A Forbe's columnist, Gene Marks, has many people talking about what it's like to be poor and black. He is neither, but that doesn't matter because when you have the secret for eradicating poverty, you can project whatever hypotheticals you would like...whether you use poor subjunctive tenses or not. If I were a middle class white man, like Gene Marks, these are more things I would assume of a poor black kid.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/quickerbettertech/2011/12/12/if-i-was-a-poor-black-kid/
If I were a poor black kid and overcame the disproportionate odds of surviving to adulthood, the deteriorating school systems I attend wouldn't even become aware to me until traveling in the back seat of my parents vehicle as we passed nearby lovely nearby neighborhoods that our own barely lay outside of. I'd be grateful to see the clean cut lawns, windows, and newly designed schools that made mine look slightly better than the half-way house a mile from my own. I would decry congresses' choice to cut taxes on education. Not because I know my own would be shafted, but because who's going to clean the stained glass windows at Bexley highschool? I'll never go there, but they're a beau to look at! Everyone knows education reform is unnecessary because poor communities have the internet and Gene Marks; the bootstraps whereby we can pull ourselves up from instead of crying about poor education, crummy teachers, and the children stuck with them. I would lobby on Capitol Hill with a sign that reads "This poor black boy has bootstraps! No new taxes! Gingrich/Marks for Pres/VEEP!"
If I were a poor black kid, I would realize the welfare system is an umbrella for drug abusers and pushers just as my favorite conservatives retort. I would ask my mother, "Why do we need government subsistence when Gene Marks has shown us resources like Google, momma?" And she would say, "Well I'll be darn't! Jesus done come and sent us a real live angel child! God bless dat man, Mr. Marks!" And then we would share this mysterious google apparition with other poor black kids and eradicate poverty together!
If I was a poor black kid, I'd go to sleep every night dreaming that Sandra Bullock picks me up on the way to school and hones me into a superstar college athlete since I'm too dumb to soar academically by my own merits. I would pray everyday that a middle class white man would write an article about how much better he would be as a poor black kid than myself. Maybe I would read it 20 years later and realize, "Oh! No wonder I'm such a failure...I didn't utilize google search engines!" Wait, did I just assume the identity of a poor black boy and call myself a failure? Must reboot. Self deprecation will not be tolerated!
If I were a poor black boy, I would pick up my sisters at 10 years old from school to walk them to the library where we would wait for our mother to get off of work everyday. I would sit the three of us down to do our homework, read The Boxcar Children, and then play on the swings behind the library. If on three out of the five school days police officers came to accost us...I mean ask questions about what we were doing, I would know that they are our friends and would not confuse us with other children that sold drugs or threw rocks at the library windows the night before, shattering at least three of them. I would not mind that officers would glare at us in our neighborhood, because they are here to protect us. I would not question why libraries and recreation centers in the suburbs did not have as large a police presence as my community, because I know the primary reason is that the law wants to make sure poor black kids like me are really, really safe. For that reason I would never develop an internalized distrust in the presence of officers, as a poor black kid.
If I were a poor black kid, I would do the taxes for my mother instead of spending the night at my friends house playing video game consoles, and work on my portfolio on weekends instead of imitating the Mighty Morphing Power Rangers and climbing trees. As a poor black kid, working tirelessly from my disposition would be the only thing that matters in life and I would be born with the aptitude to suppress the wanton childish desires for endless mouthfuls of sugar, samurai violence, and elementary crushes.
Ah, good thing I'm a middle class white guy!
Man, I'm done with this
