What does it mean to be black

As an appetizer: are being black and being African synonymous?
No. There is a connection but a definite difference between being born in Africa and
being a black American. Black Americans have emerged in this country not
only in the last place of this race to success that America proposes for
all of its citizens, but last place being both bound and blind. So there’s a
feeling of immense pride that begins building and rolling inside of me when
I think about being black. The history behind the fight.
Being black has little to nothing to do with my actual skin color. Black in
color is something neither my next generation nor I will see; even if I
procreate with the silkiest, ebony man on earth. I have been blended into
existence and my children will bear the beauty of the combination of
cultures from my DNA.
I think about my dad, a black berry from the heart of Mississippi and the
pivotal happiness of my childhood and am excited to eventually raise black
men in his remembrance. Then I think of what it means to be black today and
I am perplexed.
On the one hand I am quick to jump to the defense of the entire black race
when someone says, “He dresses pretty well for a Black guy.” Or when I tell
people that I passed up admission into LSUs journalism department to become
a student at an HBCU (that sadly probably won’t be here in the next 50
years), and they send me a blank stare. Countering to my defense, at times,
is a silence. Not a scared, or full of pity, or angry silence, just a
speechlessness that hovers heavy over me when I see a group of black men
beating black boys for whatever “reason”. Or when black girls pass me by
purposefully, perhaps ignorantly, so overzealously loud that disgust is the
only registering response.
Being black connects us all, especially if you find value in the historical
and often logical realization that humans first originated from Africa.
During a time, in the not so distant past, if you had even an ounce of black
in you the upper echelon would expect, and appreciate your failure and
demise. Today, however, men like my boyfriend — whose grandmother was black
but greatly carries his mother’s Italian genetics — is by any onlooker’s eye
white. He is then outcaste to the very society that once shamed him.
There have never been ‘sides’ to choose. White or black, there is only right
and wrong.
I am often frustrated with the people who look like me and make me feel like
I am competing with my fellow peers for which one of us is the “truest” black.
Being black is not a choice; and then again it is.
Being black is more than a bubble to color in for statistics; it is
representation, a brotherhood, and not everyone deserves to bear the title.
The black woman who shoots her husband is no better than the white cop who
arrests the black youth for skateboarding. Nor should a black man selling
crack to his neighborhood consider himself more of a brother than the Jewish
man coaching the YMCA after-school basketball team.
I am uncertain about the apparent distress that all skinned people on this
earth have and continue to face. But I am certain that if every person spent
a little less time on finding (or less time stalling in the search for) the
importance in their outer vessels, the connectivity throughout this world
would be as definitive as the air we equally share.
We were each placed in a specific shell for a reason, understand, but then
expand.
There is more to your growth than the obsession of your exterior.