If we look at things truthfully, we must admit that the more that we give lip service in the Black community to problems of violence and poverty, the more things get worse. Most community eyes are focused outside at others to place blame. Actually, that is only half of the problem. The real issue is that we are all subject to MIND CONTROL coming in the form of electronic coercion.
This issue is not just limited to the Black community because everyone in America is subject to these influences, but Black people, because of a history of PYSCHOLOGICAL OPPRESSION, tend to be especially vulnerable to cultural garbage. It comes in the form of music heavily laden with violence, materialism, misogyny, selfishness and self-hatred. Television provides a heavy dose of ignorance. Programs that target the Black community often feature crime (For My Man, Fatal Attraction, and movies that prominently feature drug dealing thugs). There is very little that comes over the airwaves that focuses on thoughtful dialog. True there are some, but they are few and far between.
If we examine media that targets Black people we will see that it encourages them to focus disproportionately on senseless entertainment, sports, “street life,” infidelity, and more of that ilk. Several recent polls taken of career aspirations of Black youth found that they disproportionately strive for careers in sports or entertainment. These are the areas that they see bringing material rewards. Balanced, economically viable communities need more than sports and entertainment. A self-sufficient community must have representation from a variety of careers.
Even though there are not enough people targeting diverse careers, people complain about the dearth of jobs that are available to Black people. In order for the fiscal tables to turn, it will be important that education becomes a real focus. This includes education for the sake of knowledge, and not just for the purpose of getting specific jobs. Black people must acquire a taste for the “life of the mind,” for learning to think about thinking, in order to avoid total dependence upon the dominant culture. Make no mistake, interdependence IS a characteristic of life on Earth, but it should be a function of reciprocity.
Regarding the issue of education, there are documentaries about Africa all over the Internet, and in almost every case, the infrastructure in most places is sorely wanting. Poverty and degradation are everywhere, even though that continent has a plethora of valuable resources. For example, coltan, a mineral used in cell phones and in almost every other kind of electronic device, is so valuable that it is making foreign investors obscenely wealthy, while indigenous people who are mining the substance work for slave wages. Everywhere across the continent, you see poorly or uneducated people living in tin shacks and in blighted communities. Unemployment is sky high and substance abuse is rampant.
The latest wave of economic opportunists to invade Africa are Chinese. Why aren’t indigenous Africans focusing on upgrading their own infrastructure? Why aren’t they utilizing and benefiting from their own resources? Part of the answer lies in the fact that too many people, as said earlier, have goals that are heavily slanted toward entertainment and sports with not enough focus on education, which can lead to institution building and entrepreneurship. Of course, some who read these words will take issue with them because there ARE Black people who are excelling in every area of endeavor, but they are not the majority. Too many of our young people, both Africans and African-Americans, are fed a steady diet of self-destructive imagery and act out murderous fantasies in mean streets. If we don’t re-group in order to deconstruct psychological and emotional barriers that keep us from working together to build diverse, economically viable communities, we will continue to remain victimized by almost every other group that organizes to drain resources from Black communities with businesses that provide services that we should be able to provide for ourselves. And we must pursue the right kind of education in order to do this. A Luta Continua.
