Mister T

"I don't hate Balboa but I pity the fool" - Clubber Lang (Mr. T)

It’s Black History Month. Should the Honest Man write about a historical moment in black history? Yessir. Will it be about something meaningful and though provoking? No sir…well in my mind it is.

I’ve told you about my high school in past stories. Little antedotes about dealing with some dumb muthaphuckas from time to time. But not every moment of high school was a bad memory. In fact, I have overwhelmingly more positive memories of high school than negative. One particular memory I have is one time when my school decided to actually honor Black history month by having us studying key moments in black history. This was a big deal because of a student body that was like 250-300 kids total, only about 20-30 of us were black. Do the math Einstein…

For my class, we were 48 kids strong. 6 were black. Oddly enough 3 boys, 3 girls. One of the classes we took were religion class (it was a private catholic school). My religion teacher took Black History Month further, decided to educate us on history making things that blacks did in the past, and at the end of the month, we would take a quiz that reflected that material.

So you would think with the extra special attention, that all 6 of us would be motivated to learn and hopefully blow that quiz out right? Wrong. A few of us thought that we knew our black history and taking the quiz was a formality. Yea if that history included questions like who sat on the bus and who gave the I have a dream speech. When the quiz had questions like who invented the traffic light and who was the first heart surgeon in America, man bruhs were getting stumped.

We did the tally after the quizzes were turned. Turned out that only 2 of the 6 black people finished in the top 5 for highest score in the class. Again do the math Einstein. How can we complain as Chuck D said about “history shouldn’t be a mystery and HIS story” when we can’t even take our own history seriously?!?! It was a dark day in my mind for the black community in our high school. It’s Black History month and non-black kids no more about my history than I do. Mr T definitely pitied the fools that day.

Today's Lesson

I don't know who should be more ashamed. The black kids that finished behind the white kids or the black kids that did finish ahead and didn't prep the rest of the bunch. Considering the Honest Man was one of those 2, I put the onus on the 4 that finished behind. C'mon SON, what did you think I would say (shout out to Tight Tight for using the phrase C'mon SON) :-)