As you already know, my name is Jerome Anderson. I'm 17, 3 months away from being 18, and I was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. In 2013, I'm about to be legally known as a man. But in reality, I must admit that I'm a little afraid. As a Black man, how will I be seen by society? Or what if I never make it to the point of being seen, whatever that means, and be invisible instead? I'm not dead. So why I am so afraid of being a ghost in America?
I've never spent a lot of time in school learning about our history. This year, however, my counselor just happened to place me in your class. Though I grew up in a Black community all of my life, I didn't really care too deeply about the history of it and those before me. In school, the biggest dose of knowledge that I received was during Black History Month. My teachers would spend some time talking about Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, and some others. After February, we kept it moving, and I was busy trying to pass math, science, and reading. I just wasn't challenged by my "educators" to think about what it meant be to Black and how I could help to make more history.
Anyway, I guess this is a roundabout way of saying that I feel educated in your class, and I've become more visible to myself. You told us to write a report about the Civil War, and I wasn't too sure where to start. A friend of mine told me to read W.E.B DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk, and it's stuck with me. One quote that's symbolic to me is,
"It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War; and however much they who marched South and North in 1861 may have fixed on the technical points of urban and local autonomy as a shibboleth, all nevertheless knew, as we know, that the question of Negro slavery was the real cause of the conflict." (55)DuBois helped me to realize that slavery caused a Civil War that never ended. I notice divisions all around me. There's still a Civil War that persists in not all Black families, but too many...absentee fathers, single mothers, neglected children. Black on black crime is a reality where I live, and the local news has something to say everyday about people dying. Ignorance seems bliss. America as a whole is symbolic of a divided house that was built on a complicated foundation. And mentally, I've been struggling with maintaining health. Peace of mind is hard for me to obtain. I've become more cognizant of my condition as a Black man in America, and I'm not sure how to reconcile the pieces. Yet, I think this class is a first step, and I want to keep opening my mind. I want to think more about the state of Black women too, and how history has impacted that. I read about Sally Hemings in The Hemingses in Monticello like you suggested and that's helped me a little with learning more about the relationship between race, gender, and power.
I still have a long way to go, but I truly believe DuBois' point about how Black people need to be educated. He stated, "The training of the schools we need today more than ever, --the training of deft hands, quick eyes and ears, and above all the broader, deeper, higher culture of gifted minds and pure hearts." It's not easy, but I want to be conscious.
Sincerely,
Jerome
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