WHAT NOBODY WANTS TO ADMIT ABOUT THE BLACK COMMUNITY…

WHAT NOBODY WANTS TO ADMIT ABOUT THE BLACK COMMUNITY…

Black people have failed at being stewards of their own communities, well, not all Black peoples but clearly those who dwell in some of the roughest and most economically challenged in America!  That is where such stewardship is most needed, and where it is most absent.  There is one very clear link to the failure of these communities’; they have adopted the motto of cowards, "Don't Snitch" and “Don’t Strive For Excellence” and it has devastated what was once a strong but delicate balance of order and civility.   As such the term, “Black Community” is nothing more than a weather worn epitaph for these places which had once been functional neighborhoods notwithstanding the economic and other perverse challenges they faced.

An unschooled mind would think it far easier for a Black community composed of well-educated and hardworking white and blue collar professionals to achieve and maintain a stable, healthy and functional community because they are personally invested in its safety, quality and welfare.   But most successful Black communities must constantly battle an influx of the same criminal, barbarisms that have taken root in less gifted neighborhoods.  The treat of crime and violence is only a breath away from most working and middle class Black communities especially in the city.  These communities are constantly victimized by opportunistic criminals coming from less advantaged black neighborhoods to prey on their hard won prosperity.  This reality leads to the obvious but erroneous conclusion that the black man is his own antithesis, his own poison!  Crime is the byproduct of poverty regardless of race.  Poverty can be quantified in terms of economics and intellect; race is only an incidental variable of crime.

There is an obvious connexion between the flight of middle class Blacks to the suburbs and that of whites.  The irony is that they have both sought to escape the same phenomenon, ghetto-mentality and/or slave-mentality!  The biggest and most puzzling irony is the way American media popularizes ghetto lifestyle while at the same time American ghettos are under attack and are being aggressively demolished in lieu of gentrification.  Americans are amenable to utilise ghettoisms for purposes of humorous entertainment but nobody wants to take the ghetto girl or boy home to mama and without a doubt nobody wants them living next door either!  As long as Americans are comfortably buffered from
“Ghetto Culture” by the reassuring but intangible medium of cyberspace they imagine they are safe! But there is a crazy spin to gentrification which has always pen demonized as representative of the influx of whites and other traditionally economically fortified ethnic groups but has ignored the influx of middle and upper middle class Blacks.  As poor Blacks are being moved out of American cities those affluent Blacks living on the border of this migration are moving back into the city into gentrified slums, neighborhoods now populated with an ethnic array middle and upper middle class folks creating a reverse-migration of the poor to the outskirts of town.  In time those neighborhoods caught between the exclusive suburbs and the renovated, high-rent urban districts will eventually be routed out as property values increase to a point that will no longer be able to support housing affordable to the poor.  In time the poor will be removed to rural enclaves far beyond the city and suburb.  It is wholly conceivable that eventually poor Blacks will live in isolated shanty-towns cut off from the amenities of the cities; neighborhoods that might resemble concentration camps complete with their own police and prisons to manage the crime.  This prediction is more than just an Orwellian fantasy; it might one day come to pass!

The twenty-first century has found that affluent, middle class and working class Blacks are turning their backs to the poor, under-educated and disadvantaged that continue to dwell in the historic ghettos of most American cities.  Faced with the prospect of sending their children to decent schools and fending off crime spilling over from ghettos adjacent to their own neighborhoods, they have everything to gain by the dismantling of urban ghettos and the relocation of its population to more remote locations.  Given the history of crime and other atrocities they have been forced to endure can you honestly blame them?

The Black American ghettos were never historically a fun or beautiful place to live.  But during the late 1960’s through the 1990’s their historic borders widened to encompass historically stable Black neighborhoods all devastated by the culture of drugs and the crime that accompanied it.  The gains of generations of hard working Black folk were lost in a matter of decades as their children abandoned the education and work ethics of their parents losing their inherited property and assets while transfixed in a multiple spiral of variables ranging from incarceration to drug addiction.  As these ghettos expanded they became more and more vicious transforming into a cesspool of anarchy, barbarism and profound ignorance!  In the name of easy money and out of fear these Black people allowed family and love ties to cause them to abandon their ethics, morals and the very foundation of human decency!  To other ethnic groups looking at the black community it surely appears to be barbaric on an unprecedented scale!  One has only to try the experiment of pretending to be another race looking at the headlines of the newspapers, absorbing the long list of homicide after homicide; shooting after shooting; robbery after robbery; arrest after arrest!  Can you honestly blame them for their low opinion of black peoples?  Yes you can… they should and can be more understanding, less generalizing but realistically, they just absorb what they see, after all it’s not their battle anyway!

They fear us and despise the Black man and his community and have no interest in reforming it at all, they see only the quick solution to move the ghetto as far away from them as possible and to perhaps make some money in the process!  Nobody can cure the black community but itself!  There has to be some tough love or things will never improve, the ignorance appears to be widening not growing smaller...  Dependence on public assistance growing, percentages of illiteracy, incarceration, unemployment and teen pregnancy growing, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy of utter doom! 

On the other hand Black Americans coming from other communities are experiencing unprecedented successes!  Black families are still able to produce doctors, lawyers, master electricians, politicians, master plumbers, engineers, carpenters, architects, sanitation engineers, designers, teachers, lawyers, principles and administrators, bus drivers, business entrepreneurs, chemists, music Moghuls, to their credit.  But after decades of disturbing headliners mourning how young and promising Black prodigies have been cut down by the “Random Ghetto Factor” or RGF, these families are moving as far away from the ghetto and all of its attributes as they possibly can or facilitating buffers from them; they want nothing to do with it and can you honestly blame them.  In all truth, you cannot!  The Black ghetto is out of control, it is a catabolic threat unlike any other that seems to gain even more momentum even as it gets closer to certain obliteration!  It has been said many times before, “It is no crime to be born in or come from the ghetto but it is indeed a crime to perpetuate the ignorance and barbarity that has come to be characterized as the ghetto mentality”!

I recall a conversation I had in the early 1990’s With Michael Smith, Essex Hemphill and others regarding the way we perceived that racism was being managed by Black people in general.  In that conversation Mike pointed out that Black people should never just react to racism, rather they must be proactive in order to avert it!  In short, it is no longer acceptable as a general rule for Black Americans to attribute the cause of all of their problems to racism.  Black Americans have got so accustomed to blaming the white man for all of their problems they have failed to look at themselves as their own oppressors.  Although racism is still very much a factor every Black American must manage in their daily lives more immediate are the real threats Black people pose to themselves.  The big and powerful “What If” in this equation is, “What if Black Americans could manage a level of solidarity across class and gender that would neutralize the devastating effects of self-administered racism”?  In the end it will take a monumental coordination on multiple levels to identify, contain and counteract the eroding effects of ghettoism including black on black crime.  It’s not an impossible task but it will require something that appears to have been lost not only within the Black American Population but in American culture as a whole; that is the ability of people who share similar causes to effectively unite and galvanize themselves toward the accomplishment of goals made infinitely more complex by the disparate nature of society.  If there is but one truth that might lift the pall from an ambivalent and apathetic Black America it will ultimately be the revelation of what nobody wants to admit about The Black American Community…

Written by David Vollin

Administrator: For “The Brothas Cultural, Intellectual Salon” on Facebook

and on Blogger at:  http://www.forthebrothas.blogspot.com/