Passion. It is a strong and barely controllable emotion. My passion is standing up for those that can’t stand up for themselves. My passion is to teach and instruct young teenagers how to stand up for what they are living in. My passion is to aid my own people.

            I am afraid of change. I am also very aware that my brothers and sisters are as well. Many of our black leaders have spoken and died for us to all be equal. We stood behind them, fought alongside them, and protested for them. When is it our turn? When is it my generation’s turn to take racisms reigns and guide it to a different direction that could better lives, families, and neighborhoods. Many of my friends have been murdered in cold blood while being affiliated with gangs, selling drugs, or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. What started this?

            Traivon Martin. A young teenage boy murdered at night while he was walking to the store to buy supplies with a hood on his head. The white man somehow felt the need to draw out his gun and shoot the young man; he didn’t think about the young man’s future, his family he was going back home to, his soon to be wife, children, his life, and not once about his education. Us black brothers and sisters of this generation have been perceived as thieves or hoes. Young men were perceived that if they had visible tattoos on their faces or bodies, they could be illegally involved with any type of crime, then sent to juvenile detention center for the rest of their adolescent years or, once the legal age, prison. Young women were looked down upon, literally. Most of them were either on the street corners begging for money or a place to stay with only their bodies to sell. The rest were most likely crack heads or drug addicts. Many of these young black teens may have tried to overcome their obstacles and change their futures already set in stone for them once they were born, but the environment, the media, and their peers distracted them from seeing the big picture. The big picture is this: African Americans have been beaten, lynched, sold, arrested, looked down upon, murdered, and treated unfairly. It has been an unsurprising chain of events for thousands of years, but we can change that. We can prove the white men wrong, we can unite and show ourselves that if we want better, then we can have better. We have to want the change, be the change, and understand what it takes to change. It may not seem easy because we may feel alone and unheard, however, we are alive to this day no matter what our ancestors have gone through so we can stand another couple thousand years.

            What triggered this beautiful chaos goes back to Traivon Martin. His struggle and his family’s struggle is alive in all of us and we need to use that to defend ourselves. We may be treated as the enemy, but we are NOT. Fear is a burden; in our blood we LOVE to break free of burdens. Instead of showing that strength into men leaving their children and man against our own man, we need to control our burden that others bestow on us and use it in our strategies to conquer.

            I say all of this to say, silence, in this case, is not golden. Independence and “change” that Obama was promising, is the key. Understand that, analyze that, and use it. We are niggas; not in the sense that we whites were to call us, but in a sense that we are Never Ignorant, we Get Goals Accomplished.