Chapter from Philosophical Street Chronic (I’m Just Trying to Survive!)
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
Black 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
Objective All True-ISM (Altruism)
Back in the days white Americas vitriol and hate was reserved for Blacks strictly because we were seen to be less than 100% man, as it was stated that we were 3/5th’s of a man. This racist mentality was the basis of laws like the Black Codes that made up Jim Crow America during the late 19th to the middle 20th century. Civil Rights initiatives beat down most of those laws and gave us better ground to stand on and since then we have been building upon a better foundation to reach our lofty goals.
But while we were building and fighting for every inch of ground that we got, a new animus was being nurtured by the “elitist” of our society. These people were the white people who were so blinded by their privilege that they lived in an impregnable bubble. This bubble would continue to grow and grow as more and more white Americans became wealthy enough to partake in the “finer things” in life and separate themselves from the other 99% percent of society in which we live in.
This 1% of society follows Ayn Rand and practices the Randian philosophy that she developed from Existentialism; a philosophy developed during the late 19th and early 20th century, that she called Objectivism! This philosophy emerged around the world after the Civil War, when Black men and women in America were finally afforded the same rights as white people.
Objectivism is, as stated here, “Objectivism’s central tenets are that reality exists independent of consciousness, that human beings have direct contact with reality through sense perception, that one can attain objective knowledge from perception through the process of concept formation and inductive logic, that the proper moral purpose of one’s life is the pursuit of one’s own happiness (or rational self-interest), that the only social system consistent with this morality is full respect for individual rights embodied in laissez-faire capitalism, and that the role of art in human life is to transform humans’ metaphysical ideas by selective reproduction of reality into a physical form”. Continue reading
$59.624 Trillion (What Black People are Owed for Reparations for $5 Billion, Alex)
A few days ago I ran across an article online where a teacher (http://activistteacher.blogspot.ca/2013/01/calculated-minimum-reparation-due-to.html?m=1) decided to do the math behind what black people would be owed if we got reparations adjusted for todays minimum wage values. He did his numbers based solely on a minimal economic value of free slave labor adjusted at the lowest reasonable rate of interest.
The number he came up with was $1.5 million dollars for every Black person in this country that descended from a enslaved ancestor, which is roughly, wait for it…………… $59.2 trillion dollars. Yep approximately $60 trillion in reparations is owed to blacks in America and this is based off minimum values. This is why Congress will never seriously talk about reparations in a meaningful way.
Crazy isn’t it!
So after reading the article it got me thinking. If the newly freed slaves had gotten the 40 acres and a mule promised to them by Lincoln during the Civil War, how much land would we own?
After doing the math it was simple to realize why they went back on that plan almost immediately after the war was over, so here it is! Continue reading
A Letter to White America
Dear White America, close your eyes and imagine for a minute that this is how the Trayvon Martin incident!
On February 26th 2011, a young white boy was walking to his father’s house after coming from the store. He was wearing a hoodie and carrying a bag of skittles and ice tea, he was minding his own business.
Out of nowhere a grown Black man drove by and assessed that this white teenager was up to no good so he started following him. The teenager recognized that he was being followed so he ran, not knowing why this grown man was following him, he just knew that a creepy dude in a car was following him for no reason. Is it a crime for a white kid to go to the store to get some snacks? I think not! He was within his rights to be where he was and was doing nothing wrong, yet because he was he was immediately vilified by the Black guy in the car. This is evident in the fact that he decided to follow the kid because “he looked like he was up to no good”.
The black guy then proceeds to call 911 to report this “suspicious looking” white kid that was wearing a hoodie. He then told the 911 operator that he was following the suspect, and the operator immediately told him to stand down, do not follow him, the police are on their way. This grown Black dude then proceeds to get out of his car and follow the white teenager anyway, even though he was told not to. As he is following the teenager he can be heard mumbling about how they always get away with stuff. The call ends and he continues to pursue the white teenager.
By this time the white teenager has called his friend and is telling her that a creepy looking nigger is following him. He looks up and there he is, the Black man is standing there, and before he hangs up the phone with his friend, he is overheard saying “why are you following me”?
What happens next more than likely went like this! Continue reading