Ever Get Tired of Being Called ‘Black’?

Black this, Black that. 

From Blackmail to Black Sunday. Black ink, blacksmith to blackjack. It’s always Black this, Black that.

Right now you probably have a million questions scurrying up and down in your mind, eager to find an escape cavity so it can lend into somebody’s ear. You just don’t want to be the one to say it, don’t you? Me neither. Never been the type who pays too much attention to all these ‘colour bar’ conspiracies, but this weekend, it was just so hard to ignore. It was a blow that caught me right in the jaw, knocking me to the ground without giving me an option to retaliate. Well, it’s not the first time, is it?

After reading a few articles last year on why ‘blacks cannot be racist’, I got to understand the whole issue a lot better. It’s scary to even think that today, more than decades into freedom, emancipation and so-called democratic world setup; somebody would have the guts to start labelling people in the manner this lad did. Oh, and the new name for ‘black’ folks is ‘Blackberries’ (According to this guy). That’s the term this chap used to classify me and a few of my friends, as we were going about our own business on a lazy Saturday evening.

Maybe if I was a fellow from the farmland or rural areas, I would have smiled and laughed alongside his lousy joke. The name sounds exotic too, doesn’t it? I doubt Research In Motion, wherever their offices are in Canada, sat down, and actually agreed to name their brand of digital gadgets ‘BlackBerry’ because they will be sold to the ‘blacks’, or it will be a name that will reinstate the one ‘we’ have come to be used to over the years? Maybe even this lad thought it would be cool to throw it at a ‘black’ guy like me just to see how I am going to react to it. Just so you know, I didn’t’ even smile at this guy. 

“Democracy is supposed to give you the feeling of choice, like Painkiller X and Painkiller Y. But they're both just aspirin.”- Gore Vidal

Who had a choice in all this, I wonder? I also had a choice, probably to shove my size nine down his throat, far down  that he could taste the sole of my shoe, and then kindly ask him to spell ‘Blackberry’ for me, backwards this time. Well, if it was another day, maybe back in the 1800s, that could have been an option. During the days were rationality was a thing of the past, I suppose. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. 

It was a dog eat dog world, I’ll give you that, but its attitudes like this that continue to thrust the sharp-blade of racial discrimination back into our currently mutilated wounds. They haven’t totally healed, have they? Maybe a bowdlerized version of this article would have been better for most of you. But my mind is now too sharp to let me down. Just so you know, this is the edited one, deleted the one I had started on

I know discrimination when I see it, and the fact that he had a smile on his face when he said it doesn’t tone down the effect his words have on my heart and mind. This world is far much better without all this derogatory comportment. 

I would love to hear what you have to say about this. How does one react to such, given the current situation in the world? To me, this word wouldn’t be any different from the ‘N’ word, or the ‘K’ word for that matter. Share your views...make use of the comment box below.

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