By Justin Moore
It was my favorite time of year: the squirrels are getting fat, the mosquitoes are dead and it’s not cold enough to need a big, bulky coat.
It was Election Day and Barack Obama was announced as the next U.S. president.
A bunch of friends and I decided to go out and celebrate. Inevitably, we found ourselves on Bardstown Road (Highlands) until late in the night. Amongst the haze of hookah smoke and the sounds of drunken karaoke, my buddy and I decided to go out for a walk.
We stepped out into the crisp cool air and set off down the street, smoking cigars and soaking in the general feeling of pride that we both had in our country. While walking, a silver sedan slowed down and switched lanes, from the middle lane to the lane closest to the sidewalk. A window rolled down, and a head with a backwards baseball cap, poked out and said, “What’s up nigger!” As the car sped off and the breeze washed over me and my friend, I held my middle finger high in the air, “Obama ’08, bitch!”
At the moment, when I had the most hope for our country, I was brought quickly back down to earth and forced to realize that we still have a long way to go. This displayed two types of ignorance: the obvious racism and bigotry, but beyond that, that guy thought that I would be deeply offended by his words. He figured he was going to ruin my day and change my life by calling me a nigger.
Let’s get something straight, that’s not the first time anybody has called me the big N, and it’s not going to be the last. It’s a reality that all black people have to live with, and after a while, learn to accept. There are several things that he could have said that would have made me feel much worse.
What are those things? How can you really get under Justin’s skin? Here are three things he could have said:
“You have no hope going to law school, you have no hope of being a journalist, and you’ll never be a senator!”
Law School and Journalism are things that are not out of my reach, but at the same time, they seem like such huge parts of my life that they are on the edge of being unobtainable. This would hurt me because it would push the possibility of those things happening that much closer.
“You’re in college wasting time; all you’re doing is drinking, smoking and making your parents ashamed of you!”
I came to college because I wanted to be somebody that my parents could be proud of, I always have this deep rooted fear of letting my parents down and wasting their time and money. I really am working as hard as I can to make them proud, but I always feel like I could be working harder.
“Nobody is going to remember you after you die.”
I want people to talk about me after I die. I want everybody who has ever met me to look back with pure pleasure and nostalgia when they think about me. After I die, that’s how I will measure how good my life was. A kind of deep value that people only realize they lost something they really loved.
It’s hard for me to open myself up like this, and let the reader base know my deepest fears, but I feel like if you are going to try and insult me, you might as well do it right. If it has to be a race thing, you can say any of the above and tack on a “and it doesn’t help that you’re black!” if you must. America is never going to truly move forward until our haters can look behind skin color and actually start hating who we really are.
