21 Jul, 2013
Goodbye to my American Dream by Tiffanie Drayton – Alternet
I survived because I was never able to make America my home. I never watched my childhood neighborhood become whitened by helicopter lights in search of criminals or hipsters in search of apartments. No state, city or town has been a mother to me, cradling generations of my family near her bosom, to then be destroyed by unemployment or poverty. No school system had the time or opportunity to relegate me to “remedial,” “rejected” or “unteachable.” I never accepted the misogynistic, drug-infested, stripper-glamorizing, hip-hop culture that is force-fed to black youths through square tubes. I am not a product of a state of greatness but a byproduct of emptiness.
In that empty, dark space I found my blackness. I stripped myself of the labels, painfully peeling them off one by one. Beneath them there is a wounded, disfigured colored woman who refuses to be faceless anymore, remain hidden any longer. My face may be repulsive to some since it bears proof that race continues to be a problem.
Read the rest: Goodbye to my American Dream | Alternet.
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