What
happens when the soundtrack of your life collides with the sound track of your
existence? When a marginalized member of society is on the outside of the
marginalized group? I am an African-American woman. Born to working-class
bootstrapping parents. Who bought and believed in the American dream.
We
left the segregated west side of Chicago for the desegregated but not
integrated south side of the city. At the time we thought they were one and the
same; we learned they are not.
It was a glorious time—my childhood. A time of Rhythm
and Blues, a time of P-funk., a time of Soul—music that soothed. It was Black
music for Black people. big afros, dashikis, fists raised in salute to our
brothers and sisters in the struggle for equality. My family traveled the road
of James Brown, Say It Loud I’m Black and
I’m Proud straight to Roseland—a working class community on the far south
side. We hummed the tune of the Stylistics Ooh,
ooh, child things are going to get easier because we had knocked on the door
of integration, and opened—or it seemed. We were Black; we were beautiful; we
were proud.
We
had ushered in another migration of bodies moving toward something better—we
hoped. We prayed. And for a while it
seemed like we might find that Stairway
to Heaven, as music merged into an amalgamation of colorless songs. We
believed Sweet Dreams Are Made of This
who we to disagree in the land of milk
and honey?
This
pseudo-migration created degrees of acculturation followed by assimilation
which should have led to integration, but instead created another form of
separation forcing us into annihilation as we screamed, Don’t You Want Me Baby, Don’t
You Want me Now? as the White families moved out as fast as the Black ones
moved in. Then the businesses moved out, and the drugs moved in. First it was
those following Rick James Mary Jane,
followed by White Lines that broke
and cracked into something lethal that we could not escape. Now Molly is the
new girl on the block.
For
awhile I lived in the theoretical Multicultural Mecca that is Hyde Park, and
while Michael was King and Whitney was Queen, we tried to sink our teeth into the
dream that has become our nightmare. We stopped Fighting the Power of Public Enemy and drunk the Kool-aid of white
supremacy. And so the socially conscious songs that gave the world a peek into
Black America across the urban landscapes gave way to the modern day minstrel
shows and the self-hatred of a group of people caught up in excessive
consumption and greed.
Brainwashed
into believing that as long as they get theirs by any means necessary, then all
is well in the world. The new millennium was nothing new. It set us back to
where we started in the bowels of the slave ship—back to the realities of our
blighted life. So real is the level of poverty, so real is the degradation and
dehumanization , it seems surreal.
It’s
the gun-toting pimpled faced boys posted up on YouTube. The onscreen spilled in real life beef of Chief Keef. It’s the Bitch
Betta Have My Money track of the
girls still in grade school working the track of Michigan Ave. It’s Bands that Make her Dance, when what she
really wants is to Dance With Her Father—again
or even for the first time.
We
should have been One Nation Under A
Groove, but we were Slippin’ into the
Darkness –of our reality in urban America—Roseland with t-shirts that
emblazoned with God Made it Roseland,
Niggas made it the Wild Hun’eds. I am not a ‘hood girl. You get no
apologies from me as I try to change the station from the static clinging to
parts of my life. This Noise they call
music reaching into my window early in
the mornings and lulling me to sleep at night. The sounds of music shared without
my permission from heart-bumping base that beats me all upside my head. Loud,
angry voices. Sirens. The rat-a-tat-tat
of a gun. Sometimes I call 9-1-1. But Flava-Fave
already said 9-1-1 is a joke, only nobody’s
laughing. Families are wailing against the unending violence.
Drake said we started from the bottom now we’re
here, but where is here? We went from ghetto, to savage, now ratchet and we're proud of that? The madness makes me wanna holla and throw up both my hands, but I hold onto
the beauty of my people. I am reminded that a lump of coal can be transformed
into the sparkling gems that the world treasures. And I hold on that we will return
to our greatness and know that we are
beautiful like diamonds in the sky.
Shine Bright
Like A Diamond
Shine Bright
Like A Diamond