Reconstruction by Cameron

Reconstruction by Cameron - November 2023 Scholarship Essay

My family lived in a ghetto, not the ghetto. The one touted by suburban whites who lived in fear of what black people faced - yet could not encompass the same FEAR that confined the black experience - which led them to mistake the American dream for empirical reality. The one which permitted negligence and brutality against certain groups of people, with certain traits, and a misunderstood culture. A culture to whites glorified violence, but in reality met the violence of the world head-on, challenging the oppressive hand with rhetoric meant to inspire the hopeful reconstruction of a group marginalized across centuries by the same willful ignorance.

Exposed to me at fourteen, the culture of 2010s rap murmured while riding in my grandparents' car which rang out gospel music throughout the whole Appalachian valley. While trying to connect my headphones to my phone full of downloaded music, the discordant sound of struggle blasted at full volume with the tambourine’s hiss clashing and the awakening clap of the beat, followed by a strum of descending chords into a deeper meaning; whisking you into a lurid reality, reeked with decay. The lyrics that rolled out to the vehicle fell on deaf ears: “Cocaine quarter piece, got war and peace inside my DNA”, struck with panic, I tried to turn it off, but by then too much had slipped. For the whole three-hour ride to church, my grandparents gave me a circuitous lecture on how rap promoted sin. I know if they could hear the lyric for its true meaning, the exaltation of substances would not serve as the takeaway, but a historical reference to the cocaine epidemic in the 1980s which hit black communities foremost, moving the wealth of families to the pockets of institutional prisons. A crucial part of the lyric: is the artist’s heritage and his family, a value they admired; I believe they would feel empathy because I hold the compassion they taught me, especially since addiction struck home due to poverty.

Reasons drew me to this album by Kendrick Lamar: when I peeked out the window of the hurtling car I witnessed the dreary worn-down walls of brick that used to base the coal industry in Southwest Virginia, just like the red brick wall on the album cover. I resonated with the look and sound of the music relative to the deterioration of the near-ghost town (or ghetto) my family grew up in. I had an introspective realization of how people similar to me often separated the degradation of inner cities from the downturn of small towns by red lines. The continuities exist in the Greenwood District, the Rust Belt, or Grundy, Virginia; the prosperity of communities like my own siphoned out by those who amassed wealth not through merit but exploitative greed. I realized these actions correlated with the graphs of economic downturn, indicative statistics of kids without food, unpayable medical bills, and death. Not just a place where violence is normalized, spurred by violence in poor inner cities, but instead a common region where an impoverished group lives, a ghetto: America’s economic reality.

My environment’s history emboldened me to expose the inequitable roots in my community and elsewhere: I wish to erect evidence to stand as a bulwark for the disadvantaged. I do not wish to shun my community: I wish to give back. I want to fight for equitable changes where necessary. Maturing, I lacked decisive purpose, but now I am resolute in upholding the indispensable non-commodifiable work of public defenders or teachers: people who strengthen communities like mine. My guides stimulate my aspiration for history, social science, law, and policy solutions to current issues, which can only be amended by attentiveness to our shared plights, like listening to the revealing voices of others to facilitate the bright reconstruction of our communities despite the history that ensnares us.