Brother Askia’s answer to the question should Black people work in American law enforcement and military.
Brother Askia’s answer to the question should Black people work in American law enforcement and military.
Dr. Amos Wilson reveals the fundamental basis and cause & reason for the unfortunate circumstances of self hate among people of African decent.
1968 was by far the most confusing year in American history for white people. It was the year that for the first time in modern and western history, white people had become openly defenseless, fearful, nervous, and simply scared of Black people. Almost fifty years later and absolutely nothing has changed about the dynamics of white people’s overall perceptions of Black people. The only thing that has evolved is white people’s willingness to admit to their fear of Black people, and yet most still will not.
The late nineteen sixties and mid seventies was a time when white people had for once consciously and subconsciously considered Black people as unpredictable. Before then, it was a fairly simple assessment to place Black people into an easily contained afterthought compartment within the consciousness of white people. The main factor in this mentality was the prevailing apparatus of Black people’s fear driven by racism and discriminatory brutality against Black people for centuries. The tides had abruptly changed when in the late sixties, Black people had become more willing to express their rights and fight for them. The new atmosphere of conflicting views and color lines brought about a riddling society which created an air of uncertainty.
With the advent of color television, live newscasts, yet less sophistication in media censorship, the entire world was able to see the reality of American racism. It was then without a doubt and apparent that the leader of the so called free world was a complete hipocracy and unable to be trusted as a government elite in the global stratosphere. It was time for America to clean up the act. The late seventies ushered in a new sense of codes in conduct, particularly in the realm of politics. With the new generations of unpredictable Blacks who could now wage what white people believed to be street wars and fight for their rights, it was time that white people learn new ways to predict the movements and cultural advancements of Black people.
The nineteen eighties showed white politicians were very swift with a solution and quite timely to the disadvantage of Black people. While the country and even the world began to fully enjoy the benefits of illicit drugs openly and freely, American politicians saw an opportunity to place well written codes onto Black people without appearing to be racist bigots. The stage was set to put the entire Black population back into a state of fear and predictability. The introduction of the War on Drugs and its prime asset called crack created a new paradigm in the ways white people could conceptualize and legitimize their fears, and ultimately their racist sense of predictability of Black people. This destructive and neglectful thinking of white Americans allowed for laws to authorize unjust and wrongful imprisonments, and countless murders by police of unarmed and innocent Black people.
No matter how much the facts are present and the truth is in front of everyone’s face, law enforcement’s sole purpose has ultimately been in place to keep minorities in America controlled and contained, yet no authorities or officials will admit this. The most hated minority to law enforcement in America has always overwhelmingly been Black people. By the late 20th century, when it was no longer acceptable to blame the problems of American society on Black people outright, politicians simply replaced Black with crime. It was a very simple transition which to this very moment is still causing turmoil among America’s Black communities with no end in sight.
Unless the observable truth is heeded and its unmistakable injustices are ceased then the inevitable yet avoidable reality is soon to come. The day when Black people will again be unpredictable to white people.
Because that old shit matters!
I hate when people bring up something that I did in the past which they may not have liked. I probably apologized for it and expressed my will to never do it again. What is done is done and I cannot change the past. I would love the idea of being forgiven as well as having the done deed forgotten, but that is never fully the case. I may be forgiven, but what I have done will not be forgotten. The act of before and its affect are what I must now live with and deal unto accordingly, even appropriately if I desire to maintain my own peace.
No one wants to constantly be reminded of their own transgressions against others. We would all like to be seen by others as the perfect model of a human being. If it were up to all of us, our wrongs would simply be rights. That is everyone’s ideal solution to their deviated and delinquent behavior. Why else would a misdoer argue to justify his or her wrongdoing? It is only to appeal to someone else’s empathetic nature and to coerce their agreement to righten themselves being done wrong. We all do it! It is the civilized thing to do. Tell me I am a fool to my face so that you and I can continue the cooperative effort of allowing you to mistreat me. That is the name of the game. Rarely does the argument ever end so peacefully. Usually someone has to form a compromise to assuage an ensued and heated debate over the misdeed. If not, that is where violence comes in handy. “Oh, you don’t like me treating you bad? Take this ass whooping! That will show you what is good for you.” There, the fence of civility has been cleared and we have entered into savagery. It should never go there, but unfortunately it does and always will sometimes.
Enter Memory:
What if we forgot when someone mistreated us? Aha! Some of you never gave that a thought I bet. I do not mean forgot in the philosophical or theoretical sense like, “oh don’t worry. I forgot that even happen.” I am talking about in the literal and physical sense like “hold up, what happened? When? For real? You lyin’! Nah that shit ain’t happen… but for real though?” The fact we can recall traumatic experiences in life is a defense mechanism and it serves a very valuable purpose. Our cognitive recollection can remind us of what we do not enjoy and if working properly will help us position ourselves to never let or allow what causes grief to negatively affect us again. Without memory and the ability to rewind and playback our experiences, bad as well as good, we would be suffering from amnesia (a brain disorder).
White folks, the rest of this is for you:
Ironically, we all have the innate ability to forgive. The catch is we have to find it in ourselves to choose to forgive being mistreated. Forgiveness is very similar to forgetting, although the two concepts are not the same. Forgiveness allows us to say to ourselves, “you know what, I have to stop thinking about what happened in the past all the time. I’ll never let it happen again though!”
To be forgiven for mistreating someone means that we have to allow ourselves to be accountable for what we have done to that other person. When we allow ourselves to be forgiven we have to also accept that who we mistreated will probably never forget what we did to them, and from time to time will remind us that they have not forgotten for safe measure. This must be done in order for them to further remind us that they intend to never let it happen again, but will forget about it until the next time they feel the need to remind us again.
Memory lasts in time and matures. It grows and becomes a new life. It takes on different names and languages. It has homes and styles itself in the latest and modern fashions. It has children and parents. It is a living, breathing, reproducing organism. Memory is essential to a society and its order. Memory passes on to generations and raises them. It feeds them their favorite foods, sings them their favorite songs, buys them their first car, helps them raise their own children. Memory reminds us of all the good things that have happened throughout human history, as well as the bad. We are the memory of us all from before, in the present, and into the future. We are accountable for our history, whether we were physically here to witness it, or it was passed down to us through memories. We can forgive ourselves and allow ourselves to be forgiven, but we will never truly forget. That old shit matters to us all.
“Con coco o sin coco?” Is what brothers and sisters ask when you ask them if they have any weed to smoke in the Dominican Republic. With cocaine or without cocaine? In the Dominican Republic cocaine is a more socially accepted drug of choice than marijuana. Weed is actually looked down upon in the way smoking crack is looked upon here in the United States. This was a very bizarre state of affairs when I realized the ramifications of such a construct. This meant that in the Dominican Republic, I was a crack head and the coke heads were the laid back stoners. My how the truth can be malleable and ambiguously obscure.
When I went to a close friend’s potluck a week ago, who is actually Dominican himself, I kept hearing him and his cousin yell out “I’m in love with the coco!” They finally played the video for everyone and we all were glued to the monitor as we watched a man sitting at a kitchen table with his friends, seemingly spreading powdered cocaine over it with playing cards and rolling up blunts. How simply sensational of a sight I thought! Who cannot relate to this image? How can you not see how relevant this scene is? I thought all of this at the same time as I thought how disgusting the video was. The mundaneness of what Hip Hop or Rap has degraded to. Who could support such garbage! These were the conflicting debates floating in my mind as I continued to stare and listen to what one of our good friends from college described as a nursery rhyme. He was right. The lyrics were so simple a two year old could recite and comprehend them after one listen. It was actually kind of disturbing to think of the influence this video will have on younger viewers.
It was stuck in my head. I walked home with my girlfriend singing “I’m in love with the coco” out loud. We would both laugh and shake our heads at our own senseless embarrassment and juxtaposed affinity for the simple yet catchy tune. I asked her to play it again when we got home. We watched the whole thing, twice. I watched it again, alone with my headphones. I bobbed my head. I lip synced the single syllable lyrics to myself. I smiled at the screen. I enjoyed it. It was addictive.
The beat! The foundation of the auditory retention is the low frequency of the sub bass line in the background music. The engineer of the musical score synthesized the reverberations of the low tones very well, and in unison the sound effects which work congruently with the bass are mesmerizing. If there were no lyrics, the song will still have a profound affect onto the listener. I can imagine watching the video with the instrumental only and still fully understanding the theme of the song. Without a doubt, like many other current rap hits, the beat carries the song and without it I sincerely believe it would not work or feel the same. The producer and his engineer did an excellent job.
The lyrics are simple, as already stated. However, the lyrics are contrasting to what is the current political atmosphere in the Black community. Whether Genasis intended to cause a debate or not is not the question. He has most certainly done so. While at my friend’s potluck, I recall a divide amongst all who were watching the video. Some loved it. Some hated it. I did find myself somewhere in the middle. The melody of the lyrics and the cadence of the rhyme took me back to “con coco o sin coco” in the Dominican Republic. It reminded me of a time and place when and where I was unsure of my political stance on drugs and what is socially on the fence, and what is totally overboard. I will not promote violence and I believe guns should be used only for protection, however I was reminded of the G Thang video when the guy had the pistol tucked into the back of his pants while working the barbecue pit. The guns looked real and I looked at them closely. I was drawn to them the same way I have always been when watching a movie or television show. This video was no different. This was a good rap video. If we must separate Hip Hip and Rap to achieve a sense of clarity and social aptness in our culture and responsibility to our community then I say this is an excellent rap video.
Whether Genasis will stand the test of the fickle music industry is oh but yet to be seen. I for one could not care less how things play out, but best of luck to him and his family. As for this record, very disturbing yet highly intriguing. It is extremely interesting how the same thing can be done in so many ways and still one out of the million appears and feels so different. This one was like tasting something different in a corner store bottled water and thinking “wow, what is this?” Only to look and see it is Poland Spring with a new logo and feeling unconsciously satisfied with what you perceive as something new.
Vandalism, Rioting & Looting: A Brief Explanation for the Law Abiding Citizen
Laws are social in nature. There must be an agreement between two or more people in order for law to function. There is order without law, and that is called natural order. However, as people grow larger in numbers and form communities, different ideas of what that order means becomes apparent. Laws are formed in order to better interpret these orders amongst the larger group. Written laws are created to further substantiate the new and evolved meanings of the agreed upon orders, and that is called policy (within the English diction).
The idea of the police is a direct result of policy. The formation of a community or state appointed group of people to enforce the policies is as old as the formation of laws. In the brief history of America, the police were formed mainly to protect property from destruction, burglary, and theft. Later on, continuing to today, they have been granted more authority over more policies and jurisdictions of the interpreted laws. Nonetheless, protection of property is the historic basis of American police enforcement.
In America, and quite like most countries worldwide, when a group of citizens who feel the law has been misinterpreted by their appointed officials and the police enforcement has infringed upon their agreed civil liberties, those people believe the law is no longer valid. Protesting can be passive as well as aggressive. Peaceful protests to misinterpretations and gross infringements of the law are most often received with little resistance by community officials and law enforcement, therefore they usually do not beg any attention from law enforcement or appointed officials. The community grievance will persist and remain unsettled. Violence to officials or law enforcers is a far greater risk to a protestor’s personal well being, plain and simple. Otherwise, hand to hand combat and gratuitous violence would be a protestor’s first option at proving their political point. In history, violence has proven effective when a disgruntled group of people wish to have their social and political demands met by a government, often times leading to a newer government run by those formerly disgruntled parties. However one may want to interpret a civil protest, war is and always will be an option if tensions reach those points.
Destruction of Property: Since the historic basis of law enforcement, specifically in America, is to protect property, it is considered a great portion of political leverage for an angry protestor to test the policy of protecting property by the police enforcement. City officials must and will answer the complaints of those property owners who have been hurt by the property destruction, and those law enforcers must use proper judgment when addressing the mob who is aggressively taunting their authority. This political conundrum the government is placed within is perplexing and very costly. The predicament which it will certainly lead to during and after the riot and destruction of property does affect the future policy and places government in a position of defense, rather than the offensive stance they’ve been abusing before. One must acknowledge and question the role of government in this instance and refer to reinterpretation of the law and its policies. If it were not for the policy to promise to protect property and enforce this seemingly simple task, which often times is rarely addressed correctly on a normal basis by law enforcement, the angry protestor would have little advantage in a corrupted society besides peacefully being unheard, or angrily waging full scale war.
I hope this brief explanation has helped the law abiding citizen to understand why vandalism, looting, & rioting happen, and what true and rational purpose they serve in urban society.
Once there was a time when our fathers and our mothers were together in nature. Our family was whole. Our tribe was one. Our nation was wealthy. We did not seek out false senses. That was a time when we knew who we were and understood our presence amongst a universe. In that time we could look upon our brother and our sister without shame. His and her bodies were not a work of art, but were them in their flesh. We could see each other as who and what we were together, and commune for greater meanings. There was no term for our being. We were as we were and we were loved. We could find our future within ourselves and create something beautiful without the thought of procedure, and ceremony was a family affair and not a legality.
Then one day the sons and the daughters of our fathers and our mothers were stolen to be farmed. Sentenced to a life of criminality. Their bodies were ravaged and draped in bloody soiled rags. It was a tragedy. These were our new fathers and our new mothers. They were auctioned to be bred. The purpose of their flesh was to make flesh. There was no person, only an object. Our new fathers were bulls, and our new mothers were heifers. They both could be mistreated within the new laws. They were not told, but forced. So it began they were sexual creatures. Created only to create more genetic mutations of a lusty alien inhabitant. In the new wilderness they worked for nothing and lusted to do more of nothing. The bodies of our new mothers and fathers became ornaments of promiscuity. It was no longer them in their flesh as it once was. It was the flesh on them, and then it meant more than who they were. They passed their fleshly syndrome to their children, and their children to their children. It never ceased. The body then came before the mind, as the cart had become before the horse. The godly dynamic of our mothers and fathers from our beginning was lost, and gone to be lost for eons.
Today we accept the sexual potency of the farm bred people. Our lost past is still missing in the annals of time. We cannot escape our fixation of our own flesh. We lose sleep over the thought of having to go without satisfying our lusts. We loathe a simple matching of our time with our love for the mind. It is an idea well misunderstood and no longer sought. It is deemed unnatural. Nature is now the body and its desire. It is the new realization of what a meaningful partnership is determined. To go back to where we come from is to be savage. We are the product of farm breeding and our sexual potency is the commodity which has survived with us. It must mean our survival, if not then we would be extinct. This is the belief. Although untrue, it stands as our cognitive misguided instinct. Our fathers and mothers would not understand us. They would believe we are savages.
What we all have to recognize is that amongst us we have a common maladaptive, misguided, miseducated, indiscriminately imposed, abnormal, weakened and downtrodden mental consciousness. It is one of a subordinate servant. We all must further fully realize and actualize as a people that we also have one common enemy, who with their selfish, misguided, uneducated, insidious, diseased and unwarranted superior yet truly inferior way of thinking, have fooled us into believing in a great myth. The great myth is that they are superior and we are inferior. It is time we recollect our awareness and our thoughts and reach back in time and recall that we have a common goal, and that is to reclaim our power and become a great nation once again as we have been before. It is imperative that our goal be achieved if we intend to survive and substantially reap the true benefits of our toil for our generations to come.
We have a lot of weaknesses in our way of thinking today. Our mentality is one of a non thinker, an imbecile, a wanton, a silly, a jest, a joke, someone who cannot be taken seriously. We have a great tendency to rely on others for our own validation. Our men are profoundly discouraged and our women are easily fooled. We think our way of thinking is good for us. We believe we are all individuals who have no agency to our community and one another. We consume liberally in belief that the more we consume then the more our illusionary success is substantiated. We believe the pervasively simple yet fleeting notion that money alone is power. We are quite foolish.
We are quite foolish in the sense that these anecdotal follies of the consciousness are simply proverbial ideological hand-me-downs from them. They wrote us a simplistic and undefined lackadaisical cartoon playbook for our so called life, then said it was the truth to our success. This quick sleight of hand motion from our enemy happened in 1964. The trickery and devilish events that played out between 1964 and into the 1970s have setup a current culture defined in uncontrollable pseudo liberalism, quasi intellectualism, and plain stupidity. We are once again a people divided, suffering from a generation gap which insists that our parents cannot teach our children, and our children are parenting children. Our history has been forgotten once more, especially our recent history.
These are symptoms of the weakness of the subordinate mentality. The idea that someone else is superior to us is more present now than it was 55 years ago. We once again seek acceptance amongst a people who will never fully accept us. We once again believe if we act like them long enough that we can actually become them. We once again believe that since we are born here that we naturally belong here. We are once again fooled by a stupid little lie, the lie of equality. We are not equal. We are not made the same. We do not think the same. We are very different, and the more we try to act like them the further we do ourselves a tremendous disservice, in service of them. The weakness of the subordinate mentality has affected our progress toward solidarity and wealth building. Our power sources are impeded by our subservient predisposition to labor. We do not labor for ourselves and our own people. We labor for them unconsciously as well as consciously. They take from us with no protest on our behalf. We give our mind and body to them without regard and willingly. We are slaves.
There is a weakness within the subordinate mentality. We learn their history and say it is ours. We determine the potency of our sexuality based on their sadistic standards and proclaim it as natural. We eat their food and call it our own. We use their model of family structure to rate the value of ours and say we are homegrown. Our women define beauty as that of their women and believe they are feminists. Our men attest to success as that of their men and call themselves entrepreneurs. We substantiate our wealth with the idea of owning property on their illegitimate lands. We fight their wars for them without just cause or due pay and claim to be patriotic. We teach our children their sciences, which are bastard inklings of our fathers’ knowledge, and call it a good education. We study their religions and praise their gods and call ourselves holy. These are but a few of the weaknesses of the subordinate mentality.
Our greatness is at hand. It is within our own grasp. Our power is between the lot of us and us alone. The gates must be shut and the lock must be latched. Our front door has been opened for too many centuries. It is time to close the windows and let down the blinds. We cannot afford our guests’ presence in our homes any longer. They have raided our refrigerator and soiled our furniture. They have left their mess and we must clean after them. We have partied with them on our dime and to our demise. They do not appreciate us nor do they care to invest in our well being. We are fools to believe they will change and become a proper acquaintance. Now and forever we should see them for who they are, parasites and guile adversaries.
Now we should look at one another and rebuild our kingdom, our nation, our empire. We now need to work amongst ourselves and ourselves only. We do not need any outside influence or acceptance. This is our duty to ourselves and our generations to come. No longer should we suffer from the weaknesses of a subordinate mentality. We must recollect our history and speak the truths of one another to each other. It is only then that our power will be rekindled and our nation rebuilt to its heights. There is only one way to solve our plight and that is through solidarity and close minded, self centered restructure of our own selves as a people. Our leaders must be reinvented and our warriors must be reorganized. Our women need to be reacquainted and our children reeducated. We are not powerless and we are not truly subordinate. We are powerful and we are superior. We are the greatest creation to walk the earth. It is for us to recognize and reclaim our true place and position here, now, and forever.