Posted by
flagwaver on Wednesday, September 12, 2007 3:18:58 PM
I guess that any excuse is better than none, but it is high time for the Black community to stop making them. It is well past the time that we as Blacks stop looking outside for the reasons for our failures, and started looking inside ourselves and our communities for the reasons that we seem to lag behind in America.
It is also time for us to realize that we have it good here, and that there is nowhere else in the world that could give us the opportunities for success that America offers. We have the choice, all of us, to either work to succeed or to accept failure and defeat. Sadly, too many of us are way too eager to accept failure and pass the blame for it to someone else.
We listen to millionaire rappers tell us how hard life is in “the hood”, and we accept it when they glamorize the worst aspects of ghetto culture. We revel in their tales of p*mps, hoes, rock slinging, and bling-blinging; and all the while, these rappers are getting themselves out of those circumstances. They stress “keeping it real” to a younger generation, while they get their money, gather their families, and leave the ghetto. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just the hypocrisy of it all that stinks to high heaven.
We use being poor as an excuse for every conceivable ill in the Black community, and it is killing us softly---to quote Roberta Flack. We are much too willing to accept that being poor means that you should not strive to do better, that you should not chase educational opportunities, and that you should just accept the fact that being poor now means being poor in the future. But that is just not true, and I have lived a life that proves it.
When I was a kid, there were times that my family was po’---that means we were so broke we couldn’t afford the o and the r. We struggled, and many times we weren’t sure where our next meal would come from. We lived in houses without indoor plumbing, sometimes without electricity, no A/C in the summer, and no heat in the winter. But my mother never stopped working, she never let us go hungry, and she never let us give into the temptation of just packing it in. She made sure we had food, clean clothes, and that we went to school; she didn’t want us to have to struggle as adults and so she sacrificed for us. Our extended family was there to lend a helping hand, because that’s just what families did.
And today I look at where we are; my eldest brother was a minister and musician before he passed away, my older brother is an Army veteran and social worker, my older sister is in middle management with her employer, my younger brother is a civil engineer, and my younger sister does in-home care for developmentally challenged kids. We rose above some very tough circumstances to be healthy, productive members of society.
See, we had the attitude that the Evans family had on the old show “Good Times”, and not the self defeating attitude that is so prevalent in hip-hop music nowadays. On “Good Times”, the Evans family did not care about their “street cred” or “keeping it real”; their sole focus was to get themselves out of the situation they were in. James Evans worked as many jobs as possible to move towards getting out of the ghetto, and the parents did their best to keep their 3 kids from falling victim to the ghetto lifestyle. Contrast that to the lyrics found in nearly any rap song nowadays, and it is no real wonder that the Black community remains mired in ghetto culture.
It doesn’t have to be this way, but it is because we let it be so. We will defend publicly every vile thing that these clowns say, while privately we bemoan it. But we defend them anyway, out of some misguided sense of loyalty and solidarity. And as long as we enable them and their message to be spread, our communities will continue to pay the price.
When we finally decide that we have had enough of this tomfoolery, and that we want to do better we can change things for ourselves. But as long as we continue to support the rot inside our communities, defend them out of a sense of shared Blackness, and continue to blindly offer them support nothing will change.
It will just continue to be a hot, ghetto mess.