Saying No Will Not Be An Option

The hip hop phenomenon that originally came on the scene back in the eighties started out as some positive, uplifting music for the black community. But look at this form of music now and it has become synonymous with misogyny, criminal behavior, and everything else that is despicable in the black community. A lot of people say that black people should be ashamed and should take more pride in themselves than to allow this to continue to happen. But take the time to peel back the covers and take just a cursory glance at the source and you’ll see that this so called black form of music has been hijacked by music industry conglomerates that have totally rewritten the script. Why? The music industry has the resources to pay somebody to do whatever they want. And people line up to do it.

There was a scene in the movie Bamboozled where the two black stars of a modern day minstrel finally had enough of debasing themselves for the dominant culture’s entertainment. One of the stars had already quit and the other refused to don his costume before he went on stage. The white network executive was furious and fired him right on the spot. Before he could take another breath he turned to a stage hand and asked if he was ready for the big league. Without hesitating for any fraction of a microsecond the stage hand jumped at his chance to do what other black people actually figured out was too insulting to be done.

In the movie White Dog, featuring Kristy McNichol as Julie Sawyers and Paul Winfield as Keys as well as a host of other actors, a white girl becomes the owner of a dog that has been trained to attack only visibly black people. Ms. Sawyers takes her dog to Mr. Keys who specializes in training dogs in an attempt to get the dog reconditioned to not attack black people. Ms. Sawyers asked the usual naïve questions. Who would want their dog to attack only black people? Duh! Sick mean ass white people. How would they train the dog? Mr. Keys told her all the white person has to do is run across a brother who is down on his luck and needs a little cash. They’ll give the man a few dollars to mistreat the dog as a puppy and the dog will develop a sense of hatred for black people. As far as the black man was concerned, all that mattered was the money. Whether or not he thought about why he was mistreating a dog wasn’t even close to being important. The fact that he was actually helping to develop a tool against black people isn’t important either. Somebody’s got to do it.

The white dominant culture has always been in control of the vast majority of wealth. And lord knows that in this country, to do anything, anything at all, you need to have access to money. Usually, if black people want a sliver of this American wealth pie, they have to submit to the predominantly white pie masters. For many black people the pursuit of wealth can be summed up as somebody’s got to do it. Yes it’s wrong but hey, I’m not a role model and somebody’s got to make the music. Hey, it’s not my problem that white people think black people are stupid and crime oriented. But the white people need some black person to help them make the propaganda that reinforces the thinking that black people are stupid and crime oriented. If I don’t do it they’ll just get somebody else. I might as well be the one benefiting from it.

Without failure there will always be some black person looking to win some white person’s favor by cutting them some slack. Back in the day the African that worked closely with the white people in the big house would be more apt to protect the white master and his property than to work with the black community. This preference for supporting white people in their endeavors with the black community has become second nature to a lot of people. Black people need to stop trying to play the race card. Yes this white man used the word nigger but he is a good friend of mine and he is a good person. That white woman is a good person and the fact that she’s on tape telling her daughter that as long as she dates a black man she can no longer work in the family business doesn’t mean a thing. The white politician was trying to pay the black man a compliment over the fact that he had never been in jail. Don’t most black people spend part of their childhood or young adult years in jail?

Black people who choose not to see the disparity in America aren’t working to be neutral. These people are actually doing what they need to do in order to believe that their submission to the status quo is okay within their own subconscious. The status quo is firmly planted in the policy of white domination and white privilege. Black people can say learn to say no. But unless all of us say no in black unity it will be a waste of time. Somebody somewhere is going to say that they don’t mind being the example of so called black independence. The black person whose thinking matches dominant thinking is promoted as a model of courage who is unafraid to break with the black group thought. And other black people who want to look courages, look independent, and reap the rewards of white society will jump on this bandwagon. Black unity will start to collapse. Just like most things that are in opposition to unity in the black community it can be done simply because black people know that some black person somewhere else would be willing to do it.