I am a Black Woman, Mother, and Grandmother, who is experiencing anger, frustration, and depression due to what is happening to the Black community.
The question I ask myself every day is– why are we killing each other and why are the police killing our Black children, women, and men? Why are guns and drugs so easily accessible in the Black community? When our Black children are killed just because they are Black a part of me dies. I can’t turn this feeling off because it is embedded in me. I have lost sleep and shed tears over the past few months. So much, that it has been difficult to get out of bed.
I was raised in Canton, Mississippi. I have experienced racial discrimination the majority of my life. I was 16 years old when a man was killed in my home state of Mississippi. I held hands and did voter registration drives with he and others
Today I am appalled at some churches’ leadership. It would appear that some are more concerned about the pastor church anniversaries, and other related church events instead of outreach to their collective communities.
Some questions I struggle with are: Have we become tired, complacent, materialistic, and apathetic? Why we had to drink from colored only fountains and our mothers and grandmothers fed white babes their breast milk? Why were black women continuously raped by white slave owners and could not refuse their sexual advances? How humiliating.
Black women are a strong force in the family. They (WE) have endured.
Many painful situations were there then and now still today. Black women have worked hard in fields, done domestic work, and labor work for 2-3 dollars a day, but are classified as lazy. Our Black men are classified as 3/5 of a man and thugs.
Black Americans have experienced these racial injustices for over 400 years. Let’s hope America will make Black Lives Matter.
Shirley Minter McGee
