John Fountain: What to do about racial hate?

So what we gon’ do, y’all?

What “we” gon’ do?

After tears, fears and years of worry over who will occupy the presidential seat in the White House; after all the pontificating, finger-pointing and blame shifting; after all the fretting over an uncertain future; after waiting for generations now for the coming of a Black Messiah or supreme sociopolitical prophet who never arrives: What we gon’ do?

Translation: What are we going to do as African Americans to save ourselves, our families, our neighborhoods?

Jesse ain’t Jesus. Al ain’t Allah. The government ain’t God. The revolution will not be led by a rapper.

And our community won’t be suddenly healed by osmosis but only by the uplift of our own hands and a concerted conscious effort to finally face, deal with, and overcome what plagues us. We are not powerless. So what we gon’ do?

It is a question that begs in this 21st century quagmire, stuck somewhere between a post-civil rights and so-called post-racial society.

Discrimination and racial hatred — and also glaring self-hatred — form the sobering waters I tread daily as a black man in America.

I stand with a foot in two worlds. And I stand as a potential casualty in both: A perpetual Enemy of the State in one, where I am “suspect,” “menace to society,” the object of hostility of a rogue cop — my black body a bull’s eye for 16 angry shots.

In the other world, I am a potential walking corpse. More prone to face another brother’s self-hate, mercilessly dispensed with a gun. More likely to join the tally of homicide that builds this mountain of genocide as the murder of us by us continually rises disproportionately, mockingly, brazenly, like the young bloodthirsty killers who hold us hostage.

So what we gon’ do?

My heart hurts over our complacency. I am angry. Over our willingness, without sufficient resistance, too often to concede our power and authority to those who hate us, hurt us, or who seek to placate us with empty promises — the once-roaring winds of change dissipating, in due season, to the faintest whisper.

Donald J. Trump has been elected president. But eight years after Barack Obama, Black America is still sinking in socioeconomic quicksand. The blood of our children — slain by our children — still runs red in urban streets.

Police shoot down unarmed black men like dogs. Public education is still separate and unequal. And life for the Negro in America ain’t no crystal stair.

Mass incarceration is the new Jim Crow. And racial hate American style has once again become en vogue.

So please, somebody tell me: What we gon’ do?

I am sick and tired of talk about systemic oppression — as if we are without recourse, hapless victims with no means of self-determination.

What did Harriet Tubman do? Or Frederick Douglass? Booker T. Washington, or Daniel Hale Williams? Sojourner Truth, Rosa Parks, the Tuskegee Airmen, C. Alfred Anderson? What about Nat Turner, Martin Luther King Jr. and Fred Hampton, Ida B. Wells?

What did they do? Sit on their hands and wait for “The Deliverer”? On the “white man”? Or the black man? Did they throw up their hands in disgust and defeat amid the seemingly insurmountable, unconquerable odds?

Or did they roll up their sleeves, lift their eyes to the hills, put their shoulder to the grindstone and choose to look in the mirror and see the reflection of the truest and only deliverer they might ever see in their lifetime?

What we gon’ do? Please, somebody tell me, what we gon’ do?

Or better yet, what you gon’ do?

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