Black Planking and Slavery

I see where you draw the connection. I understand how you could be offended. I am aware of how it could be misunderstood, and that is what I believe has happened. Simply put, the meaning you draw from it, however logical, is not the intended meaning, and you are wrong to be offended.

I know, I know. The slaves on the ship and the one-on-top-of-the-other and the bodily fluids and disease and the death and all of that laying face down on planks of wood with the arms to the side. I know. I understand. You're still wrong.

Look at it this way. Say we're sitting directly across a table from each other. I draw a five-pointed star on a piece of paper with the point to the top from my view. From your view the point is to the bottom, so it is an inverted pentagram, a sign of Satanism. You may perceive it as me drawing a Satanist symbol, but I intended it as just a (half-assed) drawing of a star.
Or say I scratch the side of my face with my middle finger and you happen to be standing on that side. Am I flicking you off or simply taming an itch?

The point is, sometimes you really can take things for face value. You get pissed off for your teachers adding non-existant symbolism to books, and here you are doing in real life. Everything DOES NOT have deeper meaning. Some things truly are just what they are and nothing more. The "planking" epidemic has nothing to do with slaves stacked up on a slave ship (or, at least, it didn't, until you took it there). Planking was not offensive until you said it was, and that gives everyone else the opportunity to use that against us.

Another thing, as black people, it's time to let the slavery thing go. I can state as a fact that anyone my age or within 10 years of that age is AT LEAST three(3) generations removed from slavery, and probably a few more than that. For some of you, even your great-grandmother isn't old enough to have known anyone who was an actual slave. The black race has come leaps and bounds from that point, and could be a hop, skip, and a jump further than that if we would quit looking back at it all the time. The white man took off the physical chains, then we locked ourselves up in the memories. I'm not saying that we should forget our history, in fact it's vital that we remember, but it's about time we take a dose of GETTHEFUCKOVERIT, accept that it happened, understand that it's over, and let history stay where it belongs: in the past.

ALL THAT SAID, I WILL BE DOING SOME PLANKING AND I WILL ENJOY MYSELF DOING IT, BECAUSE I AM NOT BOUND TO THE PAST OF MY PEOPLE, NOR AM I CONFINED TO YOUR "ONCE-WAS-A-SLAVE" MINDSET.

Points: 50 for reading. -100 if you believe the planking=slavery thing. +50 if you are ready to move on and +200 if you go planking.