It's A Black Thang

Solomon's Eruption,  regarding the 'Failure of the Black Community To Do What It Needs To Do, as Opposed To Placing the Blame on Other Communities for Black Failure": in response to a thread in the Smiley and West Blog.

If our community, our womb and sustainer, was an empowered community, and if more individual black Americans would become empowered, instead of conceding power to any real or imagined superior foe, it wouldn't matter. The members of other non-white but empowered communities do not share similar fixations and obsessions. Blacks should be angry with the black family, a family that is failing them along with themselves.


As a result and similar to orphaned children, we look to and share our angst when it comes to other flawed communities as opposed to questioning the flaws and weakness of our own - the primary one that fails to give us what we need. It is the weakness in our community, and at times within individual members of our own communities that is more detrimental than any other community.


Remember our ancestors, who under incredible odds built schools, universities, were inventors, created towns ... What is our dependent and black community doing today, but complaining and blaming instead of overcoming any real or imagined foe! We simply need to 'get in the real world', admit and repair what is broken within our own incubator and flawed community, and sever our 'flawed dependency' on other real or imagined flawed communities; in other words we need to sever the umbilical cord and confront the source of the real problem.


As I once shared with visiting brothers from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, all of us are dependents on white western paternalism, which is an admission if not a concession, that we don't, as a community, know what in the hell we are doing, among other things.  If you would, look into the mirror.  There, you will be staring into the face of one of the elemental contributors of the black family's failure to overcome any real or perceived enemy.


What happened to 'we shall overcome'?  I recognize, that oftentimes, our real enemy is us - white else do blacks often take black-flight to the suburbs and private schools.  Isn't that what many of our civil rights leaders, do?  Or are we conceding the following: we simply do not know how to overcome, as a community, internal and external foes and challenges.  Instead, we permit black murderers, rapists, drug-dealers, occupiers, pedophiles, oftentimes,  to control our communities, to murder spirit and individuals within our own communities!


Solomon


[I dedicate this piece to the memory of the late, Dr. Dorothy Height. Year after year, she would bring the black family together on the Capitol Mall in Washington DC, and make every effort to help to move us forward. I was frequently present at those gatherings.  She was just one among  many black women, some sung and others unsung, who worked and work tirelessly, to save the children who pass through their wombs!]