You Can't Escape The Room

The way my people lived before Martin Luther King J.R rose with his message of peace and brotherhood during the Civil Rights Movement, was infuriating. Whites and “Colored” people were segregated. We were separate, but definitely not equal. Black people lived in fear, but somehow were the ones to be feared.

Dr. King said, “We must learn to live together or perish together as fools.” King wanted people to work with one another. How? As if we were raised in an escape room, one that requires multiple minds and thoughts in order to make our way out. King didn’t make a difference by himself, and we as a society, cannot go forward without every one of us. There will be no leaving out the “negroes or the “monkeys” or whatever label you put on us. Once you’re lacking people, because you make them feel unwelcome and cause them suffering, you face more problems. The outcome isn’t very peaceful. In this escape room, refusing to live and work together could cost your life & mine. Fools sacrifice the lives of many for their mixed emotions and misconceptions. We went through slavery “together,” we’re going through slavery together, so we should end it together.

Once you judge me because of the color of skin I was born with, your prejudice cuts a path that leads us to nowhere. Once you assume my intentions are evil just because of my race, then all you see is a criminal. When you use the words of Racism to label and define our reality, you write our story for us but you leave behind our truth. When you teach your children to stay away from black people you take away the pieces of their heart that connects them to others. If you show them division how will they learn out culture, and how it has intertwined to weave the fabric of American culture. They won’t understand us “negroes” have made a difference just as much as your heroes did.

Sticking together, not as white and blacks, but as human beings who are all trying to get to the same place, could make life more peaceful. Life is an escape room, and it could trap us forever if we don’t figure it out. We then won’t be able to see the end of the journey through slavery and segregation. Thinking about the way my ancestors were treated enrages me. Knowing the old anger is taken out on us by those who hold grudges makes me depressed. To this day we’re still treated as if we aren’t humans, and don’t walk this earth and look up to the same moon every night.

The lights are going out, everyone is panicking and putting the blame on on one another. We won’t make it out of the escape room while we’re all looking like blind idiots who cannot see our reality. The reality where we must learn to live together or we will die together. We need to spend our lives searching for the right mindset, for the vision to see the way out. The key to unlocking the escape room is in a most simple spot: your heart.