Hey Y’all,
Like most of y’all, my wife, Monica, is livid about the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis Police Officer. Moreover, she is perplexed by my seeming lack of concern. She can’t understand why I’m not as outwardly angry as everyone else as she walks around the house, givin’ me that scolding black woman side-eye. How can I act so cavalier? It’s not that my heart does not ache for Mr. Floyd and his family. It isn’t that I don’t worry about my stepson and my grandson whenever they are not in the confines of their own home. But, white folks committing atrocities to black folks no longer surprises or shocks me. But, more than that, I’m over the redundant cycle of impotent outrage of the majority of black folks to this issue because real outrage sparks a solution. Yet, the only solution that the majority of black folks embrace is begging white folks to be nice to them, which is, by definition, integration. And, please, before anyone emails me to defend or discuss the merits of integration, make sure that you know the difference between integration and desegregation as most folks, especially Negroes who embrace “integration,” don’t. Furthermore, make sure that you know the history of the African-American liberation movement to know that black folks wanted desegregation and not integration. Integration was merely the way to test desegregation until the white-controlled media hijacked the Movement and far too many of the African-American leadership, including Martin Luther King, Jr., rejected Black Power, not because it was a bad idea but because they were worried how white folks would react to both the term and the concept. Those are King’s own words as King would eventually admit in Where Do We Go from Here? Again, know some history before you email me to defend the bs/mythical strategy known as integration. As James Baldwin stated in Evidence of Things Not Seen, “If ‘honest toil and the magic of the marketplace’—to quote our quite magical and inestimable President Reagan—really created wealth, the Black people of this particular time and place and history would be among the wealthiest in the history of the human race.” Thus, Baldwin infers that integration, as a concept, is merely another way for white folks to sell black folks the fallacy of the American Dream while exploiting black labor for white wealth.
Additionally, we should also be tired of the vast number of Negro Christians who hide behind Yeshua as the reason they will not embrace Black Nationalism. Yeshua’s commandment to love everybody is their hypocritical justification when they are using the text to cloak their cowardice in the same manner as the vast majority of whites who use Christianity to cloak their white supremacy. Yet, for all those cowardly Negroes, I suggest that they read Matthew 18:15 – 18 so that they can see that Christianity is clear about how to engage evil people, and it does not include integrating with them. Even King told us that he believed that he had integrated his people into a burning house. I don’t know what else y’all need to be told. As such, the murder of Floyd is integration, is what happens when you continue to beg your oppressor to love you, is what happens when you hate yourself so much that you cannot fathom building, maintaining, and evolving your own life with your own institutions. African people are the only people on the planet who do not own what they do better than anyone else because we have not the self-love to believe that we have the capability to own what we create, even our own lives. So, I’m just going to watch y’all go through the motions of being outraged. Y’all are going to post on Facebook, Instagram, and wherever the effin’ Cloud is. Y’all are going to march, rally, create hashtags, and even riot. Yet, after all of that, y’all are going to run into the arms of the oppressors once again just like the “chosen people” wanted to return to the arms of Pharaoh the moment thangs got a bit difficult. So, what is there left for anyone like me to say? African Americans are in an abusive relationship. Until African Americans understand that they are deserving of being treated humanely and are willing to terminate the relationship with their abuser, white cops will continue to kill unarmed black people, the majority of qualified black applicants will continue to be denied access to schools and jobs that they deserve, and the majority of black patients will continue to receive flawed, if not false, medical treatment. This is integration at its best.
To be clear, I’m not blaming the victim for being persecuted. But, I am blaming us for not being the men and women we have been designed to be, which means to remove ourselves from those who persecute us. So, I’ll end with an anecdote to show just how we continue to relinquish the power that we have because we have failed to learn and love ourselves. During the summer, I teach a literature of science class for the Tougaloo Jackson Heart Study Summer SLAM Program. (For y’all unfamiliar with it, here is a link to a discussion of it.) The program is an advanced science program designed for the top ten percent of Jackson-Metro high school students from ninth through eleventh grade. Along with my college students, these are some of the most brilliant young people that I have ever met. One year, we had a student whose parents were my classmates at Jackson State University. After graduating from JSU, the mother continued to earn her law degree, and the father became an engineer. They are fine examples of how an HBCU can prepare one for life. Their son is an excellent student. I think that he won several top academic awards that year as a ninth-grader. At the end of the program, I was talking to the mother and casually stated that their son is “already prepared for The Yard.” (For white folks, “The Yard” is JSU.) To my surprise, she responded: “Oh, no, honey, we are only considering Ivy League schools.” Allow me to reiterate that she and her husband both graduated from JSU. One is a successful lawyer, and the other is a successful engineer. And, still, these two self-hating clowns don’t think that an HBCU is good enough for their son. Thus, I’ll treat y’all like I treated her that day. I have nothing more to say. Y’all may continue with your “outrage” as we view the upcoming events.
Wait, wait, wait…hold up. As that extraordinary funk philosopher James Brown would say, sometimes da funk so good dat you jus’ gotta hit ‘em wit a li’l bit mo. So, let me leave y’all with these last few bars of funk. My mother—black college graduate. My Pops—black college graduate. Myself and two of my siblings—black college graduates. Over twenty cousins—black college graduates. Our family doctor—black college graduate. Our family lawyer—black college graduate. Our family dentist—black college graduate. The psychiatrist who came to my Pops’ house on Saturday to listen to jazz and watch the game—black college graduate. Even the veterinarian in my Pops’ neighborhood—black college graduate. My grandfather and both of my grandmothers purchased the bulk of their fish, fruits, and vegetables from black fishermen and farmers. Y’all can still get fresh produce from Foot Print Farms of Jackson, Mississippi, founded by Dr. Cindy Ayers Elliot (a black woman) as well as many other black fishermen and farmers around the country. As such, the only thing that I’ve ever needed white folks to do for me is leave me alone and handle the issue of supremacy/schizophrenia in their own community as SNCC once advised.