Black Gen X: Raised without a Blue Print for a New World

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, our lives changed overnight. Schools shut down, graduations moved to front lawns, and families were thrown into a reality no one had prepared for.

Even after two years, many were left traumatized by the sudden shift. 

But what if we take that same lens and look back further? Imagine living under 90 years of Jim Crow and then seeing those laws vanish virtually overnight. For Black Gen X, that was our inheritance — growing up in a desegregated society that our parents and grandparents had never experienced, with no roadmap to guide us. 

In this episode, I connect the shock of the pandemic to the deeper historical transition after Jim Crow, showing how Gen X became the generation raised without a blueprint. 

📚 This conversation is one of the central themes in my new book, Black Gen X in the Middle. Leave a comment on the YouTube version of this episode and request a free code for a copy!

Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/in-the-know-with-tony-reeves--5596987/support.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
And in the good evening everyone and to read, Tony read,
and you read, Tony read Buyer. Following the news that
shape or no shortage of things to talk about? What
did read? What this is? Reality simply happened? To step
by it and we read, let me read, let me

(00:24):
go ahead, and kids started. All of us who remember
what happened during the pandemic. That's right, in twenty twenty,
our world stopped overnight. We were told that we had
to stay inside, we had to limit our exposure to
other people, we had to wear a mask, and the
way we interacted with people would change overnight, and we

(00:45):
were told that we were on a lock down period
full stop. Nobody had prepared us for this. We didn't
know about this was coming. Nobody full warned us that
a lockdown was possible, and we had no clue what
a lockdown looked like. Imagine all of the things that
shook your world. I mean, how you went grocery shopping,
how you order things for your home. Your kids graduated

(01:06):
in front in the front yard. Some of the kids
who went to college, their first year of college was
literally in their bedroom. So all of a sudden, you've
got this situation where we as a society was shocked
because the way we have been doing things for the longest,
we were told we had to stop doing it overnight.
And this went on for two years. But now fast

(01:27):
forward two years later, twenty twenty two, were coming out
of it. By the time we get there, we are
aggravated because guess what, the way we've been doing things
was disrupted and way that we can never get back.
Those kids will never be able to graduate high school again.
They'll never be able to get that first year back
in college. We still recognize and appreciate some of the
niceties in terms of using apps to get different things,

(01:47):
but guess what, the way we had our life was
shook forever. We now would realize that there is a
possibility that we could be in a world where, at
a moment's notice, locking you down was a possible ability.
And trust me, there's a lot of you out there
that feels a particular way. I mean really it feels like, yeah,
I ain't trying to go through that again. A lot
of you, whether you want to acknowledge it or not,

(02:09):
we're traumatized. This was not what you signed up for,
But how could you sign up for because this was
something that you didn't experience. So even though this was
a two year time period, it was two years of
your life you can't get back because they'd disrupted all
of the years leading up to that point. Nobody prepared
you for this, and there was no way you could
prepare your kids for this or future generations, no way whatsoever.

(02:32):
So now we're years removed from when the pandemic actually occurred,
and we're telling ourselves we never go through that again,
and we were traumatized as a result of it. See
how you feel about that. Take a step back and
ask yourself this question. Imagine being in a world that
for at least ninety years literally separated everyone. Mean, black
people over here, white people over here. Black people were

(02:54):
told they had to sit in the back, white people
told that they could go through certain interests. Black people
experience these types of discriminatory concept white people told that
this was okay, and then out of nowhere it ended overnight.
You just had two years of the pandemic shaping you're
shaking your world. Imagine after ninety years having the world shook,
what do you do with that information going forward? More importantly,

(03:16):
just like it was for those parents, during the pandemic,
trying to figure out how do I prepare my kids
for what a post pandemic world looks like? When I
don't even know this was a thing. What happens to
those parents who find themselves in a position of now
looking at their kids and saying, this has been the
world order for almost a century, this is what's going
to be happening now, not quite sure how to prepare
you for, but this is what the deal is. That's

(03:37):
the story of Generation X, and even more so, the
story of Black Generation X, a new world order without
a map. Think about what I just described before with
regards to the pandemic. With the pandemic came, we didn't
see it coming. We literally found ourselves in a situation
where overnight the virus came. It was catching us off guard,
and they had to move accordingly, and so all of

(03:58):
a sudden they the flip a switch. The roads were clear,
mass trends, people were staying at home, and we were
doing things we had never done before. So imagine a
situation where almost ninety years there was restrictive covenant, there
were discriminatory law. They were red lighting, and then there
was Jim Crow. They were all these things that had
would put in place where people were basically told, if

(04:20):
you go here, these are consequences. If you do this,
this is the consequences. It was a world that literally
people thought this was just the way it is, and
then literally overnight we were told, Nope, not gonna do
that anymore. All of you gotta go get together, work
it out. If you're a parent in that situation, what
is your reference point when you send your children to
school under this new environment. Now there was a lot

(04:41):
of parents who found themselves pulling their kids out of
those environments and putting and keeping them environments that they
were familiar with. But this wasn't the case. Across the board.
Bussing became an issue, the segregation became an issue. Schools
were being shut down. So all of a sudden, you
have parents who have ninety years of reference of how
things used to be now faced the reality that their
kids are now in this new space and they had

(05:03):
no idea how to prepare them for it. And this
is one of the reasons I talked about this in
my book Black Generation X in the Middle, because I
wanted people to get an understanding how that shaped us
and why is this important. You've got to remember. This
is one of the things that doesn't get talked about
for black kids who grew up during Jim Crow. Schools
and the communities were designed to not only nurture kids

(05:23):
that look like me, but also to protect them because
they had to be familiar with how to maneuver in
spaces where hostility can turn on a dime. They had
to know where the places they could go where it
was safe, and where the places they could go that
was not safe. They had to learn how to engage
people in such a way so that they wouldn't be harmed,
and what they needed to do, and how they needed

(05:44):
to get out of those areas if it looked like
it was going to escalate quickly. This was the world
order from about eighteen sixty five to about nineteen sixty four.
This was pretty much the way the world worked. All
of a sudden, that was gone. So what do you
do at that point? I had to remind people that
even my mom, who was a kindergarten teacher back in
like nineteen seventy four is when she started her first

(06:04):
class of students, was the first integrated class. All of
her peers, her white colleagues and her black colleagues who
were teaching kindergartens. They were the first generation of teachers
to literally have the first integrated kindergarten class. Nobody talked
to them anything. Nobody said to them, Okay, now that
you've got a mixture of these kids, this is what
you need to do. The only thing the school districts

(06:25):
could do is rely upon these teachers educational training that
they could teach them accordingly. But for us who grew
up in as things, this was our norm. The unlike
the pandemic, where it literally happened at a time period
where it wasn't long enough for a particular generation to
actually experience this and so forth like this. For me,
I grew up as a member of Black Generation X,

(06:45):
where my norm was a desegregated society. I didn't know
what it was like to walk into the back door
side doors or sit in the back I didn't know
what it was like to go into an establishment and
not get served immediately right out the date. My world
order was this world order where I developed relationships with
kids who looked like me and those kids who didn't
look like me. This was the norm for me, These

(07:06):
kids came to my house, I went to their house.
There didn't seem to be any particular problem. But the
reality is is that there were plenty of examples. Trust me,
there were a lot of Confederate flag Because I grew
up in the South, I did have family members who
reminded me or let me know about certain things, like
certain parks in my hometown were black and white, certain
areas were black and white. I found out where the

(07:27):
dividing line, where where the black communities were and where
the white communities were. There were those remnants from the
trauma of that time period that was readily made available
to me. But at the same time, for me, they
were just historical references because for my parents and my grandparents,
they were representatives of the trauma of the experience. For me,
it was just a historical indication of what life was before,

(07:47):
not reflective of where we were, which made our experience
so powerful. We Generation X, especially Black Generation X, were
the first generation to come up in a world where
our parents couldn't prepare us. Whether it was the Silent
Generation or the Greatest Generation or the Baby Boo versus,
all of those had the prior generation to prepare them
because the way the world was was the same throughout.

(08:10):
Coming into the Generation X, our world was different and
our parents did not necessarily know what tools they had
to provide to us to prepare us for this new
world order. And this is just an introduction. If you
want the full journey, please check out my book below.
It's great. I do have a couple of specials so
that if you're looking at just getting a free copy,
if you leave me a comment indicating that you'd like

(08:32):
me to put a code in here in the comment section,
I'll be more than happy to. I only have a
limited number of free codes, so if you want one,
check it out and read it up. It's not a
law read, but I would really love your feedback. Take
care of the one to the day