Second Class Citizen

I know that I am a black man in a white world... I know I never had it made.

Jackie Robinson

On paper the United States of America is a very attractive place. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights champion the protection of rights of individual citizens. Although originally absent, through amendments the idea of equality has joined liberty and freedom as the foundations of our country….on paper. Things tend to always look better on paper than in the real world. Even though our country is over 200 years old tens of millions of Americans are still second class citizens. Being African American and an individual who is always traveling perpendicular to the status quo I am keenly aware of my second class citizenship. I ride a bike instead of driving a car, politically I’m what most people would call a radical, I wear my hair Mohawk style, I’m a straight guy who wears ear rings, I don’t subscribe to any of the major religions (I consider myself an Agnostic Humanist) and I believe that people are more important than allegiance to nationalism, patriotism, and international and national imaginary boundaries. To top it all off I live in San Francisco, a place many Americans see as subversive and out of touch with the rest of the country.


Progress does not just happen organically in the United States. The status quo has to be challenged, in the streets, in the courts, and in the hearts and minds of Americans. Without The Struggle things would never change. Plans are made and people make sacrifices, sometimes they must sacrifice their lives for the possibility of a better tomorrow. When progress is made it is not an end, there is always the fight that remains against those that would usurp and undermine that progress. In the history of America Africans have spent more time in bondage than in freedom. Africans started out as chattel with bellies to the ground in shackles and the boot on the neck. There were rebellions and revolts that history books have chosen to ignore. With emancipation Africans were freed from bondage but cast into the world of segregation and Jim Crowe with little protection from the law. The new freedom came with a heavy cost, terrorism. Africans were hung from trees and burned at the stake in front of smiling crowds of men, women, and children. Sometimes these events were advertised in papers and people traveled in packed trains to see the reckoning. Even after World War II, after the exposure of the Nazi death camps the reign of terror continued. Through the federal courts Africans won the right to an equal education and to ride on the front of a bus but the mandated protection of the National Guard was needed to protect the children. Even the children were not safe. Emmit Till was brutally murdered just one year after Brown vs. Board of Education. Not only was his life taken, his body was disfigured, his skull split in half. His crime, whistling at a white woman. His murderers were known but they were found not guilty by their peers. Emmit‘s peers had no say in the matter. The murderers sold their story to Life magazine for $4,000. They were heroes in the same way Joe Wilson has become a hero. What kind of citizens were Africans that their children could be murdered in cold blood and not be offered equal protection under the law?


African resolve was not broken. African Americans made America accountable for its self proclaimed ideology and self appointed leadership of the free world. We boycotted, we marched, we sat-in, we organized freedom rides on trains and buses, and we challenged the laws that inhibited where we could work, where we could live, and who we could marry. We challenged the laws that inhibited our right to vote and seek representation. We were met not with open arms but with guns, Nazi dogs, batons, fire hoses, and fire bombs. We were set upon by law enforcement and ordinary citizens. In the year of my birth four little girls were murdered when some ordinary citizens bombed a church. These men who called themselves Christians fire bombed a church of Christ taking the lives of Christian children. If you were not safe in a Christian church in a god fearing Christian country there was no place you could call sanctuary. Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wilson were innocent, young, beautiful, Christian girls. Their blood is on the hands of America, forever. We had come to far and suffered too much to turn back and our vigilance resulted in the passing of the Civil Rights Act that would bring the possibility of first class citizenship not only to Africans, but to every other group of people suffering from oppression, discrimination, and terrorist violence at the hands of the law, institutions, and the citizens representing the status quo. Still we had to fight. Our leaders were assassinated in attempt to kill the body by cutting off the head.


Today we have a black President. Even though his mother is white he is considered black. In the world of Judaism if your mother is Jewish you are Jewish. In America it doesn’t matter, if you have one drop of black blood from either line you are black, ask Tiger Woods. It is unbelievable that we have a black President in my life time. I drank two bottles of champagne on election night but I was sober by the next day because I know how it works in America. We are still fighting to be first class citizens and the election of Barak Obama has only intensified the battle. BART officer Joe Meserhle shoots unarmed black citizen Oscar Grant in the back and many people see him as a hero. Joe Wilson calls the President a liar and he is a hero. I see the rabid faces of the mostly white crowds, some of them toting guns, opposing Barak Obama’s policies and it is all too familiar. It’s the same faces we’ve seen at lynchings, the same faces that pardoned sinners for murdering black children, the same faces screaming, threatening, and beating college students at the counter of a diner. The past is the past, the past is the present, will the past also be our future?