As black teens we are taught that our future is determined on the color of our skin. That may have been true when the people who told us this were born but now it is not all about the color anymore, itâÂÂs not that our Caucasian counterparts are superior because their skin is the color of snow and ours is the color of the beautiful nightâÂÂs sky. ItâÂÂs merely about our intelligence, morality, and our persistence.
You may ask what I mean by our morality. When I say our future is based on our morality I mean that our future is dependent on whether or not we know right from wrong. FromWikipedia.org, morality is defined as follows: âÂÂMorality (from the Latin moralitaser manner, character, and proper behavior) has four principal meanings. In its first descriptive usage: morality means a code of conduct held to be authoritative in matters of right and wrong, whether by society, or religion.â If we as in black people took the time to think about what we do, what we say or whatâÂÂs right and wrong maybe then we would get out of this trap, saying that itâÂÂs because of the color of our skin that we cannot get from this hell whole we call poverty or this slave ship we call jail. Because of our lack in understanding right from wrong or our lack in morality we cannot see the bigger picture; our eyes are being over shadowed by the past that we just stopped our success in the future. We are sitting here being morally wrong, still finding someone to blame for our own misfortune that we are not doing anything to change the future. As teens we act on what we hear. When your teachers or parents say that, because of the color of our skin we can hardly get good jobs we tend to follow down the path of being morally incorrect, our parents may not know it, our teacherâÂÂs may not know, we may not even know it, but they are a part of us being in moral captivity, because they are still living in the past they make us to think in the past as well.
Persistence has a lot of effect on us in the future. If we continually, or persistently think in the past, walk in the past, talk in the past, talk in a racial tongue, saying nothingâÂÂs going to really come my way because I am black, or we look through our eyes and all we see is black and white we are going to persistently fall flat on our faces and then thatâÂÂs when we are going to get nowhere. Every year every teen must have heard it once or twice from a teacher telling them to âÂÂworry about yourself and not about other peopleâ well it does not seem that they or your parents are taking it to their own heads. They tell us not to worry about other people or we would fall flat on our faces, why are they consistently worried about the Caucasian race, maybe thatâÂÂs why we are going nowhere.
Our intelligence is another major key in our future, because of the knowledge that I parents or teachers bring to us about being black we{teens} think that since we are not really going to get anywhere, what is the sense of staying in school. {That is why we have such a high dropout rate.} We are taught to stay in school, and then we are taught that because of our skin color we are going to be deprived of some of the luxuries of life, and that is when our lack of morality kicks in, we donâÂÂt know that having an education is right and depriving yourself of one is wrong, that we choose mind over matter, we let whatever is in our mind chose, instead of thinking about the future where we as a race Is going to be in 20yrs, which really matters.
When asking question about how this article made you feel, I was left with a lot of positive feedback from the African American community: