Mission Accomplished?

Well this is a monumental and historical week! All of my ranting and ravings of being a political expert has paid off! We have our first African American nominated for the Presidency of the United States. As I’ve watched every minute of the convention, I realized that this is true reality TV. I wonder how many of our youth have even flipped the channel to the convention. When I look back at the “struggle” I wonder If our youth will ever know what we went through as a people. Now don’t’ get me wrong, I’m not that old! I wasn’t friends with Harriet Tubman and I didn’t march with King, so I understand that a lot of what I know about our fight for racial equality has been read in books. The goal has always been to struggle and strive to make things better for the next generation. The question is, how do you make things better but also make sure they understand what it took to get here. I was talking to a young woman and although she was impressed with the election she wasn’t amazed, excited and as overjoyed as I was. I realized that when she was born we already had African American Mayors, Senators and Congress members and was very, very young when we had our first elected Governor, we had an African American woman and man as Secretary of Sate, so this next step of having an African American President didn’t seem that foreign to her. She had never been denied a job due to her race (that she knew of) and seemed to think the country was pretty much done with racism. Now she did agree that racial profiling and problems with the law did exist for African Americans, but that was only in certain areas she said. Since in her mind race was not a factor, she had pondered voting for Hillary, because she felt that she faced more closed doors being a woman than being African American. Martin Luther King is moving further and further away from our youth and eventually he’ll be some guy in their Social Studies book. But that’s what we wanted right? For our children to never have to suffer due to their race. The goal was always to make it better, but by accomplishing this goal will they understand and respect how we got here? It’s not just them, we’re all further removed from the experiences that our parents and grandparents went through, it’s a natural progression. So I guess we can say mission accomplished? …………right?