2008 Woodie Awards
Oppression Knows No Language
What the hell is going on?
Donald Woodard
Issue date: 11/25/05 Section: Opinions
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In a world as tumultuous as the one we live in now, it is easy to see how the lines between reality and fantasy become blurred.
We live in a society where our best literature, music, movies, and even the theater are all based upon fiction, where it all is graded by how "real" it seems.
It has completely desensitized the world as a culture. We only feel when things hit so close to us that it has no choice but to feel "real." If it doesn't hit us directly, we seem to just brush it off, keeping the reality of it at a distance.
There is a huge problem brewing in the country of France. A problem not too distant from the problems that minorities in this country have faced and continue to face today.
But even in a country whose history is filled with tales of heroic men and women fighting for rights and equality, if you ask the average American what exactly is going on in those suburban estates of France, no one really seems to know or care.
I just find it utterly mind-boggling that even in a country like the United States of America, the same United States of America where not even a lifetime removed from colored drinking fountains and Jim Crow, we can stay so utterly disassociated from what is going on in France. It is but a blip on the radar of our national consciousness. It just isn't real to us.
Learn from history, or it is bound to repeat itself
One of my biggest thrills growing up was to sit around the elders in my family and just soak in the vast amounts of information they contained.
From politics, history, relationships and just life lessons, they were my encyclopedias of all useful information. My biggest joys came when they told me about life for them growing up. You see, many African American men and women from Chicago are either second or third generation Chicagoans. Most have either parents or grandparents who migrated to the city sometime between the 1940s to 1960s.
They left homes in rural towns in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia to try to make a better life for themselves in the big cities in the north.
We live in a society where our best literature, music, movies, and even the theater are all based upon fiction, where it all is graded by how "real" it seems.
It has completely desensitized the world as a culture. We only feel when things hit so close to us that it has no choice but to feel "real." If it doesn't hit us directly, we seem to just brush it off, keeping the reality of it at a distance.
There is a huge problem brewing in the country of France. A problem not too distant from the problems that minorities in this country have faced and continue to face today.
But even in a country whose history is filled with tales of heroic men and women fighting for rights and equality, if you ask the average American what exactly is going on in those suburban estates of France, no one really seems to know or care.
I just find it utterly mind-boggling that even in a country like the United States of America, the same United States of America where not even a lifetime removed from colored drinking fountains and Jim Crow, we can stay so utterly disassociated from what is going on in France. It is but a blip on the radar of our national consciousness. It just isn't real to us.
Learn from history, or it is bound to repeat itself
One of my biggest thrills growing up was to sit around the elders in my family and just soak in the vast amounts of information they contained.
From politics, history, relationships and just life lessons, they were my encyclopedias of all useful information. My biggest joys came when they told me about life for them growing up. You see, many African American men and women from Chicago are either second or third generation Chicagoans. Most have either parents or grandparents who migrated to the city sometime between the 1940s to 1960s.
They left homes in rural towns in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia to try to make a better life for themselves in the big cities in the north.
