okay so the skinny jeans didn't work out for me so well …

People always wonder what really happened to the African-American community and why we’re not so tight so more. The only reason why we were such a tight knit community in the first place was because we had to be as Whites wouldn’t accept us. It isn’t even a shame or fear and loathing about your own culture, though many are quick to tell you that, it’s just that you have other things and a whole new world opened up to you, and new choices to shift though. Once those doors started opening and barriers began to come down we started doing other things, for a while it was chic but these days you have African-Americans who have their own personal politics about the way that things are now that just outright refuse to be part of the larger Black community. When there are rather violent consequences to trying to be a part of mainstream culture you’re disenfranchised and pigeon holed, so of course you’re going to be as tight with your fellow man as you possible can be. Whites want us to get over it, as we’ve been free, as far as slavery, for well over a hundred years, free, as far as old laws that got in the way of personal civil rights, for a good 40 years or so now. But freedom doesn’t mean that you know what to do with it or how to proceed, on some level we were overwhelmed; think of what would happen to you if you were locked in a basement for 20 years, you may walk out, and may have become comfortable in your surrounding and developed a deep, yet sick and unhealthy, appreciation for them as you had to in order to survive. You may leave or you may not, you may try to better yourself or you may try to destroy yourself it’s anyone’s call how you pass that bridge when you come to it.

So now that we have this freedom to associate with other cultures, at least to a certain extent, we have to wonder what happened to us and where we’ve been and where we were going. We fought so hard for those freedoms, and did so much to keep ourselves close (to each other) and out of trouble out of fear of what happened to someone else we never imagined that a time and place would come in that we wouldn’t want to associate with the next person. It was as if there were vulnerabilities and known exploits in our culture that were hacked into; someone started a fire in the club and pandemonium broke out. Drugs are the most obvious and livid example of what that fire must have been, but no one really cares about the drugs, except for the users themselves, save the money, and no one really cares about the money either except for what they can get with it. Yet I stand to suggest that if it weren’t drugs it would have been something else, and that the drugs just accelerated a process that was already set into place to begin with. Again it is the idea that you are free to do something that you never had that chance to do before; what will you do with it, how responsible are you in moving through that freedom, how will it liberate you or how will it kill you and serve to destroy the community you are in.

We continue to argue about who started the fire or hacked into our ecosystem when that has little do with coming up with a creative solution in the problem. Things were good in the seventies; we had record numbers of African-Americans attending college, particularly men, and it started to look as though the worst of our problems were behind us. Yet there were still large swaths of Blacks that were impoverished that were unaccounted for, and the lies and promises of wealth and pleasure that the drug trade offered was entirely too good to be true. Ideally, through education we could give back to that sector of our community and improve things for them in that way, but there were obvious other forces vying for their attention that spoke a lot louder and clearer to them than anything an academic would have to say.

We always did have issues with hustling in our poorer communities but there were barriers to entry and an inaccessibility that came with the dealing heroin and pills, or raw cocaine, that were virtually non-exist with crack. So the flood gates opened, our world was turned upside down and suddenly the same Whites that worked against us for so long were now seemingly working with us, getting the stuff over here, passing through customs, getting past the Coast Guard, bringing it to the streets and then finally buying up greater amounts of it than any of our junkies ever could have. The Whites that you used to take issue with, that you could see that didn’t want you to sit on their side of the restaurant and use their bathroom, had moved on, the Whites you didn’t see that sat in high places that everyone liked to assume were holding Blacks down, had moved on; as far as you were concerned your real enemy was the guy standing next to you that wanted to take over the block, the neighborhood, the city or whatever the bottom line was that it got in the way of what you were trying to do yourself. This isn’t the well integrated middle America where Blacks and Whites can get along and want a lot of the same things out of life, this the segregated ghetto, where buses refuse to run, and trains do not have a line running through there, on the edge and the cusp of the society everyone else takes for granted. The place romanticized in gangsta rap that everyone from there doesn’t want to listen to yet everyone else who doesn’t know anything about the lifestyle is infatuated with because it gives them a look through that window. See our middle class and our rich moved out and created new communities of their own, while the poor lived in whatever areas they were allowed to move into as banks often discouraged them from moving into certain areas as they would have to do so on their own. Most cities have vibrant Black suburbs where middle class Blacks are insulated from the despair and the issues they used to deal with. Rich Blacks can move back into the downtown that used to be it’s own slum 30 years ago leaving the poor in Section 8 developments as most housing projects have been torn down and suburbs that used to be desirable communities but turned into slums as people moved out of those as well.

We found ourselves in a position where we were willing to compromise ourselves for money and throw out the ethics of hard work and our hard earned appreciation for family values and any sense of community. You have to realize, yeah your parents would almost nearly beat you to death not so much because of what is written in the Bible, though the Word does allude to that and we like to use that as justification, but because of what happened to Emmit Till and other free spirited African-Americans that weren’t necessarily doing anything wrong but crossed the wrong people inadvertently. I’m not against corporal punishment as they like to call it, but they couldn’t always articulate to you what was going on so it was often more of a “do as I say not as I do” type of thing; stuff they knew for themselves but couldn’t fully explain to you until later on. They figured you would fear them enough to stay out of jail and keep your nose clean and avoid trouble at all costs as an adult, and a lot of us did. Yet one of the negative results of that was that when times changed and you didn’t necessarily have to concern yourself with those same consequences from 50 years ago you weren’t necessarily sure what to do, so you continued to stay away even though you didn’t necessarily have to. These days you can mess up and they won’t necessarily throw you under the jail for doing so. Therefore we want to talk to our children, reason with them, but they don’t necessarily have to do what we say either or aren’t encouraged or motivated to because they have so many different voices talking to them they would rather do something else. They don’t fear the consequences of their actions, and we forget that yeah we were beat, but it was consistent and inline and you could count on that; these days we’re too preoccupied with our demons to be consistent with our kids any more than we are with ourselves.

But time passed on and other influences came in, as they always do, and we started asking why and started wondering if perhaps our whole thing wasn’t messed up; we had this strict way of doing things that weren’t working I mean we were still poor, still living hand to mouth. So maybe the grass is greener on the other side, and we started getting free spirited again. Black women tried to hold things down and keep everything in place, trying to instill those old values but Black men kept sticking their nose around with White women or whoever else would talk to them. These days the shoe is on the other foot and it’s Black women out doing their thing, and Black men want to go back to the way that things were realizing that you can’t take the women for granted anymore, at the same time you can’t tell those women anything after having been away for so many years, literally and figuratively.

A good example is what happened to Pocahontas, at least the way it is romanticized in movies like “The New World”. Pocahontas was so fascinated and infatuated with England she was willing to put it all behind just to be a part of something that she thought was so much bigger than herself. At the end of the day, as restrictive as the culture you think you’re coming from is it still isn’t to say that things are necessarily better on the other side. We all go through it and have to come to that place where we either have to come to terms with the fact that we’re still different and will never completely be like those of other cultures or we just give it all up and become more of an Uncle Tom than anything else.

Yet self-exploration, as much as it is encouraged today was a rather blasphemous concept years ago, completely unheard of and you should be ashamed even to think about doing so whatsoever. The damage that was done over the years of typecasting (for lack of a better term) African-Americans; first as slaves, then in certain professions, then to demean and diminish them to be afraid to even think of anything outside of the existence that had been forced on them has had very detrimental effects over time.

We think it’s easy; we’ll simply divorce ourselves from those ignorant ways and poverty thinking and everything will be okay. But it’s not easy and you have to do it for quite some time to make a habit out of it and there is always something dragging you back down into that instant gratification. What used to be a fine appreciation for the fact that you’re Black and a strong sense of being has been replaced by materialism and consumerism. Buying Gucci and Prada doesn’t make you any less Black, it doesn’t say that you have arrived and it certainly isn’t any indication that you evolved at all. Wearing Ralph Lauren doesn’t get you into the snobby English country club you’re still the same person, dressing a lot better but still that same individual. If you still don’t get it; when did we start buying into something that was a mark of success for someone in another culture or race to make our own selves feel good about our mere existence. Why is the ultimate goal for arriving and making one’s self seen always something outside of who we are; granted we do not have the resources and cannot afford to make or sell Italian clothing or English cars, at least not for a reasonable rate to turn a profit. Would you pay 1.5 million for the same Bentley you can get for a half million from the British or ten grand for a three thousand dollar Gucci suit; yet at the same time is the message the same, if we can get ourselves to the point where we can afford stuff and have means unlike that which our less fortunate African-Americans have to digress towards and can easily afford, the Sean John and the Phat Farm, is that a statement in and of itself. Better yet why can’t we concentrate on the stuff we do have more control over and can offer something that no one else is doing, something unique where we can honestly compete like we used to instead of ripping each other off with overpriced clothing? Then we wonder why our labels (eg. FUBU) are made a fool out of and why the designers for those bourgeois euro-trash lines do not respect us; why are those pioneers of so called urban wear like virtually non-existent now, diminished to having to sell in Japan where their appreciation for American culture is like 15 years removed? Could be that our children are a bit smarter (about the quality of street fashion) than we were then. Jadakiss has a song in which (among other things) he brags about having what the American government has, it’s my personal favorite and that is one of the more memorable lines, but he gets it, he understands it. Granted gangsta rap is a tool of the establishment, at best, but if you’re going to do it …

So why do we punish ourselves in such a way, we used to have a pride in the way that we dressed that was independent of designer labels, straight hair, McMansions or anything else some other culture took for granted. There was a decency and pride about being Black that was first and foremost more important than any trinket money could buy. In the nineties we said we would make a point of speaking to each other “just because” yet what happened to that. We wonder why a Black girl can get on television and proclaim to America that she isn’t interested in being Black anymore when it was the same platform the media was giving Black women to talk about their disdain with Black men twenty years ago. Granted no one was talking about plastic surgery or lightening their skin then either, but still.

Why do we have a “Superhead” some wonder? Every race and culture has one but why is ours so notorious and deserving of so much attention in the media one has to ask. I realize it’s old news now but I’m using this to make a point. It’s because we have a culture that does that double speak and about face; supposedly Karrine Stephans is such a blight on the reputation of African-American women we shouldn’t have given her any attention whatsoever but every journalist wants to interview her and wants to have those exclusive rights because of what it would do for their career. There is no loyalty, because you’ll use the woman to sell a magazine but then turn around and preach something positive to your readers and insult their intelligence. It didn’t say a lot about journalists then, because if they were any good they could have avoided the story and it would have been a non issue, and it doesn’t say anything now when we continue to deliver non-existent “news” the way the mainstream culture did for about the last year and a half now with Britney Spears. Of course Britney wasn’t writing books, didn’t need to, and really didn’t want the attention (as far as one could tell), but the example still remains the same. They’ll write about someone who was doing something, at least at one time but is diminished so they can take pot shots at them, yet we’ll write about someone who isn’t doing anything that wants the advantages of having done everything because we’re envious. Yet as entirely stupid as we are we don’t see the difference and will fall for that trick every single time; only through hip-hop do you have the exaltation of the so called “video girl”.  With everyone else they’re on par with being a movie extra paid $100 a day, with rap they’re more important than the artists themselves, which never said much about the music but nonetheless.  Are we that desperate for recognition?  Yeah, … on the other hand Gary Coleman is getting divorced, if anyone missed that one what is that all about …

She should put out a magazine of her own, in fact it wouldn’t surprise me if she doesn’t have her own production company or studio out there, because that is the way that we like it. We like to hear about someone that beat the odds and turned the tables on someone, digressed to being on the same level as her oppressors and so on and so forth. What is the difference, wasn’t it not that long ago that female rappers were everywhere talking about what they would do, the debauchery, the mindlessness, so what is the difference.

Karrine actually did what people always talk about doing yet rarely do, which is to drag other people through it with her; it’s one thing to talk about men, as a general concept in an abstract way, yet quite another to name names. Of course she wasn’t the first, we hated Robin Givens too but today that seems a distant memory. We’ll hate any Black woman that puts into question those assumptions of authority and that entitlement that Black men have over them and their family because doing so borders on the sacrilegious.

That precisely is the difference in the way that the African-American community is now and the way it was then. We call people out, we bring them to the floor, we’re more confrontational with each other and we don’t sit there and take it like we used to. Worse yet it doesn’t matter who sees it or who our infighting is a spectacle for anymore. Is it necessarily a good thing, no. Could we find a better way to go about it, yes. But money comes into play and if it isn’t a contact sport, then we shouldn’t be playing it.

Today it’s us for ourselves instead of everyone for the idea of the direction that the African-American community is supposed to be going in. Again, after hundreds of years of conforming to one standard it has to be expected but that doesn’t or isn’t to suggest that you can’t turn things around for good either. We may never get back to the way that we were, but we can find a new direction that represents an evolution of the way that it’s been post civil rights, post drug era …