Stop Speaking For Us…Try Learning Before Discounting Our Pain

You know…it’s wild how quickly people claim to speak for “everyone” without ever checking whether their view of the world is shaped by anything other than their own reflection.

You hear the same lines over and over “We’re all human,” “God created us all” as if repeating it somehow erases the lived experiences they’ve never had to carry. And it makes me wonder: does the same God we fear and believe in truly see fit in the way people who aren’t Black or brown treat us? Treated like something beneath a shoe, scraped off like dog shit and gum.

I’m a Black man. I don’t speak for Black women, and I don’t pretend to speak for all Black men either. So why do people outside our community feel so comfortable telling us what we should think, feel, or get over? The moment someone says, “That was 160 years ago,” you know they’ve never had to navigate the world through a lens that marks you before you even open your mouth. They don’t see the daily calculations, the quiet humiliations, the coded language that still gets thrown around.

And lately, the casual use of words like “chimp” or “chimping out” says more about them than anything they think they’re describing. It’s ignorance dressed up as humor, and it exposes how little they understand about equality, dignity, or history. We’re not asking for handouts. We’re not looking for shortcuts. What we want is simple: equality without an asterisk. When we earn a seat at the table, it shouldn’t be dismissed as “DEI.” It should be recognized as merit… full stop.

There’s something deeply broken when someone can look at your accomplishments and assume they came with strings attached. And the idea that anyone gets to tell me how to feel about the past is laughable. If we’re supposed to forget what happened 160 years ago, then let’s be consistent and forget what happened 250 years ago too. But we won’t, because this country is built on stories we selectively remember and bodies we collectively forget.

Fair is fair, right. But from where I’m standing, fairness has never been the foundation…just the promise we’re still waiting to see honored.