their stereotypes, your no better than Jim Crow.