Black Gen X at the Crossroads: Living Between Two Realities

In this episode, I reflect on the unique reality of being part of Black Gen X—caught between two worlds that often felt at odds. Our parents, mostly Baby Boomers, grew up under segregation and faced open hostility, while we were the first generation to come of age in a fully desegregated society.
I share my story of growing up in Pine Bluff, Arkansas—a majority-Black town in a majority-White state—where I saw both the nurturing support of Black communities and the subtle hostilities that lingered outside of them. I explore the shift from “hard bigotry” to “soft bigotry,” the absence of a blueprint for navigating this new reality, and the ways both Black and White Gen X had to learn by trial and error.
This is a conversation about resilience, identity, and how Gen X forged its own path without letting the weight of the past hold us back.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Let me read, let me go ahead, and kids started.
I grew up in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, And for those
of you who may not be aware, pine Bluff is
kind of a unique anomaly with roughly around forty to
fifty thousand people. The majority of the individuals who live
in Pine Bluff are persons of African descent, so about

(00:21):
roughly about seventy to seventy five percent. This is an
anomaly because the state as a whole is about seventy
percent white. So therefore, I grew up in a really
unique environment where my immediate environment in terms of where
I grew up, was predominantly black. Therefore, I grew up
in a nurturing environment that was centered around me. And

(00:42):
I also happened to have the advantage of growing up
in the same community that my mother and my grandparents
had grown up in. So I had an infrastructure of
people who I interacted with upon along my journey growing
up who could look after me, support me, guide me,
and help me as I progress forward. And this was
a while phenomenon in light of the fact that you
proceeded outside of Pine Bluff, the nearest city that had

(01:03):
a population of any size with the majority of population
of people of color was Little Rock, and even then,
I think it's roughly around forty nine or forty eight
percent black people in Little Rock. I learned very quickly
that there were places outside of Pine Bluff that didn't
always look at me with the favorable light or with
me or my best interest in mind, and so I
learned how to maneuver through those environments as well. So

(01:24):
now you've got a situation where I was literally learning
how to balance moving between two worlds seamlessly. And trust me,
this is something that a lot of people are familiar with.
One of the stories that I often tell people is
that when I grew up in my hometown, because I
was growing up in a town that was predominantly black,
that had a lot of black professionals as a result
of a predominantly black college in my hometown the largest

(01:44):
in the state of Arkansas, on my path, as well
as having family members and family friends who grew up
in the area as well, is that I had an
infrastructure of people readily at my disposal. At every stage
of my educational career, I ran across someone who knew
my grandparents or was a friend of my mom. At
every juncture, I had access and exposure to different black professionals,

(02:06):
so I knew what it was like to be in
an environment where you saw a lot of people that
looked like you in various representations of daily life. But
I was also not oblivious to what the world was
like outside. I had a lot of friends in neighboring
cities and neighboring towns that I would visit or hang
out with. And on top of the fact that my
father lived in Mississippi, so I used to drive down

(02:27):
there with my mom on a regular basis. So I
was very familiar with the fact that just the moment
that we left our county, that the percentage would flip
and we were going to be instantly in the minority.
But it wasn't just that we were going to instantly
be in the minority. It was that we were going
to be moving through parts of the Deep South where
hostilities against people of me had historically been a thing.

(02:48):
So even though I may not have been able to
readily see them, I was cogniously aware that they were there,
which put me in a very unique position because from
my mom's generation, hard bigger tri as I call it,
it's something that was a normal way of life for her.
That means sitting in the back of the bus, going
through the doors of specific interests, certain things that she

(03:10):
couldn't do, segregated systems across the board. That was the
norm for her. When I came through, it was a
little different. I was in a de segregated society. There
was no restrictions placed upon me, and I could move
in a way more freely than her. The big difference
is that there was not a clear cut dividing line,
at least in her world. She knew exactly where she

(03:30):
stood in terms of what she could and she couldn't do,
and there was a very overt level of racism that
she had to experience, that she knew how to engauge,
and that she knew was coming one way or the other. I,
on the other hand, didn't always readily know what was
or what was not bigotry, because in most instances, we
were now with this new phase of our culture where

(03:52):
my generation there was this expectation that with all of
us being together, that the sins of the past had
now been resolved. But the reality is this is that
we had to learn early on and not all that
and not everyone shared this sentiment, and I had to
learn through a few series of different events and different
experiences that there were still some people out there who
did not like this new world or so as a result,

(04:14):
I often found myself in these spaces of wondering was
this racism or was this something else? And remember, as
a member of Generation X, on both sides of the equation,
there was no blueprint. Meaning for my white friends, they
were now actively engaging and becoming friends of people who
look like me, So the attitudes that their parents may
have had, hopefully were not as such where they or

(04:35):
hostile towards people like me. Just like on the flip side,
I came from this environment where a lot of my
mom's generations didn't actively have friends or relationships with people
who were white. So now both of us were moving
into this what I call this period of time of
what I affectionately referred to as trial and error, where
we're trying to figure out how do we both both
in these spaces where our parents have these very prequenceived

(04:57):
ideas and mentalities and cultural attitudes that they had, and
they kind of, I wouldn't say imparted upon us, but
they kind of had to figure out how do how
do you massage out those attitudes while at the same
time recognize it that they are people who may still
have those but not wanting to put that upon your
kids and letting your children find out on their own.
So we literally were not only the transitional generation, we

(05:19):
were a trial and error generation. So it's important to
recognize that as we moved forward under this new way
of doing things, that there was a lot of things
we just didn't know. And as a result, Generation X
not only had the responsibility of transitioning from the way
things used to be to what things are going to
be now, they also had to go through a lot
of trial and error. We had to figure out how

(05:40):
do we identify, especially as a member of Black Generation X,
those people who we believe are allies who are interested
in being in positive relationships with us, and those people
who are also carrying the torture what their parents went
through into their newfoul relationship with people who they may
not have always interacted with. This was a new way
of doing things. No one had told us how we

(06:02):
were having to finned us out on our row, and
that's exactly what we did. If you like what I'm
talking about here. I invite you to check out my book.
I give a little bit more insight about various experiences
that I had along the way, and I welcome your
field feedback. As always, take care,