What to do...

Hey young world.
I have a thought.
The strange fruit from which the title of this blog derives
is off of bloodshed
from the middle passage to my home country
from the lynching of several bodies and the starvation of others
from my TV screen to my own backyard.
from capitalistic means of depriving the periphery countries from substantial means of living
...

The other day in my class I watched a part of a documentation called Black Nation. It talked about the situation of run down neighborhood of Detroit. In it was the testimony of young black man who grew up in these projects, and who from the perspective of the way the story was told was a success story because he was still standing.
...
I don't know... it breaks my heart to hear, witness black people aspire to things that are much lower than their potential. The structure that is put in place to ensure that it happens is sickening. But what are we to do? ... By we I mean people who understand this complexity and are blessed enough to have resources available to them to make the difference they can.
... I'm trying to figure it out. With all this knowledge I'm acquiring, I want to do something about it. I honestly do!!. But the more I learn, the more I understand the more my spirit seems to be damped by the reality of it all. Yes, it's waaaaaaay worse than I imagined.

Someone suggested that black people rather than aspire to their past as their means of discovering their identity, should aspire to greater things and should set their identities as evolving and set their minds on to what they could be in order to move forward. Because we don't know who we are. Jews have their religion to fall back to during the Holocaust. But what do blacks have? A Euro-centric notion of Christianity that supposedly okayed slavery.

I for one find myself torn between my identity as a young immigrant in Canada and a foreigner in Haiti. Canada tells me I'm not Canadian because I'm somewhat FOB (by somewhat I mean I can talk like I was raised here, but when I'm mixing up all 3 languages that I speak, before my mind's completely set on one language I sound somewhat FOB lol). Haiti ... (well I haven't been back since I was 11) if I was to be back, would not consider me as one of them because of several reasons. First I speak English, second I've lost my creole and french accent that is peculiar to Haiti.

How can we move forward without knowing who we are as a people?
What use is this knowledge if I don't know what to do with it?

(sigh)


......

On a lighter note a friend of mine sent me this link, and I thought I'd share it with whoever stumbles on this. ILL :)
ENJOY