What I think when I hear the news

I so lag. I was supposed to have posted this yesterday but yesterday? More about that on another day.

Warning: The second and third videos contain some graphic images.

Check out the choreography...



And what the heck. Let's throw what I have always thought to be the companion piece into the mix.



I thought this was the perfect way to end music week. The first song came on the radio while I was in the car on the way home Thursday night. Of course, I had to turn up the volume.

Both songs seem just as a fitting now as they did when Marvin first recorded them. And I thought it was only fitting to post all three videos videos. Because as an African American woman living in the United States, I have started to question if we are not that far away from the images depicted in the last two videos.

My parents grew up in the segregated South. They did not have "regular" contact with non-Blacks until they moved to California after graduating college -- a year before I was born. And then my parents divorced when I was eight. In many ways it was the best thing for me. While my father has many friends who are not Black, they are not his "best friends." Without my father's narrow views of the world present, the home in which I grew up was one filled with diversity. When I was in undergrad, my mother would have the "orphan" Christmas at our house. The majority of the folks present were not Black. Heck. Some of them were even Jewish. And so I learned about different people. And I would say that I learned to accept them but that would be ridiculous. How can you learn to love people who seem to love you unconditionally? You don't learn because it is just a fact of life. I loved that we were different and yet still the same. Many of these people were my mom's co-workers who were from other parts of the country. And they were about halfway between my mom and me in age. So I will always think of them as being older siblings -- the ones I never had.

I often asked my mother when I was growing up if she believed that the world was a better place. She always answered, "Yes." Now my mother is lot more hesitant in her response. And that pains me deeply.