#centiment

Song of the Day: Centiment - The Kraken

Song of the Day: Centiment - Hollow Grams

Song of the Day: Dave McPherson (of InMe/Centiment) - Take it Slow (Live)

Representation goes beyond that gif of the little black kid asking his dad why none of the heroes look like him or whatever that was. That goes to heart with us. We barely exist in shows and movies unless it's something exclusively for us. We wonder why none of the good guys are black, none of the sidekicks are black, none of the main characters of their closest friends, black people are just nowhere to be seen. Then where it's exclusively black, it usually plays on demeaning black stereotypes and other degrading tropes. If that's the case, then why would we want to be black? If that's all that we get to our color, then why would we stick with it?

Now take a look at where we are represented. A lot of our representation is negative. Beyond the stereotypical black oriented media, we get portrayed in other shows and movies as gang members, thugs, ghetto, ignorant, terrible fathers, young mothers, parent-less, never to be successful and with no particular skills but reinforcing those stereotypes. They say our blackness is the very reason for all these things and put us down for the circumstances we were born into, most of those circumstances created by non-blacks and not a result of our own actions.

On top of that is the way we're treated because of all this. All the hatred, the profiling, the reason #BlackLivesMatter has to exist, the reason people are protesting and organizing and uniting. But we can't all easily fight, so we have to hide and fit in in the meantime.