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Aye, if you’re Black and you’re from the DMV, or New York, or Chicago, or Philly... where you’re grand parents from? I wanna see something.
There’s a lot of places I could go with this conversation... but I just wanted to illustrate how we’re only about 2-3 generations removed from the Great Migration
The Great Migration, for those of us who may need to be refreshed, refers to the period of time in which Black families moved from rural Southern regions to urban communities in the North from 1916-1970...
During this time period, approximately 6,000,000 Black folks and their families moved to these cities in pursuits of jobs and economic freedom, leaving behind a Jim Crow south that limited upward mobility for Black people...
Now, I ain’t finna sit here and tell y’all how even after they moved up North they still experienced racial inequalities, bigotry, and violence... we know that, and I’m not about to try to trigger us for no reason.
But, I do think it is interesting how much of the southern cultural background that grand parents and their parents carried here blended with the considerably more liberated spaces of the North, and give us cultural phenomenons such as the Harlem Renaissance & Hip Hop...
All of this being apart of our cultural inheritance, that we’ve been able to draw upon and be inspired by to create and innovate, which has been a characteristic of Black people since their original “migration” to this country...
One of my favorite things that I’ve observed personally, is how I got to college and saw the similarities in the languages that were adapted by southern people who had moved to northern cities and experienced similar things...
On top of the fact that our accidents sounded like sped up southern accents. I got real cool with the Chicago homies because our slang overlapped, the same words they needed to describe things where they were from, we used too...
So like the homies we be like, “on fo’ nem” we’d be like “on movas”, the homies would be like “merch” we’d be like “stamp” ...so that was interesting to watch unfold on so many levels.
Because even while that was language, when we hung out... we all acted like urban Black boys who always had to have their head on a swivel, we carried a lot of the same traumas...
Generationally speaking, as much progress as we’ve seen our community over the past century or so has been immense, we are still dealing with the effects, in the North, of the same racial oppression that our families were escaping in the South in the first place...
My dad was in one of the first groups that used to get bussed to white school during integration, my grandma didn’t even get to go to school past a certain age, and her mom was born during the end of slavery...
Say all this to say, the good fight is still being fought... right now is definitely the time to re-establish Black enterprise in the areas of finance, health & nutrition, education, and policy...
Everybody ain’t gotta go to college, but I adamantly believe everybody who personally identifies with the community should definitely be working to ensure that the rights and liberties of our people are protected in whatever way possible...
Open ya business, teach your students, feed your hood, heal your friends, make your art... do what is needed for our people to be their greatest selves.
Aye man, you might not agree with any of this... but it’s Twitter & I don’t much mind. If you got any thoughts on this feel free to chime in. But, if you got all the way down here I appreciate you, you smart, you kind, you important...
