Sixth Post: Complicity in Stereotyping

I was walking to the library today when I heard/saw a black guy leaving Kerr yelling out the lyrics to a hip-hop song. I paused to listen, and in a few seconds heard the words Fu--, Bi---, Cu--, Pu---, A--, Sh--, and of course Ni----. Some of them I heard repeatedly, and I stopped to listen for no longer than ten seconds. My thoughts ran somewhere along these lines:

For more than a hundred and forty years blacks have been fighting to be taken seriously, to be thought of as equals, and to eliminate all racial slurs from the vernacular of the allegedly oppressive white majority. Members of the black civil rights movement have rallied; they've boycotted; they've brought a million men to the steps of the National Mall. They've adapted to our system of government and lobby for a cornucopia of legislative agendas. They've made real progress and have had to fight tooth and nail for much of it. And in the early years, when the old guard of the deep south was still in power, where they fought they often paid dearly for it. They were beaten, raped, or both. They had lye thrown in their eyes, been attacked by dogs and been firehosed, tear-gassed, and tasered. They've been lynched.

And then there's this kid, walking down the sidewalk, with many people in earshot, literally yelling out rhyming couplets of vitriol and ignorance. Completely unaware of the suffering and the resiliency of all who had come before. He was acting like an attention-starved child, who resorts to yelling out bad words because negative attention is better than none at all. Or like a coward with low self-esteem who uses shocking and provocative behavior to say, "look at me, pay attention to me!"

The more I thought about it, the sadder I became. I felt sad for the wasted sacrifice of everyone who died, or suffered, or knew someone who did, so that this guy could own property or vote or attend college (not to mention not be a slave). I felt sad for his parents, who most likely have memories from the civil rights movement, and who see what their son has reduced it to. But most of all, I pity him, for being completely oblivious to all of it.