Home > How did we get from Black Power to Prey?

How did we get from Black Power to Prey?

by Open-Publishing - Monday 8 June 2009

Discriminations-Minorit. USA

How did we get from the powerful Black Power of the Sixties and Seventies to the prey of y2k09? What forces derailed the move toward self-sufficiency and education?

A Texas preacher asks an interesting question. When did black people stop trying to gain economic and political power and allow themselves to become prey?

Rev. James Dixon, II, says a ’“Flash without Cash” mentality undermines every possibility of building stable families, strong communities, viable organizations and enduring institutions.”’

In his book, If God is so Good, Why Are Blacks Doing So Bad?, Reverend Dixon examines the link between excessive materialism and under achievement. His view is that “’this Flash without Cash’” mentality undermines every possibility of building stable
families, strong communities, viable organizations and enduring institutions.” (Ibid)

The short-term acquisition of street wealth, which has increasingly corrupted so many of our youth, is a major cause for alarm in the Black community. According to Rev. Dixon, this alarming gap between saving and spending, and between falling for fad instead of holding on to one’s money, has turned many black and poor people into prey and prison fodder.

Rather than “being black and proud”, many of us are black and broke. Our lack of financial literacy and our inability to plan for the long-term, are ’adverse to creating patterns of generational wealth, acquiring appreciating assets and controlling a market share of any significance.’ (Ibid)

Many of our children have lost the entrepreneurial skills which their parents and grandparents acquired. Shoveling snow, cutting grass, doing errands, and babysitting seem to have fallen by the wayside with to many young people. We are now content to rent overpriced apartments and lease bling buggies, at the expense of saving and building long-term weath through home, farm, land acquisition and business development.

While there are thousands of black entrepreneurs, a lot of them fairly young, too many of the youth in our cities have few dynamic role models to lead them. What role models that exist are often drowned out by the siren song of popular entertainment, bling culture and street mayhem.

As Hollyweird and Company continue to unleash thousands of woman-hating, violence-worshiping, pieces of disrespectful trash, which masquerades as entertainment, our youth ape the ugly and turn themselves into caricatures of mediagenic morons. While other youth are preparing to become the next generation of inventors, scientists, technicians and business owners, our youth spend their parent’s hard earned dollars on cellphones, mp3 players and geegaws, congratulating themselves on their texting abilities, never considering becoming an inventor of technology.

The children of our low moderate income adults are content to be consumers of things they don’t need, enslaved by the flashing lights and sounds emanating from a host of expensive devices that are little more than jumped up toys. The wealth of our people continues to flow to others, across state, national, and continental boundaries, a process which puts money in the bank accounts of bigwigs, corporations and foreign investors, while we remain mesmerized consumers who buy devices that are designed and assembled by others, and generate profit for people who will never walk the streets of our neighborhoods, sit in our churches or mentor our technology-impaired children.

Hollywood tells us that this is how blacks behave and we follow its lead, as it drags us over the cliff. While many blacks work on attaining middle class status and keep out of criminal street culture and the drug trade, many whites and a lot of blacks accuse then of ’trying to be white,’ as if whiteness means being non-criminal and successful and being black means participating in street culture, being ignorant, disrespectful of others, and having a rap sheet.

Believe it or not, black folk are generally, or were, a conservative folk. We didn’t just jump on any ole bandwagon that came down the pike. We stuck to our core beliefs: God, family, hard work and honesty.

Too many of us are convinced that cultural suicide, drug incarceration, out of wedlock parenthood, ignorance and perpetual poverty are the foundation of black culture and that anyone who disagrees is ’trying to be white.’ Outside agents have convinced our youth that God is out of style, family isn’t worth respecting, hard work and education are for chumps, and honesty, well, you get the picture.

Many elements of the “black culture” that many ape today is an alien hybrid, created by fad, fashion, and the entertainment industry. It is a cancer in the black community and will continue to be so until black people throw off the chains of cultural enslavement and toss the culture vultures intellectual property pirates out, along with their traitorous supporters.

What kind of viable culture disrespects its elders, women and children? What kind of “culture” worships thievery, dope addiction, and disrespect of life, elders and women?

What kind of people jump on the scaffold and put the noose around their own necks? The goal of every black revolutionary, non-violent leader, protest or, teacher, civil rights activist, liberator or freedom fighter in the last 200 years has been to acquire freedom, justice, and equality for black folk. The fact that we now allow our culture to be perverted, manipulated and engineered to destroy us without fighting back is not only sad, but is inherently dangerous to us and to future generations.

This lack of investment in our future, in the form of long term stability, wealth building, and education and training, is destroying the gains we have made in the last few generations. While property pirates steal our land and homes out from under us with gentrification, land lynching, doctored documents, predatory loans, institutional racism and thievery, billions of dollars of black wealth is transferred out of black hands, often times never to return.

Our forefathers may not have understood algebra or quantum physics but they knew that the way out of poverty was to acquire land and to become self-sufficient. They understood the value of raising strong children, who understood that achievement, education and hard work are the foundation of wealth—black wealth or any kind of wealth.

They knew about bootlegging, moonshine, pimp and whore games—those moral short-circuits to short term prosperity. Yes, they knew about easy money, the flash and dash which was was often tinged with blood. And, knowing that dirty money created morally infected adults, they left the street blood money to those who were willing to sell their souls for a quick buck.

We have too many moral sell outs today. Parents who benefit from their children’s “street corner entrepreneurship”, adults who pimp children for profit, teachers who cash unearned paychecks and miseducate children, government parasites who are more interested in siphoning off funds than in providing meaningful services, and poverty pimps who sell their names and sell out the people whom they claim to be helping.

The destruction of black people as a viable economic and moral force in this nation puts money in too many hands to be “mere coincidence.” STOP! Don’t go running for the channel changer: I’m not going to jump too deeply in the conspiracy fact book. Not yet.

America, the United States, has always been about money. We had a revolution because a bunch of “patriots” thought paying taxes to Great Britain without being represented in the taxation decision was grounds for revolution—but they had no intention of letting blacks in on the action.

And, so it was that for more than two centuries, we had a national economic/political policy which mandated that whites were at the top of the food chain and everybody else was a tool to be used by the higher-ups. Black Codes, Jim Crow, one-sided or violated treaties, anti-immigrant laws, all ensured that the status quo, that is WASP male supremacy remained the policy of the land.

Yet, despite the Black Codes and Jim Crow and lynching for profit, black folk managed to buy farms, build businesses, go to college, learn trades and “rise”. Some black folk.

All was not sweetness and light in the past, no matter what some folk want to tell you. Yes, blacks bought land and property—they worked for pennies to do it, when whites often out earned them tenfold.

Black women taught black children in the Deep South for ten cents a week. Yes, college grads, too. Black men, with college degrees, some PhDs, went to work sweeping floors, clerking—the Post Office was a great job for black folk, anything to put food on the table and a roof over the family’s head.

In the course of the last 40 years, black people have made tremendous strides, with black women now comprising the fastest growing demographic of business owners. Blacks are moving up to the board room, instead of sweeping floors in the penthouse. We are on the move in politics (Go! Oboma!)

Yet, for all of the progress of the past, our youth today remain target of an insidious form of social engineering, a culture destroying process which is unraveling generations of ancestral efforts. Our youth are becoming the antithesis of what their ancestors fought for.

Where once our enemies tried to keep us from education, good jobs, property ownership and prosperity by fear, many of our children now see education, entrepreneurship, mainstream jobs and real estate ownership as “white.” The Devil’s Commandments of Greed, Ignorance, Amorality, and Thuggery have become the new guide words for a generation of young, often self-destructive black folk, who are doing more to destroy themselves and “the race” than a legion of determined Klansmen with a thousand miles of lynch rope.

We have come so far, but we have so far to go, particularly when we put ourselves in a position to be preyed upon. It can not be said enough: we come from a long line of survivors. Our people, our ancestors, endured the worse this nation had to offer and still kept their faith, still worked hard to escape poverty.

For our honor, our salvation, and for the future of black folk, and the nation as a whole, we can no longer sit back and be satisfied to be preyed upon. We can not continue to be satisfied with being consumers of technology, instead of designers and inventors of technology.

As long as we allow others to define us, as long as we are content to consume and not design, produce and own, we will remain powerless and at the back of the bus—behind ever increasing waves of immigrants, legal and illegal, who seize the Dream for themselves while too many of us continue to play with high-tech toys, spend billions on things we don’t need, ape the street trade and fail to invest in the skills, education and mindset necessary to rise out of poverty and generate wealth, health and pride for folk who look like us.

Monica Davis is an Indiana-based public speaker, author and columnist. She regularly publishes on Indybay, OpedNews and other sites and is published via ezine and print in the US, Canada, Great Britain, and India. Her website is:
http://www.lulu.com/davis4000_2000
She may be reached at; davis4000_2000@yahoo.com