By Marcus Pullman via Modvive

“The whole system is racist” Protestors in San Francisco

The prosecution of the Trayvon Martin case was summed up best by Attorney Benjamin Crump

“The whole world was looking at this case for a reason, and what people wanted to see, as we all said, was how far we had come in America in matters of equal justice.”

It wasn’t based on evidence, or eye witnesses, even worse it wasn’t about granting closure for Martin family, it was based on convicting a man to prove a point. The point that the history of racism in this country should determine how we choose to go forward. This case was politicized and used for justification for the existence of our so called “black” leadership. The Al Sharpton’s, Jesse Jackson’s, NAACP, and National Urban League are the ones who failed not us as black people because as Lebron James said “…at the end of the day, tomorrow they have to wake up and have the same life that they had before they woke up today,” they failed the Martin family. This verdict isn’t Emmett Till or Medger Evers NOT EVEN CLOSE, and for these so called educated “blacks” to even compare them only diminishes the legacy of these men and the progress they helped to create.

We as Generation X’ers or Generation Y’ers are also the ones who failed the Martin family. We have turned our backs on everything that was instilled in us from coming out of slavery and Jim Crow in the name of assimilation. We refuse to realize that sometime what people label as progress Is not actually progression but regression. We no longer strive for excellence in education, to own our own businesses, or to create a centralized family unit. No, we are more concerned with looking like our heroes and enjoying the fruits of the civil rights movement of being able to indulge of the worse parts of the Anglo Saxon culture we have merged with. Yet, we want to be able to claim racism when it suits us, or more accurately when our leadership tell us to as they know they can never let a scandal go to waste. However, we are not acknowledging that the appearance of racism has changed. Gone are the days when it slapped you in the face literally, it has evolved as time has moved forward into something different.

Black leadership exists because of racism and the history of racism in America, and was pivotal in creating the world we now take advantage of. However, unlike racism it has not evolved, they still look for the blatantly obvious pre 70’s racism that rarely rears its head. But in the meantime they miss the new racism which has yet to be clearly defined as dictionaries are not much help in understanding what is meant by the word. They usually define it as the belief that one’s own ethnic stock is superior to others, or as the belief that culture and behavior are rooted in race. I believe however when we as Americans speak of racism we mean something substantially deeper than this. Racism is an excuse to not believe that we are all from the same stock. If we were to truly believe that we were equal to whites in every way, then who/what would we blame for poverty, and criminality? Since our American society has outlawed any thought that there is any difference between races, the only possible explanation for black failure is white racism. And since blacks are markedly poor, and crime-prone, America MUST be overrun with pervasive and systematic racism. No other barriers could exist to black ascension.

Here is a theory, how about if the ones holding back black ascension into true liberation from slavery and Jim Crow is ourselves? We continue to use the excuse of racism to negate the fact that we have allowed our traditions and culture to be marginalized and commercialized. Names like Martin Luther King Jr, Emmett Till and Medger Evers are thrown about like company slogans used to sell products, like “Just do it” or “Pepsi The New Generation”. And like those slogans our black corporation AKA black leadership used them to get us to buy what they are selling, which is racism which is what they need to stay in business. Division sells, ‘us versus them’ is such an easy sell, especially in the black community, which is the only reason why we as a people would allow ourselves to get so much more up in arms about this trial than the murder of Heaven Sutton . Wasn’t stopping black on black crime all the rage in the 90’s? I know that’s all that was talked about in CPS (Chicago Public Schools)! Yet hear we are in 2013 more upset that a half white- half Hispanic man killed one of ours and now “has gotten away with it”.

Wake up black America this is the system you have assimilated into. This I the system YOU perpetuate every day, by funding its very existence. Our young women buy weaves and makeup so that they can emulate the model posed to them in the form of Queen Bey (Beyonce’) our young men fall victim to the pressures of trying to measure up to the comparison that we are all from the same stock as Jay-Z, and Lil Wayne. These people, all products of corporate capitalism, all paid to sell us a culture of violence, leisure, and immaturity, instead of just being the entertainment that they should be, which they are very good at, they are the standard for who we are. We then become indebted to banks to try to meet this standard and very few are able to pull themselves from underneath the weight of this debt.

This is the new racism that our leadership should be discussing. The fact that there our only 21 African American owned banks of which 15 were founded before 1980. The lack of black owned grocery stores and farms. Hell, it would be great if Generation X’ers and Y’ers were brought up to speed on the real black wall street . Instead we own BMW’s, Benz’s and buy into luxury goods made in China in record numbers. And I am not referring to those with a DTI (Debt to Income) of 20% or less, this is the majority living check to check. Instead we are force fed an event meant to stir our emotion and stimulate anger that lays dormant in us daily in this assimilated society. An anger that when used correctly used could be converted to an energy similar to the energy that has allowed us to have survive all that America has put us through. But at some point we must stop blaming the American “system” because we are now fully American which means we are part of the system.