Hello Family,
I attended a meeting in Evansville, Indiana this evening where college students talked about how they felt unsafe on their campus. The students shared that their lack of security on campus is due to countless encounters where peers used racial slurs and practiced discrimination. The Evansville college students called an emergency Black Student Union, or BSU, meeting for students, staff and community members to come out and learn more about what their college experiences have been like. Four college Freshman spearheaded the emergency organization meeting.
Since 1976, February has been recognized as BLACK History Month in the United States of America. Even now, in 2023 racial discrimination, police brutality, lynchings, minorities outnumbering their counterparts in the prison system and more unlisted events make it difficult to dream big.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a DREAM" speech is highly regarded and is referred to often during BLACK History Month and throughout the year. He along with many other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement (1950s-60s), my favorite being Malcolm X, SET THE PACE for dreamers of color and others.
We live in a society where the color of your skin can still be judged before the content of your character. We also live in a day in age where we can talk about Black people and other people of color having the ability to start businesses, nonprofits, lead revolutions, become the CEO of fortune 500 companies while simultaneously experiencing love, joy and peace.
In our pursuit of happiness, and dreams, have we forgotten that we are not exempt from nightmares? Terrors taunt us in the day and night now, and though it is hard to prevail we must ask ourselves...
Is what I'm fighting for worth it? Is my dream worth it?
Is my hope worth sorting through the nightmares to find the dreams? Or through the stack of oysters to find the pearls?I don't have an answer for why Tyre Nichols, Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile, George Floyd, Trayvon Martin and more people have died by way of police brutality.
I don't have an answer for why college students are suffering and feel unsafe on college campuses across the country that they PAY to live and learn in.
I don't have answers to why the fight against racial and ethnic injustice did not end at the end of the Civil Rights era.
We do not deserve to suffer and feel less than human in academic, personal, professional nor any other spaces we exist in.
Everything comes at a cost... I believe the nightmares we face with our eyes open will give us the courage to go after the dreams we see when our eyes are closed.
Please pray, send your thoughts and peace+hope to the college students in Evansville, Indiana who are struggling to feel secure in a place they call home. Send prayers to those fighting nightmares in the mass industrial prison complex. Pray for yourself.
As we find the courage to shed light on our nightmares, we will soon find our dreams are mere solutions to problems we've wrestled with without end.
I love you. Jesus loves you MOST.
Hang in there. Keep your head up, and if you can’t that’s okay too.
Xoxo Miss Ponder
That’s a good word! Appreciate you sharing Leeyah! Prayer is indeed the key to unlock this problem that we face! God knows and sees all…never leaving nor forsaking us!!! AMEN🙏🏽