The Trouble With Untamed Wildlife

I'm on 125th Street, in Harlem, the Mecca of Black America. Home of some of the greatest and most famous black people to rise to actual human status in America. People like Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Nina Simone, Diddy, Samuel Jackson, Sammy Davis Jr., etc, and so on...

As I stand on the corner of 125th and Malcolm X Blvd, I watch one of those double decker tour buses ride by, the ones that take tourists all over Manhattan and jam up traffic for those of us who actually live here and have to get somewhere important.

I'm used to the faces I see riding the bus, tourists from whichever area of Europe(name a spot, it's immaterial), or wherever large groups of tourists like these travel here from. They look at what's basically my normal life with a quizzical like fascinated expression and it makes me wonder what their thoughts are at that moment. I would wonder if most of these folks have ever had any real life experience being among black people, let alone being the minority in the area. I wonder if they're looking at me and the other black people through a lens of perception created by generations of media driven stereotype and bias.....And sadly, I wonder if they're looking at us as more of an exotic species of people, not quite the same as them....something to be driven around through, like some kind of exhibit, like those safari things at Disneyland, where you can drive your car around a bunch of wild animals

I wonder if they hear the voice of one of those narrators from those National Geographic in their head, giving them the blow by blow of the nomenclature of the urban black person in their habitat, providing behavioral signs to look out for and what they would indicate is happening.
https://youtu.be/4OV3zxOSQh0

Yes, I am being mostly sarcastic, but not as mostly as what would be assumed, because I truly wonder if black people are truly still viewed as an exotic 'other' species of homo-sapien. How far have we truly come from being looked at as actual exhibits in carnivals, like Sara Baartman, or the Aboriginals?

I truly believe that the programming placed in so many people's minds regarding black people have given them this view of us as not being the same, and the recent rashes of viral videos showing white people calling the police on black citizens for the most asinine reasons, which can simply be summed up as existing somewhere while black, have given me reason to seriously ponder this. From the two gentlemen in Starbucks, to the black women golfers, to the young college student who had the audacity to fall asleep by her own dorm, to the young teenage boy, who got lost on his way to school and almost got his head blown off for asking for directions, to the two kids shopping for prom suits, to the folks having a cookout at a public park, to folks leaving an airbnb that they just finished renting out....but I digress(because I'll run out of writing space with examples).

There have been a litany of incidents, which seem to give the impression that black people are seen as not being allowed to exist within certain places, outside of certain spaces, and thus being regarded as some form of threat.....kind of like when one of those exotic animals at the Disney safari somehow makes it's way to the food court area, docile as it may be...As outlandish as the perception is, it gets even crazier when the logic then becomes that calling the police-a now universally understood recipe for death, as it applies to black people-is the next thing that absolutely should be done....Because????....I sure as shit don't know, I don't understand any of this insanity, and I do apply the word insanity purposely. How do you see another human being and apply this line of logic towards them? Why are you even threatened by them? Why the hell are you even paying attention to them, at all, when they sure as hell aren't paying attention to you?.....Or is that the point, right there? That folks are having the audacity to be where they are, just all up in their space, like they have the right? Who the hell are these....'people'?! doing normal things here?! This cannot be tolerated, this situation must be put back in order!

....But what 'order' is that?.....

Why there will be no revolution

As I sit here, shaking my head upon seeing yet another, in a countless supply of memes geared toward furthering an  established view of what the new wave 'culture' of black 'relationships' is all about these days, my already cynical view of the world shifted inward, to Black American culture.

You see, normally, my cynicism is directed and focused on how systemic white supremacy adversely affects the behavior of current Black America, from it's inception in the 1600's, to the minutes that it's taking me to write this blog. I make it a point to deconstruct what's termed within black culture as 'acting ratchet(previously referred to as being ghetto)' from a psychological view, and link it to it's original nexus, which is the physical/mental/spiritual/emotional/psychological inheritance of the effects of white supremacy of the transatlantic slave trade passed down from generation to generation all the way to current Black America. I do this, not to give an excuse for ratchet behavior, but to understand it....to understand why so many within Black Culture 'act ratchet', and to give myself some kind of hope of being able to see when it will cease to exist.

Let me break down the general meaning of acting ratchet. It's basically having a mentality that gravitates towards self-destructive behaviors. It's about knowing better and yet not being better. It's about not only seeking out dysfunction, but thriving and bathing within it's waters, being unsatisfied with what we understand as doing things that are actually productive and good for us.

Here's the PSA part of this blog. This is not the topic to conjure up 'whataboutisms' to deflect away from what I'm specifically talking about. This is not the time to bring up the fact that there are forms of 'acting ratchet' in all cultures, I'm fully aware of that, but I'm not focused on any other culture's version. What I'm about to write does not apply to every black person in America(because it damn sure doesn't apply to me and those in my circle), so spare me the blanket statement whine job. And although I fully acknowledge that this has everything to do with the epigenetic residue of white supremacy embedded into our subconscious psyche's, this is not the time to bring that up as the crutch upon which you can place the blame and fully exonerate the behavior.

This is the time to start talking about understanding what we're doing, taking accountability for our behavior going forward....and sadly, how this being so interwoven within our culture, will be the reason why our culture will never rise up and ascend in America.

There will be no revolution to televise, because there will never be a revolution. The reason why there will never be a revolution, is that we're perfectly fine with being ratchet. We like being ratchet, we somehow have come to a point where we would actually patent being ratchet and correlate it to being black, if we could. The same way so many black folks want to attach the word nigga strictly to black people is the perfect example of the desire to be ratchet. We love dysfunction, because we have been programmed to love it. An example of it is the way we've been programmed to wistfully reminisce on the hellacious beatings we got as kids as affectionate memories to look back on and laugh at. That's turning negative trauma into normalcy, perversely making it into coming of age moments, while never getting the treatment that we needed to psychologically be able to heal and grow.

I understand the psychology of it, I understand that we have never gotten our therapy, and therefore, don't recognize why we engage in these self-destructive cycles. A lot of us don't even see it, what they see is this is how things have always been, this is 'being black', so subconsciously, they gravitate to doing these things, because it's been implanted in their minds as the things that they self-identify with. It hurts my soul to watch this manifestation in my people. It bothers my spirit to see memes like the one above, to see that this is what represents todays blackness. One of the things I've learned is that we have adopted many of the old coping mechanisms that our forefathers created and used to maintain their sanity and humanity from slavery to the 1960's. They used music, dance, song, and comedy to help laugh away the pain. They created an oasis which gave them their humanity and something to which they can identify with as being unique to only them. Those were the origins of Black American Culture. It was berthed in the fires of slavery and created just so that people could find the will to live. It implanted within them a steel reserve, a resiliency that nobody else on this planet can match. I am in awe of them, of their spirit to first survive and later to ascend......and I am also embarrassed for what that has devolved to currently, because sadly, somewhere along the way, we forgot to upgrade our programming. Those very things they did to survive, also allows us to always focus on the negative things and make light of them, instead of discarding them once we grew above them. Subconsciously, we never grew above it, and therefore, we dwell in it, we make it normalcy and we identify with it.

We have truly lost our way. We have, as Roland Deschain said in 'The Dark Tower' novels, "Forgotten the face of our father". It's mainly because the side effects of the survival mechanisms that were instilled in our ancestors were never corrected. Those side effects mutated over time and manifests today as being ratchet. Things like corporal punishment, the emasculation of the man of the family and the loss of respect for them, because they were raised not to have self respect, the inability to properly care for their women, because of said emasculation and from nobody getting the therapy to heal... to be properly deprogrammed and then rehabilitated to pursue a healthy, productively functional relationship.

All we have ever known here is dysfunction. Where I'm from, we call it 'project mentality', from the culture of living in public housing. Due to racist housing practices in the various Metropolises, practices that purposely herded black people into close quartered housing projects in low real estate tax areas, which allowed the government to not properly fund the areas for various things from optimal educational resources, the opportunity to create neighborhood businesses and the living wage jobs that would come with said businesses, to basic standard of living maintenance(all of which still exist today). Put those things together and place it on a slow simmer, and you have the perfect recipe for psychological dysfunction. This is merely one example of our normalcy.

Again, I completely understand the why, and it's for that very reason why my cynicism has taken over my optimism for the future of Black American Culture. I do understand that, in pockets, we will get better. Enough of us have broken free of our programming and are making fabulous strides, breaking barriers, seeing and avoiding the systemic traps that still exist, and no longer living with the surviving mentality, but with the thriving mentality. Those are the ones among us who will make it and continue on. Those of us on this side give me so much pride, I can't properly put it into words....

But there is too much bad programming and continued acceptance of dysfunction as normalcy to create a revolution. How can we have a revolution, when we can't even have a defined, healthy relationship? You can't even have a girlfriend/boyfriend who is actually just YOUR girlfriend/boyfriend, so how can you expect to come together, and unite, as a people? You can't even unite as a couple! Over the last decade, I have witnessed our moral foundation erode, and reformatted on an ever shifting base that has no structure, and therefore cannot support anything built upon it. The lines have been blurred, people have been completely dumbed down, there are no defined roles, no structure, no discipline, no rules......and without those things, we are only left with the one thing that we have been programmed to gravitate to, and claim as ours...


Dysfunction.