“I fear I am integrating my people into a burning house.” – Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Integration – the act or process of integrating.
A: Incorporation as equals into society or an organization.
B: Coordination of mental processes into a normal effective personality or with the environment.
Assimilation – the act of assimilating.
A: An act, process, or instance of assimilating.
B: The state of being assimilated.
We wanted integration. From a mathematical definition, we would be “X” in the equation. But using definition A, we were the ones asking to be regarded as equals. The other side never asked for equality. Their entire system was built and perfected to guarantee inequity.
Desegregation says the system is supposed to remove the legal and socially enforced separation based on race.
We wanted integration. We wanted to go where white folks go, live where white folks live, and live like white folks do. Our standard refrain when describing access and attainment? “Like white people.” It’s almost like adding “while in bed” to every fortune cookie—only here, it’s aspirational.
We dreamed of integration. A country where Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics would join hands…
But what if Dr. King was telling us that integration is the fire?
We all know the hypnotic pull of fire—the way flames dance, the satisfaction of watching something burn.
Integration started with smoke. In this case, the smoke was education. We wanted all the smoke, not knowing that Eurocentric education was toxic for everybody. It caused severe amnesia, made us forget where we come from. It caused temporary—and in some cases permanent—blindness so we couldn’t see our erasure in history. It doubled as a smoke screen to block our view of the truth. Integration told us to inhale deeply. “This smoke is necessary for your survival in the fire.” Graduation was your certificate that you might be fireproof—but it was far from a guarantee.
Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Now that you’ve proven your potential to live among the fire dwellers, you’re sent out to gather your own fire-making materials: kindling (job/money) because the smoke taught you to build a small fire, but your true task is to stoke a corporation’s fire too. You keep adding fuel—houses, cars, material things—to keep your flame alive. And to create a roaring fire, you need logs. Integration promised that you’d get the same materials and resources to build a fire “just like white folks.”
What they didn’t tell you was that white folks had a 400-year head start—our people harvested the raw materials to build their eternal flame for free, on stolen land, with stolen labor.
Integration tricked us into believing we didn’t want to build our fire out there in the wild, near the “uncivilized,” where our kindling, fuel, and logs might be stolen—likely by people who look like us. Instead, we became the “safe” Negroes, the ones they could use for their children’s diversity essays (well, not anymore…).
White folks benefit from integration too. They get to brag about living in a “diverse community.” They get to say, “My Black neighbor.” They hang Black Lives Matter signs but never invite their Black neighbor inside. They benefit from our culture. I dare anybody to name “white American culture.”
Full disclosure: I am a product of integration. I accepted its terms and conditions. Every day, I’m trying like hell to break the contract. White folks can’t stand the truth, so I’m just waiting for one of them to tell me to “go back to Africa.” I was an advocate for full integration and earned my “safe” designation. I wanted to be able to say, “I have white friends.”
I am grateful to my parents—people of the Great Migration—for raising us in an integrated neighborhood in what was, at the time, an overwhelmingly segregated town in the early 50s. I am grateful. But recently I’ve started playing the What If…? game. What if it had been Atlanta instead of Evanston? The 5th Ward instead of the 3rd? Maybe my full-blown case of blazing integration wouldn’t have transitioned into acute assimilation—an illness that might be incurable but can be treated.
And here’s the devil’s trick—the people who never wanted you in the house to begin with have always moved the furniture, stolen your seat, or stuck you at the table in a hard wooden chair to remind you you’re not supposed to get too comfortable. Now they’re taking the furniture out altogether in the name of “DEI” and “too woke.” They’ll claim it “doesn’t fit the décor.” They’ve broken the thermostat (climate change), and they’re about to turn on the stove without the pilot lit. Some would rather see assured mutual destruction than you owning the house—or even living in it. Others are already plotting their escape to other planets. Hey, SpaceX!
And some? They’re still dreaming of putting us back in the fields, still clutching the fantasy that the clock can be turned back to the days when we built their empire for free. Make America Great Again.
The only difference now is they’ve traded the whip for laws, the chains for policies, and the auction block for the ballot box. And they will burn this whole damn house to the ground before they ever let you own the deed.
And when the ashes settle, they’ll swear the fire never happened
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