The state of Black America, ”which is the shame and disgrace in our affluent land that “more than a third of all black children live in poverty and almost two-thirds grow up in a home without both parents. In some cities, more than half of all black boys do not finish high school, and by the time they are in their 30s, almost six in ten black high school dropouts will have spent time in prison. Half of all black men in their twenties are jobless, and one study a few years ago found more black men in prison than enrolled in college.”
“This sad story,” Obama concluded, “is a stark reminder that the long march toward true and meaningful equality in America isn’t over. We have a long way to go.”
Within the black condition today you will see black women with two cars and a c*ndominium but without a man to satisfy them, while many a brother is broke with too many women. You used to go through the black community and see a lot of pretty women and a lot of working men, but these days when you go through the black community you see a lot of working women and a lot of pretty men.
In this mind-boggling situation the black man tends to see the major obstacle to the performance of their role as racism or “the system” while the black woman will often see the problem as the black male, unwary of the fact that she is talking about a portion of her own heredity and has inadvertently sided with the system. Black men and women are accordingly locked in a hope-to-die struggle, a love life of misplaced rage.
In our own research at the Black Think Tank, we have observed the consequences of this predicament in our communities and “black love“ therapy groups, including the complications in the brainwashing of black men’s minds and the dreadful psychosocial obstacles that are set in place as early as five or six, when the black boy begins to develop a distorted image of his role and starts to lose the struggle to acquire and develop what psychologists call his “locus of control” over his personal destiny and day-to-day functioning.
And yet we continue to talk and write about the black male plight, but nobody does anything about it, beyond the many grand conferences where all clap hands to tough talk about “the white man” (who is usually nowhere in sight) and deliver lofty challenges and fling empty exhortations to the wind before returning to routine lives within the black male’s conked out status quo, with nothing else done until the curtains rise on still another conference. Black men’s groups and other black intellectuals have held successive conferences with the specific intent of addressing the role of the black male and to come up with concrete solutions. Today we have more and more solutions and less and less understanding of a problem that persists and grows more gruesome with each passing day of drive-by shootings and high school dropout and incarceration rates. In fact we haven’t tried one-half of the ways to solve the black male crisis we already know. Find one hundred ways to be the best black father and the best black man you already know how to be.
For instance, black men know how to work for a living, they know how to treat their women and children better, how to spend quality time with their families, or at least some time, how to stay at home and out of the street and out of trouble, to stay with their women and children, to say and do the right thing.
The destruction of our moral fiber is a sin and a shame despite the fact that black churches seem to prosper on almost every corner of our communities -- sometimes more than one church per corner. Let them become our meeting place, our shelter in a time of storm. This shouldn’t be that hard since they are the only institutions in the black community owned and controlled by us, and we no longer have the white-appointed church overseers hovering over us the way we had in the days of chattel slavery. At this late date we should by now be willing and able to demand that the pastors and the deacons keep these churches open night and day, 24/7, all night long, for teaching everything that affects black children and family,
Today, our churches stand alone and empty, languishing idle for most of the week with nothing to justify their existence. They should be packed on every Saturday from sunup to sundown with learning activities, and every night, not to mention Saturday schools and weekday after-hour educational activities (“success activities”) to replace our children’s excessive involvement in the “failure activities” that await them up and down our mean city streets.
The black male “talented tenth” must step up to the plate and seize back our children’s minds. They must halt the destruction of our children in the killing fields of the public schools controlled by outsiders to the communities and the children they presume to serve. They must lead a complete overhaul of the public schools and educate every black man, woman and child.
Both male and female adults must be mobilized to act as para-teachers in these new community educational centers to teach what they know to the children and other adults. We must begin to put education into the black community. On the most basic level, the “24-hour churches” could begin to set the standard and the tone for the restoration of discipline to black families and communities, helping the children to respect their parents and elders the way they used to do. If the children cannot respect their parents they will not respect their teachers, they will not respect their preachers, not to mention the social worker and the police, nor any other authority figure, and in the end they will not be able to respect themselves.
Fill the churches with history clubs, business clubs, political clubs, oratorical clubs, vocational skills clubs, technology clubs, business clubs. Bring in voluntary squads of psychologists and social workers and let them begin to intervene in the children’s mental and social health. Then they must move up to the adults who are worse off than the children. Our admittedly overworked and unappreciated teachers must be willing to go the extra mile and begin and come in and volunteer to teach our children in the after hour settings, without the stultifying external restraints that have hamstrung their efforts in our deteriorating public schools that locked the children and the teachers in a chronic travesty of collective miseducation. If necessary black men could demand a stimulus package like everybody else. In time we as a people would begin to raise the level of excellence in education to the level of excellence in athletics and entertainment, where the quality of black varsity academics would quickly equal or exceed the quality of black varsity athletics.
Beyond such tactics and strategies which may easily be found in public libraries and computer search engines, we must cease our endless search for spoon-fed solutions and begin to get together and coalesce around the black child from block to block, town to town, state to state and coast to coast as well as in their local “hood.” Then whether they march on Washington or not, black men will be armed with a systematic plan in place to organize around their roles as black men in each and every locale, from one community to another, from the bottom up, organizing around a Black Male Program of National Action to restore the black male to a place of respect and importance in his family and community.
The Black Think Tank hereby calls for all black men and all black organizations of men to unite and synchronize their solutions in a Black Male Program of national Action, spelling out in no uncertain terms what we as a people and America as a whole must do to enable the black male to begin to exercise the best means he can in the performance of his role as a father and a man.
“History teaches us,” Obama told the Urban League, “that equality must be fought for each and every day.” As Frederick Douglass put it, “power concedes nothing without a demand,” and you can talk about the strategies and tactics of horticulture all you want but “you can’t have the harvest without plowing the field…You may not get everything you work for but you must work for everything you get.”
The role of the black male must be as a leader of change, not only for himself but also to show the way to a better future to a confused and morally decadent society. In his search for more and more ways to do what must be done for the black male, but was left undone, he will learn from the history of social change that the point is not so much to understand things as to change them, and it will be the little things that count in a sense, the thing that he can do for himself as well as what he can demand of others or the powers-that-be.
Posted By: DAVID JOHNSON
Saturday, March 3rd 2012 at 6:45PM
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