Waking up at 7:00 a.m. this morning (earlier than most students I know), I prepared myself for yet another busy week ahead of me. That’s pretty much college anyway in a nutshell, right?
After knocking out fifth-teen or so pushups, a “fact” the Twitter account Fact Book suggest best helps wake people up in the morning, I made an unusual visit to the café for breakfast to set up this present moment perfectly.
(Hence, I’m working on time management, and personal fitness.)
It’s my first day of work as an English tutor today. And I’m thrilled, to say the least.
Finally going over a regular routine (checking emails, composing emails, contemplating emails, and reading kick-ass articles published on HBCU Buzz, The Root, The Huffington Post, and etc.), I came across an article on The Root titled, 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro.
Insert Facebook “like” button.
Of course, the general theme of the article is “100 Amazing Facts About the Negro,” though I learned 100 plus more interesting things as an result.
The small book was printed in 1934 by Joel Augustus Rogers, an acclaimed journalist in the black press.
In his “Amazing Fact #8,” Rogers writes, “Beethoven, the world’s greatest musician, was without a doubt a dark mulatto. He was called ‘The Black Spaniard.’ His teacher, the immortal Joseph Haydn, who wrote the music for the former Austrian National Anthem, was colored, too.”
Foolishly, I quickly stormed off to the Twitter airways, tweeting, “One thing that irks my soul is how history repaints some of the most visionary people to ever live as white, erasing their actual blackness.”
I soon found Roger’s claim to be false, apparently (which tells you to never trust any source without proper and valid research). As a cause and effect, however, I stumbled across something far more factual.
Is it me, or is Black history sealed and well conserved, against the grain of Blacks today?
Maybe it’s me; I am in this little “rebel against ‘the Man,’ government, and other corrupt entities” stage of my life. But then again, maybe I’m right.
(Go figure.)
Since childhood, I have been indirectly taught by media, family and friends that blacks were inferior to whites and the other great races of our time. And since childhood, I have kept that modeled perception alive and well, allowing it to consume my life, like my mother’s ambition for natural hair products.
That’s before I arrived in college; a HBCU, to be exact. And I now know that most of the world has been bamboozled about Blacks and their amazing achievements in every spectrum of life.
Certainly, with all the successes and distinction Blacks have accomplished throughout history, the version of Blacks in America’s media today is, to some extent, accurate, for the reason these people face* three-hundred years of slavery and mental, spiritual, emotional and physical deprivation to that of other races.
Nonetheless, as I wrote on Twitter days ago, people are, sometimes even unconsciously, a product of their environment. But people shouldn’t use that as an excuse, all the time.
(Indirectly, I was criticizing my black networks, and myself.)
Though, this is all an opinion from a crazed college black man who knows no better…
Carry on.
