Many of my contemporaries and I agree that in the grand scheme of things, integration has harmed us more as a people than it has helped us. Don't get me wrong, integration did open up a world of opportunities for our people, but instead of using those opportunities to better ourselves, we messed up when we squandered those opportunities in an attempt to be white. Take a look at the historical record, most if not all native people are community-based. Conversely, the people who settled this nation, as well as those who financed these trips, were out for individual gain, not the betterment of their own people. Hell, these new settlers ignored the land claims of the native peoples and their way of life, taking the land as their own and forcing their own culture and way of life on them despite the natives surviving in those areas for several millennia before. And if that wasn't enough, this nation was built on the backs of people who either had no interest in it, or were against the administration of this new culture that was so different than their own, a debt that still has not been paid in full.
As progressive payments to that debt were made via the civil rights movement, Black America again became fixated with wanting to be white, and now it's beginning to trickle down to our children. Am I the only one who remembers the days where we looked at white children and often remarked, "white kids are crazy?" You know the ones who were seen in department stores on leashes, the ones who not only cussed around their parents but at their parents, and still only received time out. Many of us received the thrashing of a lifetime for making faces about things that we disagreed with let alone verbally expressing our disagreement. Follow that up with modern advances to medicine and this (in my opinion) fictitious "disease" of ADHD and now we are convinced that it's best for our kids to make them medicated zombies because that's what white folks are doing. I've recently become privy to an interesting point, that most if not all of the youth or young adults that have indulged in mass shootings in or outside of school were prescribed some sort of ADHD medicine. Let that sink in for a minute...
Now, in 2015, in the midst of the #blacklivesmatter movement, the media is portraying that the aggressive police tactics in the black community would stop if black children had more respect for authority. In addition, many inner-city teachers are complaining about how out of control children are. It doesn't take rocket science to figure this out, children have no respect for authority because they don't get whippings anymore. We are involuntarily feeding our children back into the modern day slavery system that is American prisons. I'll admit, I grew up not trusting law enforcement and not liking teachers who told me what to do, but I knew that if a cop brought me home, with or without handcuffs, I had to call my parents from jail, or if a teacher wrote or called my house, that I'd be in for it. And that's what kept me in line. Today's children are not stupid, they realize that in instances where they may engage in inappropriate behavior, that they are not subject to the punishment that we or our parents were and in turn they don't care. Time-out or a stern talking to are nothing in comparison to a good ole fashioned tanning of the hide. But with White America always wanting to get in someone else's business, not for the betterment of community; but to push their own selfish agenda, you can't even discipline your kids without abuse allegations. So now White America wants us to believe that Sgt. Slam in South Carolina was within his rights to throw that little girl from her desk because she was disrespectful of authority, but that's a problem that they started. White children have not been traditionally the most respectful of authority but because of white privilege their childish antics of youth are dismissed as just that. Our children aren't afforded that privilege. At the end of it all one thing remains clear, as much as we try to get what White America has, we still will never be white enough for a lot of it, so I urge you, discipline your kids, before the police have to!
