It Was All A Dream...

It Was All a Dream…

One of the biggest discouragements associated with being a journalist is censorship. The following is an article I wrote in December of 2006 that was never allowed to hit the press. It’s funny how…two and a half years have passed and it still seems relevant.

“What happens to a dream deferred?” Hughes couldn’t have asked a better question and it’s answered best by racism’s fifty year impersonation of the possum, well worthy of an Oscar. When Martin Luther King proclaimed “let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York,” I strongly doubt he expected the cadence of liberty to compete with the blare of fifty some odd gunshots ringing out in the streets of New York city or the monotone in the scolding voice of an all time favorite sitcom bit player, revealing his feelings regarding the African American race.

It all started when Kanye West went on ABC, shivering in rampant fury as he pulled up a seat next to Mike Meyers, looked directly into the live broadcasting camera with a state of odium amongst his pupils and courageously asserted that our president “does not care about black people.” Well…actually I guess we’d really have to blame Katrina because if she didn’t have a temper tantrum across New Orleans, maybe Kanye never would have flipped out on national TV. But then again…had George not been off in Iraq trying to get his hands on some oil reserves, perhaps our nation could have focused on domestic issues and contained that hurricane from wreaking a record breaking toll on the country. Or maybe Bush never would have found the gall to offer us the notion that there were “nuclear weapons,” in the Middle East as grounds to venture into Iraq in the first place if we hadn’t begun playing a game of “Where’s Waldo,” with Osama Bin Laden after we developed cravings for a scapegoat to take all responsibility for the demolition of the World Trade Center, giving George W. the “O.K.” to use any military force necessary to “make a stand against terrorism.” So in theory, 9/11 marks the day racism began to rear its ugly head again.

Ever since CNN broadcasted footage of minorities stranded on roof tops of Louisiana, eyes began squinting, fingers began pointing and a nation which once symbolized unity trickled down to a nation divided. It took a natural disaster for us to realize we weren’t fighting anyone but ourselves. The only thing terrorizing this country is the underlying prejudice which lies throughout.

I’ll go as far to provide controversial insight on the situation. Kids these days refer to each other using the “n” word in phrases such as “That’s my n****,” and “What up n****.” Anyone even a bit familiar with the civil rights movement will agree with me that Malcolm X would turn in his grave if he heard his brothers and sisters using the word that bigots once used to oppress the African American race as casual slang.

So in 1863 Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation, signaling the beginning of the journey to racial equality and forty three years later a twenty-three year old man by the name of Sean Bell is murdered Amadou Diallo style leaving his bachelor party, hours before he would’ve gotten married. Four undercover New York City police officers shot at the innocent Bell and two of his unarmed friends over fifty times as they sat in their car on “suspicion” that “one of the men were armed.” I personally believe that after five or six rounds of shots are fired, someone supposedly in possession of a fire arm would start shooting back but…I graduated from no policy academy. Then the cops file a police report stating how one of the VICTIMS of the shooting was an ex-con and how he might have been planning on retrieving a gun from another location and then returning to the club even though they didn’t find one on him. And this wasn’t the only race related issue publicized throughout the week of the event. This incident occurred only six days after comedian Michael Richards, best known as Kramer from “Seinfeld,” broke out in a racial tirade against African American men in the audience at a stand up show at the Laugh Factory comedy club in L.A, which he claims was an angry reaction to his act being interrupted. Richards shouted “shut up! Fifty years ago we would’ve had you upside down with a F****** fork up you’re a**,” and the only thing more upsetting then this display was the outbreak of laughter followed by his “joke.” It wasn’t until he proceeded to use the N word redundantly that someone in the crowd shouted “Oh My Go….” And soon after attendants began filing out, bringing his end to a show…leaving us to imagine how much further he would have gone given an audience to project the rest of his thoughts to. The targets of Richards’s verbal assault were in attendance to celebrate a friends twenty-sixth birthday party which they had been looking forward to for weeks. Two of Richards targets appeared on the tonight show and explained that as they walked in the door in a group of fifteen, a diverse group, Richards announced “a bunch of dirty black people and Mexicans have just walked into the club.” They later revealed that Richards told them that he had enough money to purchase them or put them in jail and that when he wakes up tomorrow “he will still be rich but we’ll still be a n****.” Richards claimed that since the Hurricane Katrina incident he had been harboring aggression towards the black community.

Since our current president has come into office, he has placed militants along the border of Mexico to prevent Mexicans from entering the country, been accused of having low regards for the African American race and has seemingly given more aid to the countries he helped destroy than he has given to the states torn apart after the last years hurricane season.

Minorities stranded in flooded cities, minorities being verbally attacked on their birthdays and minorities getting gunned down hours before their wedding. I’m no politician. I’m just a seventeen year old kid who reads the paper. So someone please let me know, where does a multi-cultural nation go from here?

I can’t say we’re better off now than we were before,
in synopsis this is my minority report.