Accepting Ourselves: A Dream Worth Dreaming

One day during my freshman year, I had trouble starting my car. Finally, I concluded that the battery was out of juice. However, classes were on break and there was no one to give me a boost.

Shawn Chollette

I remembered hearing during orientation that campus police helped students with minor car trouble, so I ran to my dorm room and phoned the campus police station. A dispatcher said an officer would be there shortly.

I went back to the nearly empty parking lot. A short while later, a squad car made its way toward me.

What happened next was strange and sad.

Strange in that after getting out of his car, the officer undid the strap that kept his weapon safely in its holster.

Sad because after living next door to a policeman, I knew that officers were trained to unclip their guns only in threatening situations.

To this day, I don’t know what I did to make that officer feel threatened, as I was only 5 feet, 7 inches, and 130 pounds. But I do know that four decades after Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, some Americans are still judging “citizens of color” on the basis of their complexions, rather than the content of their characters.

If the suspecting store clerk who shadows me around department-store aisles would let me shop in peace, she’d find that my money is just as green and spends just as well as anyone else’s.

If potential employers would actually check my qualifications before telling me I’m not qualified, they might find that I have much to offer.

The same can be said of many of my brothers and sisters. Yet because of fear and ignorance, they are being shortchanged.

At the 1963 March on Washington, Dr. King said that, "America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.'" He also said, "This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism."

Young Black America, we are being presented with the challenge of collecting on the overdue balance owed to us and those who came before us.

And as you watch television programs, frequent the marches and maybe even attend church services commemorating the legacy of Dr. King, please ask yourself, “What will be ‘our’ response?”

We can prescribe “the tranquilizing drug of gradualism” for our social ills, but time does not cure ignorance.

We can keep conforming to America’s ever-shifting ideal of what we ought to be, but even after we’ve bleached our skin and pressed our hair, acceptance is not guaranteed (ask Michael Jackson).

Or we can just accept ourselves, which to me is the very essence of the “I Have a Dream” speech. Embrace your blackness, your thick lips and broad noses, and America will do the same when it finally realizes that the freedom upon which it prides itself is inextricably bound to our own.

And that is a dream worth dreaming.

Shawn Chollette is a student at Louisiana Tech University. The views expressed in "Voices" are those of the writers and do not reflect the opinions of Black College Wire or its affiliates.

Posted Jan. 16, 2005