The don’t konw who we be…

As a child, I went to a predominantly white private school. I was called everything from nigger, jigaboo and spook. My only so called “best friend” at the school called me his slave, while the rest of the white guys beat me down in the locker room. Being the only black male in all of my classes, I stood with my back against the wall everyday surrounded by hate. I’ll admit I was scared and ashamed to be what I AM.
On one particular afternoon, my teacher pulled me to the side. She told me about a school that she used to teach at that was predominantly black. She said that the school was in poor condition and her students “stank, like they didn’t have runnin’ water.” “Those people need a leader,” she told me. “You can be THEIR leader.”
What my teacher failed to realize and what I really didn’t understand at the time is that WE are natural born leaders and survivors. WE are the sons and daughters of kings named Tutankhamen and queens named Nefertitti. The father of modern medicine, Imhotep, was one of US (not some brainless monster on a movie called “The Mummy”). THOSE PEOPLE that my old teacher was referring to are the descendents of the world’s greatest thought provokers (Maya, Malcolm, Martin, Tupac). OUR skin is the same color as warriors named Muhammed Ali, and survivors named Frederick Douglas. On this very campus, this BLACK College full of “those people,” are many of today’s great thinkers, inventors, leaders and motivators, and trendsetters.
For one moment, I would like all of US to look in the mirror and actually “see” ourselves for who WE really are. WE ARE bad. WE ARE a highly intelligent race of people that absorb information and spew what we have learned back into the faces of OUR adversaries. Unified, each of US represents a finger on the black fist of power.
So was I offended by the photographic “bufoonary” displayed by the students at Auburn University? Do I even care what they think of me? Well, to me a point was proven. People hate what they don’t understand, and fear what they CAN’T conquer. They fear me, so they try to mock, mimic, and tear me down. I understand that none of those depictions in those pictures represent me. To the Auburn students involved in trying to insult the black race, I say this: Nice try. But your mind ain’t deep enough!