I see where Dr. Cosby is coming from with his sentiments. Ultimately , we as a community have to do a critical self examination. Yes there is a racist society out there; police brutality, environmental racism, redlining us out of good property values, gentrification, inadeduate healthcare, unemployment and underemployment, the list can go on and on. Also, the list is not a new list. These things (and worse) have been happening to our community for hundreds of years. The conditions of the society are not new, what has changed is the condition of our souls. We have allowed the racism that we fought so diligently for over 400 years to finally dictate to us what our reality is. It is the racist that says that black people cannot excell, cannot learn discipline, cannot be educated. Now, that racist is our own people. Talk to a a young black kid in your community. Ask them what it means to be black, what it means to be white, what it means to be "real" so to speak, and you'd think you were talking to either a young klansman, or a neo-conservative "colorblind" person who sees no color, but understands the "proper" social order of white supremacy and knows that blacks are suppposed to be at the bottom of that order. One kid (black mind you) had the nerve to tell me that there was no such thing as racism and that black people are at the bottom of the social order because we simply "choose to be". This of course, supposes that black people just are ignorant, lazy, and violent by nature, which he stated that "most of them are, but I am not black, I am American"
. Later on that same day, he and 2 of his black(or not black) friends were handcuffed by the police for playing with a BB gun at a block party.
I talk with black youth everyday on the job and I tell you, there is no sense of community nor excellence. The ideal or goal is to get over on people or "Hustle", but they don't have the literacy skills nor the analytical thinking skills to be "successful" at it, so it no longer shocks me to see our jails overrun with young black boys and men. A blind cop with no legs can see them doing a crime and catch them with out so much as breaking a sweat. We are in bad shape brothers and sisters if our community is depending on the hip-hop generation to carry on a struggle for freedom, justice, and equality.
I agree with preachdawg, our churches need to step up and have total community development as a goal. But are churches today really equipped to meet such a challenge? The political evil of racism has become the spiritual evil of self hatred in our community. This self hatred is becomming our collective self identity, and the only way some of our people deal with it is to claim some sort of "non-racial" status, which means nothing because we do not define race for ourselves, the larger society does. And because of it, we as a community have to rethink our spiritual strivings and focus on the community as a source of divine inspiration and movement.
Blackwatch!!!!!!