Reniqua Allen on the Struggles of Young Black Americans

CHRISTIAN AMANPOUR: What is the significance of the title “It Was All a Dream?”

RENIQUA ALLEN: So “It Was All a Dream,” it is a lyric from a rap song from the Notorious BIG when I was growing up as a young person in the `90s. And it was about this rapper from Bed Stuy, a very poor neighborhood in New York City, having his dreams become realized. He was making it; he had money all of a sudden, and through me, I realized that’s something that didn’t quite feel so possible anymore, as I enter my 30s and as I saw a lot of my millennials, peers, really struggling to have their dreams realized. So I was wondering, is it all a dream? It was all a dream it felt like. You know, Barrack Obama, his presidency was ending, and people were still really struggling. And while millennials I think, overall, struggle, black millennials were having a specific and unique time, and a hard time kind of just dealing with growing up.

AMANPOUR: So let me – let me just get it straight, though. You – you’re sort of on the cutting edge, in that you’re one of the original, the sort of the older generation of millennials right now. So are you saying that, when you heard this song, and his experience, Notorious BIG, about this other rapper, things were looking like they were better, and you feel now, they’re not so good?

ALLEN: Absolutely, absolutely. I came of age – like you mentioned, I’m an older millennial, and when I came of age, things felt possible. Jesse Jackson was running for president; that was a big deal. Our parents had, you know, endured affirmative action and had benefitted from affirmative action. Our generation of parents were like the first people that really were in Corporate America. They were African-Americans who were, by all means, kind of succeeding, even though a lot of them grew up with – with segregation, but our parents were doing well, by – by many accounts. And all of a sudden, when we came of age, it didn’t seem like that necessarily was the case, you know, Barrack Obama was just such a high, high moment for a lot of young black millennials, but at that same time, we had to proclaim to the world that black lives matter, that our lives matter. There was a humanity that I think we still were fighting for, and it felt exhausting.