TAMING
THE “BRUTE”: WHICH IS MOST CRIMINAL A MAN CORRUPTED BY HIS ENVIRONMENT OR THE COMMUNITY THAT CORRUPTED HIM?
The
image of the Black American male is a topic that is necessarily woven into most
of the articles and commentary I have written for “For The Brothas” since its
creation. After all For The Brothas was
the brainchild of my passion to honestly examine every aspect of Black American
manhood challenging its readers and members to view this phenomenon from a
fresh and informed perspective. Black
American men live and thrive in a country that more often than not visualizes them as brutes, criminals
and savages as part of a long standing tradition of racism. Whether they are in actuality the social demons
this culture markets them as is an issue that has been hotly debated for over
300 years in America. In spite of the fact that this country has elected
its first Black American male president for a second term the unrelenting rumour of racism has continued to shadow his administration. In fact, the election of Barack Obama as the first black president of the United States of America has actually had the unexpected effect of exacerbating the unresolved and dangling issue of
racism and more specifically the divine right of one race to assume superiority
over another. As it did over 200 years ago when the ink of the Declaration of Independence and American Constitution were still wet upon the parchment the credibility of a black man as an equal in every respect to any and every other man upon this earth remains unresolved because it directly challenges the belief of racists that black
men are inferior in every way and inherently corrupt by virtue of their inferiority. I like to believe that the framers of the Declaration of Independence in their wisdom planted the seeds of universal egalitarianism within that document understanding the times were not ripe for a wholesale implementation of that lofty ideal and trusting that a more enlightened time would sow them and bring them into glorious fruition. In many ways history did play out in that selfsame way, overlong for black men yearning for freedom and opportunity in a land they had not chosen to live. Even so Black American men have shown unparalleled strength, bravery, patience and virtue on their long an incomplete journey to freedom and being imperfect as are all men they have themselves created centuries-long conflicts among themselves. There is a huge disparity in America between educated and affluent black
men such as Obama and the men, though many of them merely common men but
collectively demonized as street thugs and criminals living in some of America’s
poorest ghettos and privy or not, romanticized as purveyors of what has become
a signature ghetto culture. Likewise,
there is a lesser known and celebrated culture of Black American men who
represent the black intelligentsia a privileged and highly successful educated
class of men whose history stretches back to the days of slavery and continues
to broaden in both scope and accomplishment.
How we begin to compare these two categories of Black American men has
nothing to do with their pedigree, it begins on a level playing field which in
America universally classifies these men as brutes and savages, social
dissidents and criminals who should be feared…
The issue then and now remains the same because Black
Americans so easily turn a blind-eye to the truth. There are many reasons why Black Americans
choose not to challenge biased treatment of black men but two of them stand out
amid the rest. The larger of the two key
problems is that acknowledging racism requires them to step out of a
dysfunctional comfort zone they have created as a buffer for the certainty of a
biased assault. Secondly, giving notice
to racism challenges them to process its unpleasant content forcing them to
shape an objective and informed opinion from which to take positive action. Racism is not a threat when it has been
pushed out of sight and out of mind but as these 300 some years since the
beginning of the enslavement of Africans has proven it is a resilient threat
that appears not to be going away! The truth of the matter is that Black
Americans really do have a sound and factual basis for their fears about
racism. In the past and present black
people could be severely punished for supporting a black man or advocating a
cause sympathetic with a black man.
Black American’s are victims of racial operant conditioning, a process
of slow brainwashing used to train animals to perform certain tasks over and
over and over again until it becomes second nature. Over nearly 300 years of oppression has
conditioned black people to resent the history of unjust punishment of black
men and they fight back by assuming all black men are being unjustly treated by
the law, for this behavior I have coined the term “Reparation Justice”, it is a
feeling of entitlement for innocence based on a past history of injustice
whether the man is innocent or not. “This
is why black people are hesitant to get involved when they see a black man
being pulled over on the roadside or incarcerated on the sidewalk, this is why
black people are afraid to speak up when they witness or have knowledge of a
crime committed by a black man. Racism
must be intelligently and humanely dealt with but it may never completely
disappear in our lifetime.
The primary challenge for the Black American community is
to develop and establish effective and resilient think-tanks to galvanize and
empower itself in spite of racism in a manner that does not regurgitate the
same biases it seeks to overcome. It is
a difficult task because these think tanks must be highly introspective, i.e. focused
on the condition of Black American culture and yet responsive to those humans
and cultures who share and/or do not share their struggle. Accomplishing this task requires a highly
specialized and diversified way of thinking.
The Black community has floundered overlong because of a critical
disparity between its techniques for thinking these problems through. In a truly Machiavellian diorama the black
intelligentsia has fought and effectively lost its power struggle to the more
brutish and barbaric faction that gets it power credibility from the street! Today the black intelligentsia watches in
anesthetic horror from the stained windows of their ivory towers as the decayed
remnants of a once brilliant black community fail and become gentrified. They bemoan the rich ethnic history they
failed to capture there that has been replaced with the brutish history of the
latest homicide, gang debacle or drug overdose.
On the fringes of these dwindling communities drug dealers continue to
stand guard over territories for which they have no legal claim, the dynamics
of whose ownership exceeds their ability to comprehend until the cold notice to
vacate arrives forwarded through the attorneys of proprietors in another
country. Nothing could be more
depressing…
The black men standing on the streets feel as if they own
them and as if they have gone through some ancient warriors rites of passage to
earn the right to stand there guard their ancestral territory to the
death. But the absurdity of this premise
only becomes gruesomely evident when the coroners truck carts away their
corpse. Who knows what trials they
endured to earn the right to stand in the place where they were ultimately
killed, who knows what level of street knowledge they achieved what standard of
street credibility they earned in order to stand up and be cut down where they
stood? The legendary skills of the streetwise have been passed on generation to
generation from the plantation to the
city and they have withstood the slavemaster’s whip and the gangsters bullet,
they are weapons and tools forged for use in a deadly and viscous cycle human
suffering and depravity. The streetwise
method of thinking can in fact be qualified as a comprehensive philosophy
driven by the notion of an over-romanticized ghetto culture that is highly
survivalist and desperate in nature.
Street sense relies on raw, spontaneous instinct, it is adrenaline based
and therefore highly effective in dangerous situations but can be virtually
worthless when a more cerebral and phased out solution is required. Many people believe that the man who invests
his existence only in street sense does so because he visualizes his life as a
transient phenomenon with the expectation of little accomplishment beyond the
stolen pleasures he might wrest from the incessant conflicts threatening his
freedom and his life. He knows these
pleasures are not legitimately earned but rationalizes them by citing the
corruption of humanity in general as justification for seizing the material
objectives without regard their morality.
He may believe that because all men covet money, possessions and power
his methodology is no more immoral or unethical as the next villain. Street sense can never solve the problems of
racism because it is focused on securing a basic level survival lasting only
for the moment; a state of existence that will be in desperate chaos almost as
soon as it becomes gratified due to its lack of long-term planning. Recidivism and many other social dysfunctions
that case people to become locked into addictions, economic hardship,
over-dependency on social welfare, and other debilitating syndrome are some
typical corrosive hallmarks of street-wisdom.
Street wisdom and philosophy is not sustainable as the foundation for a culture
or community outside of an esoteric ring of gangsters, outlaws or thieves… It
cannot support the critical inter-cultural relationships that diverse, twenty-first century American
culture demands.
When viewed from a purely statistical perspective it is easy
to see that there is a real population of Black Americans that identify with the
ideological system or philosophy re-minted in the twentieth century from the
ancient Roman term, “Ghetto” who significantly outnumber the black
intelligentsia and that is why street sense and street credibility collectively
known as ghetto culture reigns as the predominant force of leadership within
the black community today. Unlike most
cultures which experience internal decline, Black American culture and
specifically the culture of the black intelligentsia did not lose power
primarily through attrition as its ranks were always historically minimized by
slavery. Slavery as we well know was an inherently
strangling phenomenon wherein the education and socioeconomic empowerment of
black men was institutionally aborted.
During the period of slavery when only freedmen could pursue education
and the manifest destiny embodied within their limited scope of careers they
did represent their community as the black intelligentsia. After slavery many
black men were able to advance themselves in the example of the black
intelligentsia with resources made available to them during the reconstruction
but their numbers were still heavily outweighed by uneducated and
unsophisticated black men who often had no choice but to cling to the fetters
of post-slavery reality. After the brief
blessing of reconstruction black men were again plunged into an abysmal state
of existence begrudging them their lawful emancipation replacing it with laws both
on and off the books that would effectively reverse the 13th
amendment and lock them out of the nation’s burgeoning industrial economy.
Now the black intelligentsia was able to make remarkable
progress after the emancipation of black peoples. Aided by the overlay of Victorian culture the
black intelligentsia assumed a more prominent role in the newly formed black
community of freedmen. Historically the
black intelligentsia comprised of clergymen, farmers and businessmen as well as
some slaves who held prominent positions within the plantation system was
always the ethical and political rock of the bisected black community. Whenever there was any racial conflict the
men of the black intelligentsia were first consulted by both black and white
stakeholders toward a resolution. Then
as now slaves, ex slaves as well as their descendants were forced to comply
with the wishes of these black leaders whether they agreed with them or not
because of the rigidity of the social structure; that they greatly resented and
envied them their affluence cannot be discounted as there would have been a
huge gulf in their respective standards of living. Such men certainly might have viewed the
black intelligentsia with the same disdain they held for men they more clearly
understood to be their oppressors. So it
is quite easy to understand how institutionally enforced oppression, poverty
and ignorance has always been the source of the black man’s hatred and
resentment of authority, and education or intelligence. Moreover, the gulf between the black
intelligentsia and the general population of the black community that began to lessen
in the late nineteenth century, stabilize during the first half of the twentieth
century only to destabilize and widen again during the second half of the
twentieth and first quarter of the twenty-first century is a clear indicator
that this internal trauma has not been managed.
In reality there has been no attempt to address this disparity; the
black community continues to ignore its existence as if it were at the bottom
of their substantial pile of problems. So
the resentment, animosity and jealousy coming from the poor and uneducated
classes of Black Americans intensified over the long years during and after
slavery to the present as a rising black middle class turned its noses up at
its less fortunate brothers and sisters and as the underclasses snubbed the
black intelligentsia back. The poor of
the black community were amply frustrated with their own struggles to find
advancement and they began to claim that the economically successful talented
tenth had merely adopted the ways of their oppressors and embarked on a
wholesale rejection of the black intelligentsia including their values mostly
as a weak means of defense against forces they did not wholly understand.
Our nineteenth and early twentieth century black
intellectuals were wrong in their assumption that their poor brothers and
sisters were morally corrupt and ignorant and therefore deserving of the cruel
vicissitudes of life exacted upon them.
In those days such painful reminders of the inequity in justice would
commonly be personified by a frequent lynching or incarceration for no other
reason than being a black man vulnerable and guilty by virtue of his
powerlessness. Yes, we can honestly and
regrettably say that the black intelligentsia were and are continue to be
guilty of bias against poor, uneducated, and unsophisticated black man by even partially
condoning the lynching’s and sentencing’s of those assumed to be brutish and
ethically corrupt brothers without first challenging the legitimacy of their
sentence and the motive of their accusers.
This brings us full circle to expose the nature of the
black community that would allow it to ignore itself through the illusion that
some standard of normalcy was being preserved whilst the opposite, its very
foundation was being liquefied and vaporized through a determined combination
of destructive external and internal forces which are invested in the
opportunistic exploitation of apathy to seize total control. Even more responsibility lies on the heads of
those living in troubled communities for turning the tide around making it
necessary for them to wake up and name the undefined line they are attempting
to avoid crossing. Someone must cross
that line! The line must be drawn where black men who conspire to or actually
committed crimes are first held accountable by their own communities. Because the legal power structure in America
has historically excluded Black Americans from taking part in their own governance
blacks have always quietly awaited the sting of their masters whip knowing
nothing else as the definition of justice.
This is why the disdain for snitching has always enabled the “Brute” to
escape justice in his own community as if lying could become a form of civil
disobedience as well as means to empower the powerless with their own homegrown
recipe for jurisprudence. The game of “reparation-justice”
the black community has played for over 150 years now to evade taking
responsibility for the cultivation of a humane and civilized community has
grown equally as old as the game of continued racism against black men. No man is innocent simply because he is black
and his accusers are either white and or racists. A man is only guilty if he is
truly guilty and we must all brace ourselves to demand and then confront the
truth of a man’s choices as well as well as demanding and confronting the truth
of his accusers! Anyone of the black
intelligentsia can turn a blind-eye to justice choosing not to hold a black man
accountable because of fear, ignorance or bias and for that matter so can the
black community at the other end of the socioeconomic and political spectrum;
neither of them can ever be right in so doing!
On the other end of the spectrum the prevalent phenomenon of racism in
America which aggressively holds black men to unreasonable extremes of legal,
ethical and moral accountability it does not impose upon others must continue
to be unequivocally challenged wherever and whenever it occurs on a unified
front led by the black community. The
black community is a diversified front should not be dominated by the black
intelligentsia or any other faction to the extent that it becomes unable to
bend its substantial power to ensure that justice is duly served to every Black
American man.
FIN.
WRITTEN
BY: BIGDADDY BLUES
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