“We have to change our minds about each other”
Plainly put, we t
hink badly about ourselves, therefore we are bad to each other. Now and then, more now than then, I’m asked regularly if I am a hater.
So, before it is too late, permit me to date, restate and relate. Yes, you’ve got it right. I am a hater. I hate injustice. I hate hypocrisy. I also hate demagoguery, apathy and the stupidity that allows it to exist.
Hater? Absolutely! I’m a big-time hater. I hate what I see happening to our community, and I hate watching the development of a culture that embraces ignorance with a stupid sense of pride.
So yes, I am indeed a hater, but not only that, I’m a hater with a very low threshold for stupidity. I have never doubted the strength or intelligence of Black people – it is our focus that causes some degree of concern.
Members of our Black community may not be up-to-date with salient political issues, but do we ever love to discuss relationship issues – purely from a position of blame – “What’s wrong with Black men, or Black women?”
Open a discussion on the minute details regarding the government handling of certain issues and three people and some crickets will show up. Speak on relationships and the discussion will get hot, real hot, and real quickly too.
Some people are not prepared to discuss alternate views, but rather in proving that what they think about the other gender is true, whether it is or not. The country in general has changed the ways in which we find each other as a society, while Blacks think it is only we. And then we point to the worst of us to indict the whole of us and to imply that the bad people within the other gender are the reason for our individual inability to find love.
Asians, Indians, Hispanics understand that it is just as hard for good people to find each other, but Blacks blame each other across the gender divide as though we dislike each other; sadly but truly it is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy for more and more of us. We have become divided and it has nothing to do with the mainstream culture, just us.
As a race, we have allowed propaganda and unresolved issues from the past (individually and as a race) to divide us in public as both genders point fingers.
A growing pool of white males are failing and circling the drain because Canada is. Yet, there is no mass exodus from the white community, regardless of how much our race thinks that their men or women are dating us – they fix, we flee, we focus on them.
We are so divided that we talk to each other without even listening. We ask to be heard, but fail to return the favor.
As an example, I respond to the things that I often hear Black women say about Black men. Sadly, too many men have failed to stand up as men, allowing our people to fall because it is simply too difficult to keep facing people who hate you because they disagree with you.
Black men no longer need to march in the streets, but they do need to stand up for their children and protect the male image, even from themselves.
In addition, Black men need to stand up for themselves, rejecting definition from anyone, including our womenfolk.
Do not shoot the messenger, but it has oftentimes been said that the key to the demise of any people is through the female, and I know that many Black women would not like hearing that, even when it comes from another Black woman.
But when women forget how much power you wield, that power is easily used against you and your men. No Black women, you do not have power over Black men because you possess specific body parts, instead you have power because you can capture a man’s heart, give him a family and change his focus to “protector” because he has a reason to protect, and not because you say he should protect you if you place yourself in danger.
In differing ways we need to protect each other, back to back, against the world individually and communally. But instead we stand as individuals and judge each other for not doing the things that we think the other should do.
Being judgmental over nothing is serving as one of our greatest wedges of division. Instead of searching for common ground to unite as a community, we search for irrelevant differences and then we judge and dismiss. We spend a great deal of time, truth be told, too much time, focusing on the white community, yet we fail to do the things that they do that work.
If a Black man is Liberal instead of Conservative, spiritual instead of Christian, Muslim instead of Jehovah Witness he is promptly judged and dismissed.
I am not angry with my Black sister, only Black women who see the Black man in a negative light, and I don’t think that is all Black women. I hate when Black women see Black men through the media and statistics.
The greatest problem we as a Black community have is that we have changed the ways in which we view and regard each other, which dictates reality for us as individuals who embrace such reality.
Malcolm X aptly stated it, and it still remains a mandate that we need to embrace or become irrelevant: “We have to change our minds about each other.” Otherwise, we will become irrelevant.
We need to understand that we really don’t need to exist.
Aleuta—The struggle continues.
