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I'm not sure what, in particular, dragged this thought across my mind this morning. I suspect it's the low boil of disgust at the "bootstrap" mentality--especially when it's targeted at American descendants of slavery.
My great-great-grandfather escaped from slavery and fought in the Civil War. He served in the Massachusetts 54th towards the end of the conflict. Afterwards, the U.S. government would "compromise" with the pro-slavery traitorous Confederacy and not entirely occupy the south.
My great-great-grandfather lived through the collapse of reconstruction and the advent of the Ku Klux Klan. My great-grandfather would live through the Black Codes and the Jim Crow era that followed. An entire nation of empowered citizens effectively dismissed its Black citizens.
I neglected to mention that my great-great-grandmother was a member of the Ponkapoag tribe (apologies, Granmama), one of the myriad indigenous peoples of America who suffered the genocidal pressures of the U.S. government and its citizens.
But wait. My grandfather lived through the Jim Crow era as well, a deadly time of precarious survival and slippery rights for Black people in America.
"Hard work" meant family survival, but not the acquisition of the kind of wealth where your descendants could afford to be stupid. I think we just had a president who serves as an exemplary example of this phenomenon. 
Historically, Black people don't get to be that dumb and fail upwards for two generations. 
Anyway...
Anyway...
My own parents grew up during the Jim Crow era and had me the year Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. I've often wondered how they could have made that decision, but it's a decision that has been made for generations because survival has been a priority for Black families.
And here I am, the product of all that, the first to grow up without the pressure of laws designed to suppress me because of the color of my skin. Sort of... There's a hell of a lot of fallout from redlining and gerrymandering American cities.
Boston, the city I grew up in, is one of the worst, in terms of historical segregation. It's a lasting scar on the city and it's going to take generations to undo the damage. Every city with Black neighborhoods has an ugly, segregated past, it was not "self-segregation."
In a shocking twist, Black people want to be a part of America too and reap all the benefits of living in one of the wealthiest democracies on Earth.
I suspect belief in the ideals set forth by the founding documents is what has motivated generation after generation of Black people to voluntarily fight for this country in order to help it advance.
Like my great-great-grandfather's service in the Civil War, members of my family in every generation that followed has served in the military. (Including me.) But I'm part of the first generation post-Jim Crow...
That means I carry some of my parents' baggage. There's a messy period of adjustment that Black people my age have experienced. We see it clearly now. The modern era is preferred, for sure, but that weirdness persists. (Insert time-travelling Black people joke here.)
My kids, however, they seem to be mostly free of the psychic baggage. They understand, for sure, it's both academic and experiential, but not in the same way. They're also much more inclusive in the spectrum of humanity.
Which is a sight to see considering how homophobic and transphobic large swathes of the Black community have been. Don't get me started on their experience growing up in the Internet age. Oi...
The point is: things are looking up, I believe. As previous generations die and the next ones throw off the yoke of garbage handed to them, things improve.
That's a good thing, I think.
That's a good thing, I think.
It stinks that I won't live to see it all come to fruition. That's okay. I got to see a Black president and a female vice president. There are transgender people rising to elected offices and being appointed in presidential cabinets. There's other POC there too. That's a lot. 
P.S. That was supposed to be a brown thumbs-up, not that bullshit yellow thing. I don't know WTF happened with Twitter there.
