blacksilentmaj's JumboTweets
- There’s too much violence
in black communities:
Is there an answer?
Hint: Values Matter © 2017
Part 1
Every day, not one, but several people are shot. It’s our strongest reminder just how violent many black communities have become. Some of the acts of violence have been triggered by the smallest, the dumbest of arguments. Remember the woman on a city bus who stabbed another woman to death over a bump? Remember how one man tried to kill another man over a potato chip?
As Malcolm X might have said, “The chickens have come home to roost.” Translated, it means the failure of black parents to teach their children socially acceptable values is now coming to the surface to haunt the black community.
If it is true that you can judge a tree by its fruit, then, you sure can judge a parent by the behavior of that parent’s children. Maya Angelou said it so well: “All vices and virtues begin in the home.”
Not all black parents, but too many black parents have been failing to teach their children the following values:
• Respect themselves.
• Respect others.
• Respect for the property of others.
• Respect for life.
• They must work for what they want in life.
• They must put a premium on education, and it’s not an option.
• The must respect the law, authority and their elders.
• They must get God into their lives.
When parents fail to teach their children these values, their children will inevitably drift, they will hang out late at night, they will get involved with the wrong crowd, they will carjack, commit home burglaries, robberies, get into drug use, etc.
The violence in our communities is terrible, to put it mildly, but it’s solvable. It won’t happen overnight. It will take about 20 years for the current menaces to be imprisoned, die off, or settle into old age. The good news that is almost every problem has a short term and a long-term solution.
In the short term, the black community has to be more aggressive in protecting itself. We must set up neighborhood patrols that will work closely with the police. The community has to protect itself from black criminals who have no allegiance or love for the black community or any other community. Criminals need to know they’re being watched, and they will be “snitched” on. People can snitch anonymously, by the way.
The black community must not feel guilty about demanding long prison sentences for people who have proven they have no love for the black community. Popular rhetoric will decry the number of black men who are imprisoned. But most of the ones imprisoned are there because they’ve committed some very serious crimes against their own black people, up to and including murder. They’re hardly “political prisoners.”
- There’s too much violence
in black communities:
Is there an answer?
Hint: Values Matter © 2017
Part 2
In the long term, the black community is overdue for a second cultural revolution. The first cultural revolution was the “Black is Beautiful” cultural revolution. The second cultural revolution has to focus on black parenting, which has been horrific in many respects. Bad parenting needs to be called out.
When you think about it, so many of the problems African Americans face are actually symptoms and the effects of bad parenting.
When you look at our abysmal school drop-out rates, the parent(s) has to share much of the blame. How can a young person expect to be employable if he/she has dropped out of school and doesn’t have the skills to get a decent job? A child comes into the world with a blank slate. The parent can impress upon that child socially acceptable values that will lead to the child’s success, or the parent can impress a victim’s mindset.
Like the first cultural revolution, the second one needs to be promoted. Let us promote it in the following ways:
• In music.
• In television program.
• In movies.
• In barber and beauty shops.
• On talk radio.
• In conversations with each other.
• In books.
• In magazines.
• In tweets and posts.
In sum, let us promote the idea that values matter, not just in other communities, but in our communities too. No one group or political party has a monopoly on values. All decent people have values. Like other parents, black parents also are responsible for teaching their children values.
The result will be safer and more prosperous black communities that will also diminish the desire of some of us to move 20 or 30 miles away from each other just to live in more peaceful neighborhoods.