When I think about the African-American situation, like in yesterday’s post and just today in my FB feed, I am confronted by a lot of BS…
Its like Everyday…I’m expecting some Black person to look/do something stupid in my inbox
..and this is all for the amusement of ourselves and others…sadly
While we live in a culture that kind of celebrates this kind of Buffoonery…I find it to be insulting and downright offensive and this is coming from my own people…
It makes me wonder, on a Fine Sunday like today, where have all of our morals gone?
I remember getting beatings and chastised by family members — not as a death sentence but as a sign of love, that someone cared.
Now…you can’t even break up a fight, or in the case of Paterson teacher (take a kid’s cellphone away) without getting beaten up…(and this is as an adult)
It just makes me sick…
I wonder where all the grandmothers went, I wonder if all these girls who have decided to live this lifestyle–(out of not seeing any options in the first place) dying to be the next Walking Stereotype of Black ghetto-motherdom see that the joke is on them…sadly
I feel ashamed, when I see these girls so hungry for my approval with their kids in tow…hopeful that I will smile and just accept them for being a young, ill-equipped, financially and emotionally bereft mother.
So many children–dying to be grown too soon—
I mean, if any of these girls had any idea on there own what it would take for them to earn respect–even without trying to be this unrealistic version of What a Black women is…it would be like devastating for them
…I mean, kids today are so ignorant of what it actually takes to be a real adult (Paying for things other than shoes and clothes at your momma house–I’m taking about Rent, expenses…the whole nine–Just to hold your head up and be an adult–and the astounding amount of $–it takes just to put a roof over one’s head–feels endless cycle as even single people have hard times..not mention talking about extra mouths to feed—I wouldn’t be in a hurry)–
But I’m writing this letter to a (Hood Sistah) because I want them to know
…that I really don’t approve of their behavior and its hard for me to resolve my feelings of shame, disappointment, and ultimate dismissal, because this issue is just such an AFFRONT to my morals…
I think that my silence, when I turned a blind eye to those girls in H.S., and stopped encouraging them to rise above the odds, the pain and guilt—I harbor because I have essentially “left the Hood” and the ensnarling life of poverty behind through hard-work and diligence…nonetheless it still affects me
The guilt and shame that I harbor, knowing that I allowed many of those “fast” girls to “Dig Their Own Graves”–has affected me on a level that I have never truly resolved…and fast-forward to ten years later and the same mess is still affecting the community…
I know this is hurtful, and I feel alot of pain about this too.
…because when a good majority of Black woman “choose” to be the very thing that has characterized a whole group of as loose, immoral, and just plain dumb for so long unfairly and everything—I just end up resenting them and shirk off the communal responsibility that they and their offspring bring..and then I begin to feel bombarded and it becomes so hard for me not to see this as one big problem in which Black community already distressed by poverty end up becoming more and more strained and I’m stressed out …just thinking how–are places like Philly, Baltimore, and Chicago already struggling in with thread-bare educational budgets, jails, and health systems all on the brink–every year being bombarded with more children then they can care for —languishing in foster care and ultimate funneled in lacking juvenile/jail/mental health systems all across America.
For some reason, I’m wondering what went wrong…
I mean…Weren’t other girls encouraged finish school, get an education, or at the very least get married Before Having Kids?
Weren’t young men told that they should at least have a job and an education before they “decide to have a baby”?
Even as I pose these questions..I’m thinking…What a joke…Black America don’t care about dat..
.Young Black kids think the rules don’t apply to them, that they just don’t have to listen to anybody, or give them respect and their so inflated by what the media tells them that it has created a vacuum–Between what is realistic/and what is a want…What is really going to make you stand out as a adult..(education/lifestyle vs. a kid–new sneaks/hot gear).
As a young person, I have an obligation to speak up against this, because like I say, I just can’t go silently and let these kids out here think that this shit is acceptable…(and let another generation of Black children throw their futures away—not on my watch!
My mom used to tell me stories about: not only getting spanked by her parents for her transgressions but getting spanked by her neighbors and church friends too…so you can imagine my surprise to see that that type of child-rearing is not happening and it is being delegated to penal systems across America in handling Black children.
All I’m saying is, this generation’s young Black Leaders have to address some of these things happening in the community and no it will not be easy
I just hope that we come together and do something soon, because it is not looking good for us collectively in 2015.
Theblackfashionista 