I hate to admit it, but I’ve given up hope that we can reverse the dysfunctional state of the African American family in my lifetime, which means a significant percentage of our Black males will either subscribe or contribute to the “Culture of Poverty” (COP).
And that involvement significantly enhances the possibility that they will drop out of school, engage the criminal justice system, or join the terrorist army that is creating havoc in our community.
As mentioned last week, our community is being overrun by ghetto gangsters/Frankenstein monsters of our own creation, with body parts supplied by outside special interests and subsidized by the dominant political parties that profit from our misery.
It’s not happenstance that the last few years have witnessed the poverty industry surpassing the prison industrial complex in a conspiratorial scheme to forge new chains of slavery (profitability) to shackle our Black men.
There is evidence these special interests—progressive and conservative, middle-class professionals and the filthy rich have worked to sabotage efforts to free the new slaves—African American, Black, colored and Negro men sentenced to life imprisonment without bars.
We share their sentences and find ourselves trapped inside the prison while they prey upon us, creating opportunities for poverty pimps and missionaries. These gangsta thugs are indeed slaves despite their outward appearance—wearing brand name shoes, expensive rimmed cars, and a cloud of blunt smoke clouding their vision.
As abolitionist Harriet Tubman once said, she could have led more slaves to freedom, if they knew they were slaves.
That’s the dichotomy of our quest to seek justice and equality in America, assuming we want to include all of us, instead of a privileged few.
Most of those young thugs (and their thugette counterparts) have chains around their brains and don’t even know it. They are being pimped by a system that benefits from their negativity, including the government school system, poverty agencies, and even foreign countries that advance nationalistic programs that seek to maintain, if not grow, their market share.
But while it is true there are forces outside the community for whom maintaining the status quo is beneficial, we do our part by selling our children to them as fodder.
It speaks volumes that 70% of Milwaukee Black households are headed by a single woman, nearly 80% of whom are poor, uneducated, and more interested in buying weaves and wigs than a book for their child.
And when she, in turn, accepts the COP as a social norm, bad things happen to her children, particularly the boys who do not have a father in their lives, or a village to raise them in a positive manner.
A large percentage can’t read (in part because they were rarely read to or motivated as infants) and eventually drop out of school.
Many implode, and most will, in turn, impregnate an impressionable young woman with low self-esteem and even less ambition.
They are the monsters we help create, and many, if not most are predestined for felony convictions, most for doing harm to the community that birthed them.
And make no mistake: the COP—where there is no energy, effort, or expectations—is an opioid. It is a drug like crack, the more you suck on that pipe (vape), the more your physical and psychological condition deteriorates. You become a junkie, and just saying ‘no’ bounces off you like political rhetoric to a deaf person. Like heroin, this drug rids its victims of motivation, human compassion, and spirituality, if they had any, to begin with.
So, knowing the problem, why am I so pessimistic about solutions?
Three reasons:
The most potent entity impacting our lives—those I previously mentioned—have no motivation to affect positive change. In fact, just the opposite.
Nor do the partisan politics or corporate America. Taken together, that means there are three visible sources contributing to the maintenances of the status quo. And in truth, many Black civil rights groups have as their agenda the distribution of more crumbs instead of Black empowerment. Matter of fact, many of them are puppets of the political and civic structure and do their bidding, even when it is harmful to the people they supposedly were created to help.
If I’m not exaggerating on those points, that only leaves us to solve the problem for us. In a nutshell, it is left to us to shut down the laboratory, to tear down the apartheid walls and cast off the cultural slave chains.
And again, I’m not that optimistic.
I’ve been “Signifyin’ ” for decades. And though I’ve been part of several groups that created a national Black agenda, there has never been an embraced consensus and an even less acceptance for constructive fundamental change.
In fact, as Howard Fuller once said, “everybody’s for change until you present it.”
That change has to come through one of the three “C’s:” Cooperation (Ujamaa), culture or the church (mosque, temple or Shrine).
The problem with that strategy is another set of “C’s:”
Most of us are conflicted, confused, or compromised.
The best strategy we have working for ourselves is our faith and culture. But those of us who see ourselves and try to live our lives standing upon an Africentric foundation are few in number. Replacing a Eurocentric mindset, including its foundation of individualism and exploitation with an Africentric mindset is easier said than done, and will not take place before the bottom is completely removed from us, the reestablishment of slavery, or a global world war that will necessitate the bonding of Hue-mans in small tribes and communities.
And, most Black Christians are ill prepared or resolved to do what our religious tenets dictate.
Last Sunday, I was asked to lead a discussion/sermon as I walked through my church assembly door.
It was suggested that I open my Bible (actually, an app) and let Nyame (God) lead me.
My Bible app should have been set to the “daily scripture.” But instead, it took me to Romans 12. Hmm. Coincidence?
Even without thinking it through, I ended up using the verse to put an exclamation point on last week’s column.
I talked about how my column had plagued me as I sought to write a concluding segment and how our faith can (if we block out the noise of resistence) provide an answer.
The congregation (including several youngsters) collectively analyzed the column and then sought answers by turning to the scripture.
Read it for yourself, but my interpretation is that Nyame gave each of us a task and talent. If we are serious about being Christians—being Christ-like—we must follow the assumed biblical commandments and proverbs and work to enlarge our circle by bringing the wicked and ignorant to stand with us under God’s shadow.
The premise was correct. Although I was happy, no one asked me how to convince the thugs, terrorists, and popcorn pimps to step into the light of grace.
As I told the editor Monday morning, today we are dealing with many millennials who fall into two groups—the educated who question the authenticity and interpretation of the Bible and those less educated who question its relevancy.
And, of course, there is that group that has no interest in the Bible at all, don’t believe in God (until the judge announces their sentence) and think Christianity is a scam—or is that sham.
As I once noted after I wrote a series of articles of how poverty pimp preachers exploited their congregants, the only difference between a poverty pimp and a poverty preacher is that the former provides soles for the poor (correct spelling), and the latter sells insurance for the soul.
I know a lot of brothers and sisters who say they are more spiritual than religious, and I can appreciate and understand that since most folks think I’m a deist.
But I’m not talking about an honest, intelligent discussion on theology or how Christianity was used to control and enslave us.
I’m talking about Black men who were brought up in the COP where the only God they recognized was LL Cool J’s character’s name in a Blaxploitation movie.
Most of them only go to church for funerals to bury an Irrelevant Negro like themselves.
If all of the “true” Christians (a noun to some, but a verb to others) took their pledge seriously—touched the poor, the widow (most likely the “boyfriend” she told her parents she was engaged to) or the fatherless children, we could solve this problem in a few years.
Oh, hell (no pun intended)! That’s a pipe dream.
In truth, in this era of fear and frustration, the average Black Christian is not going to venture into the shooting gallery to save a soul, unless it’s their own. Nor will most ministers encourage them to, because they might make the mistake of asking the cleric to lead them.
Plus, I haven’t heard the argument—yet—that will convince the thugs and monsters that there’s something beyond their day-to-day existence, or in the next life.
A quasi-gangsta once told me that the only gray-haired white man he knows of is called Santa Claus. “And that blue-eyed, blond-haired Jesus… ‘F’ that. I’m going for what I know.”
I tried to convince him that Nyame was a spirit. Jesus was a brother and that I can attest to the power of prayer—at least in my case when my family and friends prayed me back to life in 2014.
Of course, I was a little taken aback when he asked why doesn’t “God” answer everybody’s prayers?
I won’t dwell on the rest of the conversation, but he did visit the church once or twice. I hear today he’s in prison.
While in contemplation about that story, the thought came to me; maybe this is all by design. Since Nyame is in charge, perhaps He/She (that’s how God is described in an original Aramaic text) allowed or engineered this scenario to wake us up. Or perhaps it’s so that we are forced by apartheid and racial polarization to return to our roots.
Given my limited understanding of the universality of life, I accept the posit that our lives are balanced on a pendulum. It will swing from extreme to extreme.
If that’s the case, there’s no need to worry or concern ourselves. Someday righteousness will rule the world, Black folks will recognize who we are, and our purpose and poverty and disease will be eliminated.
But not in my lifetime.—Hotep.
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