I’m Just Trying to Survive

Chapter from Philosophical Street Chronic (I’m Just Trying to Survive!) 

malcolm_x thinking The number one driving force behind a man’s actions is survival. When faced with situations that can lead to life or death we will fight to the death to stay alive no matter what is trying to kill us. Happiness comes in second and love/acceptance is third. The reason for this ordering is because you don’t really understand what acceptance/love is as a child because your parents are the only people that you really know, and they love/accept you unconditionally, notwithstanding those that are abusive, but you know what feeling happy is, so you search for that throughout your life. Then later in life you realize that being happy is tied to being loved and accepted by others.

So in the inner city survival within your environment is learned at a very early age in life and it stems from the activities that happen on your block and then later what happens on the blocks surrounding yours.  This is one of the major reasons Black youth join gangs, which will be discussed further in a later chapter.

One of the other reasons that this thought pattern is adopted by Black boys living in the ghetto early in life is because of an ominous warning by some adult, on TV, or the radio, erroneously stating that the life expectancy of a young Black male is 21 – 25. Add to that, the fact that most Black boys attended church on the regular as children, and one of the major things preached about in church is getting right with God, because tomorrow isn’t promised to you. So we tend to develop a subconscious thought pattern that says we need to get rich early in life so that we can be happy and experience the finer things in life before we die.

So at an early age you learn what it takes to survive in the environment that you live in, and if the things that you see are gang banging, drug dealing, and killing, you start to believe that this is how to survive. If you grow up in an affluent neighborhood and you see none of this, then you formulate survival in a different manner. Continue reading

Degrees and Toilet Tissue

fisk black gradsBlack women, please stop mentioning the fact that you’re college educated when you whine on and on about there not being any good Black men in the dating pool for you. It serves no purpose, at all! The reason why is because we could give a flying crap about your degree. As a matter of fact, your degree is synonymous with toilet paper to us. Yep that’s right, if we ran out of toilet paper and your degree was the first thing we saw, we’d wipe our asses with it.

Id say that less than 15% of all Black men care about your degree! That’s right of “All Black Men”, so when you think your degree should give you some type of ground to stand on when in the dating world, you are sorely mistaking. Then out of that 1% that do care, half of them are likely already in a relationship or married to other women with degrees. So you’re competing for less than one half of 15% of all eligible bachelors out there when you emphasize your degree.

The reason that your pool shrinks dramatically is because when a man hears a woman using her degree as a qualifier to why she should be desirable as a mate, he automatically labels you with the “I’m independent, I don’t need no man” sticker and that label usually brings a lot of baggage with it.

With the degree usually comes a pretty nice salary, which doesn’t mean anything to most men but you do have a few that are intimidated by this but the vast majority of men don’t care if a woman that he’s dating is paid, as a matter of fact we usually brag about it. But what he cares about is if you think making more money equates to wearing the pants in the relationship, and the sad thing is, a very large percentage of Black women who have a degree and make more money than their man actually try to emasculate the man. That’s where the problems begin. Continue reading

Too Many Chiefs Not Enough Indians

The quote for Black people should be; Too Many Indians That Think They Are Chiefs and Not Enough Chiefs for all These Damn Indians.

I wholly understand the first quote but over the years I have come to realize that it’s not as accurate as I once thought. The reason for this is that these Indians that are trying to be chiefs are really acting and they have no real understanding of what it takes to be a chief. They posture themselves and try to talk like a chief but they can’t walk the walk, not even a block, let alone a mile in the shoes of a real chief.

They get ahead of themselves when dealing with Black on Black situations, but if you toss them into the room with a white chief they quickly play the subordinate role. (more on the Black on Black situation in a post to come)

On the other side there’s the multitude of Indians and not enough people willing to stand up as chiefs. This is when it has to do with enlightenment and uplifting of the Black community. All of a sudden no one wants to be the chief, no one wants to die for the cause anymore or be the martyr. They all want a chief to step up, whom they will conveniently try to undermine when given the chance. (more on The Crab Syndrome in a coming post)

So let’s refresh the phrase a bit to include the latter 2 so we can really become more enlightened on the way we think.