Own worst enemy

This is something that I've been thinking about for a long time, and I've been meaning to write about it for quite awhile (see "Hypothetical"), but I just hadn't gotten around to it.
Tonight, however, I've got John Legend on iTunes, and I'm inspired partly by him, and partly by the time I've had to think.

First: this area where I'm living feels so *white*. It's been a loooong time since I've been somewhere that isn't crazy diverse, and as a brown-skinned woman, it's a comfort to know that there are people who look like me around. It makes me feel safer. I don't know if that makes sense to anyone but my fellow minorities, but we don't have the luxury of not noticing those kinds of things. I'm aware of these things, and with the recent news about the teens here killing a Mexican man basically for being Mexican, I'm a little worried.

Anyway, that's not the direction I was going to take with this post, because it doesn't really have to do with the violence inflicted on minorities, but rather on the violence and oppression we inflict on our own people.

Yes, we've still got to deal with racism, discrimination, and a real fear of how people might react towards our otherness. No matter what people say, things haven't changed that much - racism is just more hidden now. It continues to be a systematic, endemic thing in this country, a presence just as real and as evil as any other form of oppression or injustice. I'm not saying that there isn't a real need for racial healing and reconciliation here, because there IS. There absolutely is. That said, how much do we as minorities turn on our own people?

I think I first started thinking about this in earnest after watching "American Gangster". It was a good movie, don't get me wrong; the story pulls you in, and Denzel Washington is just so stinkin' good. The thing is, as I'm sitting there falling in love with his character, wanting him to get away with everything, and getting caught up in the sexiness of organized crime, it occured to me that while Frank Lucas's life is being built up, countless other lives are being destroyed by his product.
He's using this crime syndicate to show that a Black man can be succesful and run his own organization, but this is at the expense of all these other Black lives which are being consumed by heroin.
There's an allure, an attractiveness, a sexiness in that gangster lifestyle. Otherwise, movies like "American Gangster", "Scarface", and "The Godfather" wouldn't be the icons they are. There's something so smooth and so cool in the way we portray these men. And it's not just in movies, music and popular novels are also filled with these gangster ideals; it's part of American culture. And we buy into it.
It's not a matter of life imitating art. This is a true story, and organized crime was around before these movies and rap and reggaetón came into being. As minorities, we turn on our own people in search of that prestige. Frank Lucas wasn't taking his cheap heroin to exclusive neighborhoods; he was getting rich off of poor Blacks and Latinos: people who looked like him and his wife. And the man who started his empire to be free of the control of white America made slaves of his own people.

When I was working in DC this summer, we had several big incidents at the Rec Center. One staff member was physically assaulted, another was held up at gunpoint, and a man was shot on the same block. We keep doing these things to our own people. You see it all the time: gang violence, Black-on-Black crime, wealthier Latinos who exploit undocumented Latinos....
How can we expect to make headway if we keep our own people down? How can we fight for justice and equality when we're so busy turning on our own? How can we ever free this nation from the ugliness of racism if we're determined to be our own worst enemies?

It's so frustrating. If all of us minorities, in every shade of non-white skin, would get together, if we'd stop fighting eachother as well as our own people, we'd be so much more effective at bringing about profound changes in this country. Do I believe it's possible? I don't know. I'm a bit of a cynic, but, my God, I hope it's possible.