Black Future: Black Enough

I grew up in the Chamberlayne area of Henrico County, Virginia.  It was and still is a mixed-race, multi-class community ranging from white, black, Asian, Hispanic; low, working, middle, and upper class families.  An only child living with happily married parents in our modest but loving home, I played and excelled at baseball, enjoyed reading, history and social studies, and did very well in school.  I was in art clubs, the debate team, student government, and was in an honor or "talented and gifted" program every year of my formal education.  My second elementary school and my middle schools were predominately white.  All of this and more has allowed me to have a unique opportunity for exposure throughout my childhood years...which helped me gain the skills to communicate with people from a variety of races and socio-economic backgrounds.  I've had real white, Asian, and Hispanic friends.  By the account of many, many people I've associated with.....particularly from more urban areas than Chamberlayne, I wasn't black enough.

Black Future: The Police

In 2007, Harlem-based hip-hop artist Cam'ron told Anderson Cooper during an interview that he believes there's never a reason to ask for police assistance or help police during a crime investigation.  This was around the tail end of his "Stop Snitchin'" campaign, aimed at telling his community and fans to stop involving the police in, well, anything.  This was also after he had been shot in a botched robbery attempt after leaving a nightclub in Washington D.C., where he drove himself to the hospital and told the police he didn't know who shot him or anything else about the incident.  Cam'ron, by all accounts, is solid on his anti-police rhetoric.  By word and deed, there's no cooperation about cooperating.  Because of this he should be honored as an urban legend.  They should rename the club he was attending the night of the incident Club Cam and Howard University should have a course on him.  Unlike Tupac Shakur (who has courses about him in a few colleges across the country) Killa Cam didn't talk to the police or go on record to discuss working with them, like Tupac did.  Cam'ron was real...at least to himself.  To most of black America, however, he and his anti-police views are media fodder and fantasy....because we really, really love the police.

Black Future: The Political Arena

When it's all said and done...and by done I mean after the various "farewell" gatherings around the D.C. area and across the country, the BET, Centric, and TV One specials, the nearly defunct free news publication commemorative editions, and the absurd amount of non-factual memes....we will see that President Barak Obama was a slightly above-average U.S. president.  Some of us will.  Most of us will remember the "good" things like the gas prices falling in the last two years of his term, the commuting of hundreds of unfair illegal drug-related prison sentences, and how cool he appeared to be.  Yet most of us will forget how the Affordable Health Care Act strained the resources of many black-owned small business, how Obama kept American soldiers in the volatile Middle East, how he his administration sent troops to raid American homes to deport Hispanics, and how there was no legitimate, legislative response to police brutality.  All of the negative aspects of his administration will be blamed of course on Republican opposition.  But very few African-Americans will acknowledge that we didn't hold him accountable for anything that we knew wasn't good (according to white president standards).  And in the end, if we're honest we'll be able to confirm we only voted and  re-voted for President Obama because he was black.

Black Future: Black Christianity

 To all my black Christians out there, can you remember the first time you heard that white southern slave owners beat Christianity into the African slaves?  Do you remember who it was, what it was, or where you were? How do you remember feeling?  What did it do to you?  What did it do to black Christianity?

Black Future: The 'Serious Challenge' of Reparations

After a week long tour of the Untied States, the United Nations Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent released some recommendations after meeting with African Americans and others from around the country.  Now these are their preliminary thoughts according to various reports, but they believe the Untied States should put some serious effort into closing in race driven past.  For starters, they suggest the U.S. government consider reparations for all of the descendants of African slavery, establish a national human rights commission, and publicly acknowledge that the trans-Atlantic slave trade was a crime against humanity.  The group was reportedly was "extremely concerned about the [current] human rights situation of African-Americans."    Mireille Fanon Mendes-France, chair of the organization said "the colonial history, the legacy of enslavement, racial subordination and segregation, racial terrorism, and racial inequality in the U.S. remains a serious challenge as there has been no real commitment to reparations and to truth and reconciliation for people of African descent."  Should their recommendation be built on?  Should some of today's black Americans receive money for their ancestors being enslaved?  Can this really happen?