Unchained Slaves

Stefon Branch

English 002

20 October 2013

Unchained Slaves

Every now and again I sit around and wonder what the new struggle for Black America is. I know in the past, the struggle for my ancestors waking up at the crack of dawn, to work in the fields until they collapsed from exhaustion. I also know the struggle for my fellow blacks some 50 years ago; they fought a fight for rights that would allow them to be equal to their white counterparts. But in the world today, the struggle that blacks face is a one that we impose on ourselves. What we now face is the struggle for acceptance from our new masters. Blacks in America are confused about who they are, and try to conform to the image that society deems satisfactory. We are no longer physically slaves to the white man, but rather self-imposed slaves to the society that he sets for us.

Having grown up in the black neighborhood of predominantly white suburb, I have been able to observe the idea of black conformity at its finest. Most of the blacks in the neighborhood were trying to live up to the standards that they saw in white neighborhoods. This was quite evident when you saw the black children trying to dress like the white children; the black girls trying to make their hair straight as the white girls, and the black parents trying to drive the same cars as the white parents. Everyone tried to mimic what he or she saw white society do. This phenomenon is displayed in Nathan McCall’s “Faking the Funk: The Middle Class Black Folks of Prince George’s County”. In this essay, McCall talks about how blacks are stuck in a “bizarre identity crisis”. He claims that the middle class black people don’t really know who they are; therefore, they just conform to the only example they have to look at: white middle class. Saying “They’re disillusioned by the racial realities of America...they’re still in love with the idea and hope of achieving the white folks’ dream”(McCall 262). This quote shows how black...