...a good rule of thumb is if you are not a person of color and
millions of people of color across this country is saying a thing or a person is racist
It's really not your place to say that it isn't.
You've heard about the Black Card, right?
No, not the one from Visa or American Express
This one is much more valuable
There are entire
organizations that have been built upon it and
individuals that have used it to acquire both wealth and influence
If this sounds like something you might wish to own you should know that there is only one way you can get your hands on it:
You have to be born with black skin
That's the only requirement.
Really?
You can be poor, middle class, rich - it doesn't matter.
The Black Card will still confer upon you an entire history of oppression, even if you've never been oppressed.
Flash the Black Card of most white people will cower.
Play the Black Card expertly and you can win awards, make millions, all the while claiming that the people who got you there
somehow hate you
With a Black Card you can sell books full of indecipherable prose
because of the card that powerful, who cares if your words make any sense?
You can call yourself a civil rights leader and shake down
multinational corporations or you can torch your own neighborhood because you didn't like the outcome of a grand jury verdict.
Ironically, the people you might think have the most legitimate claim to the Black Card,
refused to use it.
Take my grandfather, for instance.
He raised me from the time I was nine years old. Born in 1941 in rural, North Carolina,
he started working at age five laying out tobacco to dry on a sharecropping farm.
Jim Crow, separate drinking fountains and the KKK were ever present realities.
He was 17 when he married my grandmother.
He made a living cleaning homes and office buildings until he saved up enough money to open his own cleaning business.
The thing is he never played any card.
Nor did my grandmother.
if they had problems, they didn't blame anybody. They just fixed them.
And they raised me to do the same.
Chores were a requirement in their household. So was reading the Bible every morning before school.
I didn't like the Bible readings and I hated the chores.
But I realize now that these small acts of discipline although sometimes stifling had a strong, positive
impact on my character.
I was a first generation college student. This was supposed to be the ticket to prosperity, but it wasn't.
I left college with a mountain of debt and no practical skills.
I had just 80 dollars in my bank account and very few prospects.
I could have given up. I could have dug deep into my history and declared myself a natural product of ancestral
oppression.
I could have played the Black Card and absolved myself of all responsibility for my own stupid decisions.
Except I didn't.
Because it would have destroyed my grandfather's legacy.
I am proud that he had the fortitude to turn nothing into something and I have no intention of
reversing that something back into a nothing.
My attitude comes with a price, however.
Because if you are born black and you don't accept your natural status as a victim,
then the validity of your blackness is immediately called into question.
Well, so be it.
If believing in myself, if accepting the responsibility for my failures somehow
disqualifies me from owning an imaginary card, then let me be the first to declare that I don't want one.
I also don't want Cornel West, Al Sharpton or insert anyone else who uses their skin color to game the system
as a role model.
I already have my grandfather.
If there is one thing that my family history has taught me,
is that I do not need a Black Card - or an imaginary anything - to make something of myself.
For the record, my grandfather now retired,
lives in a home that he and my grandmother built on a plot of land they purchased in North Carolina.
The very same sharecropping farm that he worked on as a small child.
His story is unique, his story is beautiful
because it's American.
And that's the only card I've ever been interested in playing.
I'm Candace Owens for Prager University