We Are Not All the Same

For months now I have heard people talk about the black community. There have been conversations about what we want and what we need. While there are certain things that people of color and dare I say people, in general, have in common, such as we want to live in safety, we want to live securely, we want to fill safe around our law enforcement professionals, We want the best for our children, and we all want the best opportunity for a good life that we can have. The fact is that it needs to be understood that we are not all the same within the black community. I have four really close friends and we have a lot in common including the fact that we are all people of color. There are other black people that I grew up with that I have absolutely nothing in common with, other than the fact that we have the same skin color. I have a person whom I work with that I share a lot of common with, yet we do not share the same skin color nor are we the same gender. I say all this to say that probably the most annoying thing that has come out of the last several months is this narrative that all of us who are black want the same thing and we all think the same way, It's interesting that this is not an assumption that is ever made about white America. Within white America you have Irish Americans, German Americans, Italian Americans, you have people of Russian descent, people of French descent, people of English descent. There is no assumption that all white people think the same. The black community in the United States is a remarkably diverse community, we have natural-born American citizens we have Blacks that have come to the country from other areas. we have Jamaicans, Haitians, Somalis, Kenyan’s, Liberian’s, Ethiopians, Sudanese, and a host of other nationalities. we have people who are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and people who hold no religious affiliation. We have those who are politically liberal, politically conservative, libertarian, and We have those who are not political at all. We have people in our community that are very supportive of law enforcement, and we have people who are not. We have people who are supportive of the black lives matter movement, and we have people who are not. We have people who are supportive of the black lives matter organization, and we have people who are not, all of this to say that we are not all the same and it does not serve our community when we are assumed to be the same, we are not.