A War Within a Race (Repost)

The House Negro and the Field Negro – Malcolm X

“…He ate the same food his master ate and wore his same clothes. And he could talk just like his master - good diction…”

  -Malcolm X 

I've always experienced questioning and inquiries about the way I speak; how I choose to deliver myself. The overarching belief that it sounded too white, my white friends thought I sounded fine; because I sounded like them. And I couldn't sound any other way or else I wouldn't have friends.

That is where it began; between the House Negro and the Field Negro, as Malcolm X puts so eloquently in the speech he delivered at Michigan State University in 1963. Black kids who perhaps tend to speak intelligently are immediately labeled as trying or acting white. Or get made fun of for sounding “white” particularly by black counterparts. (Something I've experienced on multiple occasions) But this was the slave master’s original plan: to put the House Negro and Field Negro at odds with each other. It immediately pins people that by all understanding should be united in a fight against white oppression. Instead they end up fighting each other, on the belief that the House Negro has become too much like their master, and that was the master’s plan all along: to start a war within a race. A plan that has worked for centuries, a plan that still works today...