It’s a well known fact that African Americans spend billions of dollars annually on just about every product known to man. A lot of this spending is out of our discretionary income and never sees its way into a bank account, which helps to widen the wealth gap between Blacks and Whites in this country. Even with over a trillion dollars in buying power, the actual wealth gap continues to grow because that money is hardly ever saved by us.
Why is that?
Experts have asked this question for the past few decades and no one seems to be able to pinpoint the reason why we spend so much of our income on material things. The reason why no one has been able to accurately pinpoint where the problem starts is because they all use a reductionist method to draw a conclusion, well basically they tackle the situation from the issue and then seek to walk it backwards to the answer.
That method does work, but the problem with it is that in order to do it like that, you have to already have a foregone conclusion at hand. I.E, Blacks don’t save money because they don’t know a lot about financial things. Take that conclusion, break it down and there it is, the answer. We’re not taught about finances at an early enough stage, that’s why we don’t build wealth, case closed right. Wrong! Well that’s at least a portion of the answer, lack of financial knowledge.
This method could be applied to numerous things and low and behold they will all reduce to the answer that the experimenter was looking for in the first place, and if it doesn’t they’ll change variables until the desired result is reached. Yeah, we’ve figured it out!
But at the end of the day, they all fall short of the real culprit!
The real reason that Black people don’t save for the future and build wealth on an overall basis is due to what they have been taught, not what they haven’t been taught!
Let’s break down what we’ve been taught. This begins very early in life and by the time you are a teenager, you have been thoroughly brainwashed to have these thought patterns ingrained in your conscious output.
The very first thing that we are taught starts at church. Yep our good ole Christian upbringings are the very first culprit in why we, Black people don’t seek to save and build wealth.
You are taught that tomorrow isn’t promised to you. With this being ingrained in you as early as the first time that your mother or father takes you to church, you are being bombarded with this message at least once a week until you’re old enough to tell your parents that you don’t want to go anymore. But by that time you have been subconsciously storing that message in your brain for 10 plus years.
The next thing that Christianity is teaching you during this time period is that you should not seek to store up riches on this earth; you should store them in heaven, which is consciously and subconsciously saying that your riches will come at death!
Another thing is that Christianity tells you to give 10% of your income to the church before you give it to yourself. They actually want you to give 10% of your net income per check, not what you have left over after you pay your bills or yourself in a savings account. They seek to shame people into giving by saying that you’re stealing from God if you don’t give off the top of your income, as opposed to the bottom after you pay bills.
Then on top of that, money being called the root of all evil, and the various places in the bible that reference money as a bad thing, you see the type of picture that is being painted. And all this is being done during the early stages of your understanding, which means that it will later be a part of your subconscious thought, without ever knowing it, you are being taught to think a certain way about money.
The next thing that occurs in the Black community is the environmental conditioning of your peers, teachers (at school and on the street) and other stimuli like TV, Radio and Music!
Any Black male that lives in the inner city will recite this saying as fact; “That the life expectancy of a Black male in the inner city is 25 years of age”!
That’s it, 25 years old, and if you make it pass that, you’re lucky. This is the all done through the news, what they see in their communities and the fact that the music that they listen too continues to warn them that they can be killed at any given moment. Not only by Black gang members, but by police officers and any scared white man now. What do you think that does to their psyche?
This is why you’ll hear so many young Black kids say that they are “just trying to survive”, “it’s the survival of the fittest”, or taking Malcolm X’s “By Any Means Necessary” quote out of context. Another popular saying is “I ain’t never seen a Brinks truck following a hearse”, meaning you can’t take all that money you saved with you when you die.
Couple this understanding with the Christian thought pattern about tomorrow isn’t promised to you and you quickly can see why we act and behave the way we do about saving money or building wealth.
So what do you do with all the money you make, spend it before you die? And what do you subconsciously think about how long you will live, 25 years!
Then the final conditioning method is the constant barrage of stuff that you should buy, being crammed into your brain via advertising. They quickly and constantly let you know that you should have this or that if you consider yourself this or that. From huge billboards, to ads in papers and magazines, to radio and TV, to the internet and on a subliminal level, through the music.
At the end of the day, in the mind of a young Black person you start to think that you should have this, or you should have that, because your favorite entertainer said you should. But how do you get that? By Any Means Necessary is usually the answer, this is also the methodology used to create the prison pipeline system, but that’s another post.
So by the age of 10 you’ve been conditioned to believe you can die any day, because God reserves the right to snatch your life away at any moment. You’re now going into some of your most formative years of your life, the tween and teenager years, you now start seeing friends die from gang violence, and you are being told that you might not live to 25 years old. So the ominous 25 years stat, and tomorrow isn’t promised to you become fact.
It’s now a fact of life that you might not see 25, but guess what, during these same years, you have been constantly inundated with message after message about material things, and understandings like “survival of the fittest”, “on the strong survive”, and “by any means necessary” have become part of your everyday thought pattern also. So the logical steps taken after growing up with these type of thought patterns as the basis of your understandings leads you to this.
Why am I trying to save the money I make if I could die at any given moment?
And not only is it a subconscious understanding, I’m seeing it play out daily right in front of me on a conscious level. Young people are dying, the “coolest” people, having the most “fun” are the ones spending their money on the new Jordan’s, Louis Vuitton, Yeezy’s, True Religion, and turning up every day. So guess what I’m going to do, the same damn thing, because I could die at any minute and when I die I can’t take it with me!
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
Why Gun Buyback Progams Should Be Stopped, Now!
After reading an article on RT.com about a gun buyback program in New Jersey that netted 2600 guns, of which 700 were illegal, I decided to write a little something about this progam.
Is it just me or does anyone else think that these gun buyback programs a bad policy?
I get it, to an extent, but the problem with the program is that when they buy these guns back, they are doing it with an anonymous tag attached, and most of the police departments donn’t even check the ballistics to see if they have been used in a crime before they melt them down. All these programs allow gun owners to hand over weapons and they don’t even ask who these people are, they just give them a check for the gun, and they go on their merry way.
It’s all done under the guise of getting as many guns off the streets to help keep communities safe. Kudos to law enforcement, kudos to those who want to keep their neighborhood safe, yeah thanks for helping people.
But in reality all that is happening is that people are turning in old broken guns and guns that have crimes attached to them. Criminals can take a gun with murders and temp murders on it and turn it in for cash without ever telling the police who they are and where they got the gun from. Now ask yourself, how in the hell can law enforcement catch criminals that have committed homicide without the evidence and forensic examination of the guns that are turned in? Isn’t that law 101?
A murder is committed with a gun and there are no witnesses; the only thing the police have to go on is spent shell casings with forensic evidence etched into the bullets that can identify what type of gun was used and the exact gun that was used by the markings on the bullet. You catch a bad guy with a gun on him; you take it to the lab, shoot a couple rounds off and match the markings on the bullet to the markings from the bad guy’s gun, now you know that the gun he was carrying was used in a murder! Now you can charge him with that murder, or get him to tell you who committed the murder if it wasn’t him, because the average bad guy, I don’t care how bad he is, doesn’t want to go to jail for a murder he didn’t commit. I know y’all seen The First 48, those dudes tell on each other so fast when the heat is on its mind boggling.
So with that being said, the more gun buyback programs implemented in Black neighborhoods means less homicides being solved. Who wants that, especially with what’s going on in Chicago right now? Do we really want to make it easier for villains to get away with murder when so many of our youth are being slaughtered in the streets?
I say we need to stop the gun buyback programs now if we really want to stop the criminals that are killing our children! Or at least make anyone turning in a gun accountable for that gun, no more anonymous turn ins, and I gaurantee none of these police departments will see a third of the guns that they see coming in now in the future.
What do you think?
You can read more about it here!