"It was mediocre. I give it a D."

As I headed to the Nationals baseball game on friday night, me and my boy Ralph were having one of our usual "in-depth" conversations about the black community and how it can move forward. So during our convo, Ralph mentions that there was a screening of "Black in America 2" at Howard a couple nights ago and a panel had a discussion after the viewing. Now I also have issues with the premise of black in america being a 4 hour documentary but that may be for another blog at another time. Anyway, he also mentioned there was an article about the event in Howard's student newspaper "Hilltop". So he forwarded me the article.

As I skimmed through the article there was one quote that truly stood out to me. A lot of the panels at the events were older people (over 30) and there were many younger people in the crowd asking questions about the divide between the older generation and young generation's views on how to move Black America forward in the future. But the quote about what a young woamn in the audience thought of the documentary. She said,"It was mediocre. I give it a D."

Now the first thing that came to my mind when I first read it was I must have misread the quote. So i scanned back and read it again and sure enough, that's was what she said. Now me and Ralph have been having arguments on what the steps we need to take to make the African-American experience as better in this country and we talked about the justice system, politics, education and family structure just to name a few. But after reading that quote, I realize that if we are teaching our young people that a D grade is mediocre, we are already failing. If D is mediocre, Is C good? Is B excellent? Is A not even attainable?

I think we already need to have a conversation on what our standards of excellence will be as African-Americans. Will we ask of our children the least amount and except to be give Affirmative Action because of years past? Are we just have to get a high school diploma or GED and feel like its owned to us to get a job? Going to college and doing well in school was next a question in my house. My parents expected excellence in everything I did and did not alway me to settle for less then that. Even though I may have not always achieved the best because I tried hard I was always able to be better than "mediocre".

Maybe this young woman didn't really know what mediocre meant or misspoke to the interviewer but if we allow mediocre to be our benchmark, we are bound to fail for a long time.