One of the biggest real-time issues in the Black community is trust, sprinkled in with a pot full of neediness.

Not financial neediness, but spiritual neediness based on a mixed tincture of racist social deconstruction and self-destructive moral behavior.

As a concerted whole, Black people are not economically “needy” any more. We’ve got money, and plenty of it–and everyone seems to know it except us.

Where we all seem to fall down is on our corporate ‘get it together’ economic priorities.

Suffice it to say that if Black people separated themselves from the ‘status quo’, became sovereign citizens this week and demanded reparations to boot, we would start off with at least fifty times more, economically, than the Anglo-Saxon Brits had when they arrived under their own “manifest destiny” to conquer the world. We’re already worth more now than they were at the time.

There are several areas to address when it comes to what we can stand to resolve as a wholesome economically equality-driven community. To coin a magnificent cliche, we still need to “shore up” the tens of hundreds of loose strands that are dangling amiss and heavily unreconciled.

To make a very long and twisted story sweet, simple, and as short as possible, I’m going to take the position of President of the Black United States from a historical standpoint and address the Top 10 State of the Black Union issues that need to be cleaned up and cleared out, post-haste.

Notably enough, it is becoming more than obvious that Black America, generically speaking, does not place very much value or stock in what white America values. After all, what is a diamond in real-time besides another shiny rock, like a prism that changes color in the light of day?

1 Families

From the time one of our Garden of Eden ancestors by the name of Cain murdered his brother Abel out of uncertain jealousy, Black people have been at odds with one another.

That murder led to the exile of Cain, and the proliferation of many generations of children who ended up fighting one another over time. The major battles, most notably, are between many sets of feuding brothers and their children. First most notable are Ham and his brothers, Shem and Japheth; and then Ishmael and Isaac, and then came the Mother of All Brother Wars…Esau and Jacob, later named “Israel.”

There are two major schools of thought on where white people came from as these internal battles rage on, but scientific evidence–including the evidence of the Chinese who are believed by Europeans to be the world’s oldest civilization–shows that, indeed, Black people have been on the planet for around 250,000 years, give or take a few; and that white people have only been here for somewhere between 6,000-12,000 years maximum, more like 7,000.

The jury is still out on how white people evolved in the world, whether by a dilution of melanin from leaving Africa for the frozen northern tundras of the Caucasus Mountains, or Louis Farrakhan’s story that he said came from Elijah Muhammad about how a Black scientist by the name of Yakub developed white-skinned Negroes (albinos) in a scientific experiment using the OCA-2 genome, mixing them up to derive lighter-skinned Black people all the way to nearly totally melanin-free. Either way, the fact still remains that white people can only trace their world history back about 7,000 years or so, while Black people have been on earth millennial generations longer.

The root of our familial animosity and lack of trust is found in the antiquities, not in anything that has happened recently. What we see now is fall-out that began In the Beginning, before there was such a thing as a white person on Earth.

2 Budget Deficits

Black people are coming exceedingly close to a corporate spending wealth of one trillion dollars, in terms of all of the American money riding on the table.

While that dollar value is nothing more than a blank check [or monopoly money, to hear Author Michael Lewis tell it] floating in the air on Wall Street with no viable resource to table its value in real financial terms; it is, nevertheless, the white paper contracted wealth that is used to measure every advertising dollar in America. That advertising dollar never fails to dip into our mental and emotional pockets, and it will only increase from Y2015 to Y2017, the year President Barack H. Obama leaves office for good.

In a nutshell, it is a well-known fact that Black consumerism trumps Black investment, so when a tax law professor from Emory tells Forbes that Black people’s wealth gap hit an “all-time high” under President Obama, one has to ask the natural question: What is an all-time high, considering that it is a wealth gap that has never diminished in the history of this nation?

In other words, as we lead the Joshua Generation that is now raising the Millennials – who will continue to be born through 2035 – we should have a common understanding about the overall choice of the Moses Generation before us to integrate and assimilate, rather than to become sovereign citizens as did the Native Americans.

It had huge impact, that intertwining and intermingling of the children of Africa with the children of their slaveholders.

In totality, the integrationist impact meant that when white economic wealth went up, ours went up with it; when their economic wealth went downward, ours went down with it. Like riding on a rollercoaster, or a slave ship, the “wealth gap” stayed where it always was; and our ancestors chose to stay on the boat with it.

It was never a gap that has been less than two to three times divided no matter how much better the economy has gotten. Even if we return to the good economy that was in place when that “first Black President”, Bill Clinton, was in office, the gap will remain at about the same level it is now, because we’ve never done what needed to be done to close it.

Now, if we choose to widen and deepen that gap by spending that money on AirJordans where only a hand full of us can get a job paying less than $15 per hour, rather than investing it in a series of corporate Black American co-ventures, mergers, and acquisitions that will seize the day and position us to be able to offer good-paying jobs and benefits to other Black people (particularly Black youth who can’t find work within the status quo), then I don’t want to sound like an Obamapologist, but that is not President Obama’s fault, or his problem.

We’re still on that Wealth Income Gap Slave Ship and never got off it.

BTW, Black Land Trust should always be at the center focal point of this wealth gap conversation, forty acres, mules, and all.

There was an an earlier article in UI that said we don’t need more Black businesses. The reasoning was a bit different than what I present here, but that is essentially correct if we aren’t going to support, in a grand fashion, the ones that exist now. We are already ‘flea-marketed’ enough, and if we can’t leverage $137.5Bn in gross receipts, according to the U.S. Census data, to make a dent in Black unemployment, then more small businesses aren’t going to help us. It’s just going to water down and divide up the initiative to do so even more.

Note: That was $137.5Bn in 2007. If we’re headed toward $1Tn in GBNP (gross black national product) in 2015, Black small business receipts surely must be worth $250Bn or more by now.

3 Church Partisanship

As many talks as I have had with church leadership all over the nation, the gist of the conversation is that there is a tremendous problem in the Black church with the same kind of jealousy and infighting that dates back to Cain and Abel. Everybody wants to be “Mr and/or Mrs Such’n’Much” and “Ms HotStuff” in church and very seldom does anyone want to line up with the mandates of the One and Only Holy Lord God in whom they claim to believe.

One of the reasons I have witnessed white people ducking and dodging church leadership is because they are “the boss” in the five-day workweek and don’t want to take on more projects on the weekends. Most Black people, who are not “the boss” during the natural workweek, conversely, are grasping at any “Big I/Little U” project in church that they can get their hands on; and so the infighting does not end even in church.

By way of note, God called us to lead the children of Israel, both the natural and engrafted “seed,” home to the spiritual New Jerusalem.

We were not called to concern ourselves with titles and money that only He can grant. The word of God said, simply put, that if He makes certain the sparrows find food and trees to flit to every moment during the duration of their short and altruistically simple lives on the planet, then surely He knows what we need and where He wants us to be in the meantime.

Because “church and religiosity” is such a huge matter in Black America, no matter how many times that we hear we need to go Islamic or atheist, the bottom line is that the Rome-tainted version of Christianity has carried the bulk of more than eighty-five percent of our spiritual belief systems in today’s America.

There must be a better way.

According to the broadest scriptures that we attach to the best-selling book of all time, the Bible, God (the Truest Holy See) never instituted or mandated a religion of any kind, Christianity included. So if we choose to align ourselves with a Club Faith religious social order with a label Elmer-glued to it, it isn’t what kind of religion we align ourselves to, but the self-made internal strife that spills over into our politics outside of it that make all of the difference in the world.

Black churches have, first and foremost, a civic responsibility to change the dynamics of our national economy, particularly if it is a church that collects tithes. Ninety-percent of those tithes are mandated by scripture to be reinvested in the community as a whole. There is no social or moral responsibility therein to respect persons, or personalities, in churches.

When our collective responsibility becomes that which was originally mandated by God, the trust factor and religious partisanship becomes a non-issue.

4 School to Prison Pipeline

Moving Black children in urban areas, strategically, from systems of education to prison systems to labor their lives away without pay, or for very little pay, is not a new concept by any stretch of the imagination.

It’s just the latest concept and strategy for modern-day slavery, brought to us by the same types of folk who still believe that ‘some’ folks are not entitled to pay in exchange for a work day.

What is “new” about it is the fact that the little weed of urban psychological trauma has grown into a much larger one, and the main reason for it is because we, as a people who no longer think about “The Promised Land,” are signing off on it.

It is a matter of speaking tough love to power to have to spank Black people’s corporate behinds on social responsibility toward ourselves and our people; but the truth is that once we allowed our children to be taken from schools and put in jails on a small scale because it seemed the right thing to do at the time, then we are totally at fault for allowing white America to believe it was okay to double down on that directive, triple those efforts, gain traction and speed, and expect us to stand down and accept it in the meantime.

5 Teen Trustees

Our Black teens, and young children also, are no different than white ones…except when it comes to how their teen pranks and often childish antics are portrayed and treated in the larger and less racially diverse community.

We can cry about the Trayvon Martins, the Jordan Davises, the Sean Bell’s, and the Kendrick Johnson’s, as well as the overall police brutality that continues, and we can cry about it from now until the Second Coming of Christ and it does not make a hillabeans difference, for reasons that will come into play later. For now, are we our “Brother’s Keeper“?

Now we’re back to Cain and Abel again. We’re leaning on President Obama’s “last term fearless stance” on the politics of what it means to truly BE a ‘brother’s keeper.’

In truth and honesty, he’s said all he can say, right to our faces, without literally becoming the very “ni&&er” that that certain ilk of the malignant tumorous outgrowth from the Republican Party, the Tea Party, have already proclaimed him to be.

Tempers flared under the belief that President Obama goes at white America with “common sense” initiatives and comes to us with racial platitudes like “stop making excuses.” Well, maybe no one has thought about the fact that maybe it’s because President Obama knows who we really are; he is, after all, more African-American than we are.

If he does know it, then he knows that the one thing we do above all else is make boatloads of excuses for not “coming up” in the world. Maybe President Obama has a Big Picture kind of a grasp on what are the real problems that beset us.

Suffice it to say that if all of the races of the planet can gather together under one initiative, even when they have personal insider beef, and that initiative is to oppose Black people and take us down “by any means necessary,” then continually giving in to it by playing “multi-cultural kumbaya footsies” with every race except our own is not going to help us, either. An Asian businessman was once quoted as saying that Black people’s biggest problem is that we’re the only ones on the planet concerning ourselves with every race and ethnicity except our own.

If we are not supporting the most vulnerable amongst us, whom they prey on incessantly, then it’s the ones who are in between, the ones with youthful “hormones a-poppin” who are easily deconstructed and demoralized — sagging, twerking, baby mama drama, hard core rap, thuggin’, gang-banging and all.

6 Social Partisanship

When we deal with social mores and standards on the grand national scale, there is a thin line between “Love” (what really happens in Black America) and “Hate” (the way the media spins what really happens in Black America).

If we’re talking about how we deal in society as a body of people, a cultural race of people, a “band of brothers” like the Four Musketeers, then there are only three matters to take into consideration, and they all start with the letter “m”: Money, media, militia. Those three things are common core to the American way of life, and to Black America, long after school is out and the teachings of a classroom day start to morph into the lessons of a lifetime.

We are socially and morally partisan to some very deep and extreme levels not only because of the influence of racism, but because of the way we seem to take to it like birds take to the air and fish take to the water, as well as the way buffalo takes to land.

Are we our Brother’s (or our Sister’s) Keeper? Even outside the ‘status quo’ of corporate Phillip versus unemployed or under-employed Pookie; and Soror Sharon versus street-wise Shaniqua – light skin, dark skin, good hair, bad hair, and all?  Pookie and Shaniqua’s politics and economic ploys are very much a part of the equation of division within. They can’t be ignored or overlooked forever, that much has become more than obvious.

There is some truth in the undying declaration that Black people and white people will never live together in peace as long as Black people keep trying NOT to give in to white manifest destiny (that certain deep-seated psychological need they have to be the superior and grandiose Masters of the Universe).

However, when it comes to God, to our belief in God … white people aren’t the only ones with a ‘god-complex’ in today’s society.

Yes, we Black people value life differently.

While they try to BE God in their actions, we are trying to be “God-like” in our belief systems, and not in terms of living in a Christ-like manner either. This is not racially or morally exclusive, and it is not meant to say that the scales don’t tip to one side or another depending on the person, but white people often have a visible desire to replace God, and Black folk often prefer not to BE God, but to “lord it over” one another (Matt. 20:25) while allowing others around the world to dictate and control the conversation about our spiritual and economic demeanor.

This is not without social merit: It keeps us from trusting each other on levels that can only be resolved by us.

7 Judicial Misconduct

One white guy whose name I will not mention here said that even though we like to call the judicial disparities in the justice system racist, the real reason that that message is not getting through or being taken seriously is because we don’t call it what it really is … judicial misconduct, on all fronts.

From the police beat on the streets to the Supreme Courts across the land all the way to THE Supreme Court in Washington, DC, the same one that may as well be called “The Supremacy Court,” the outcome of judicial misconduct is so deeply felt that even Black people who will never get to know one another a day in our lives will agree on its everlasting ugliness. Judicial misconduct happens to white people, but it is ‘par for the course’ with a large portion of Black Americans, with rare exceptions. If someone cleaned house on all those cases, my guess is that around sixty-percent or more of Black people in jails and prisons would have to be released and redeemed.

As a matter of note, we had seen so little equal justice in law by the time that OJ Simpson was brought to the national crime scene, that Black people didn’t care whether or not he was guilty. All we wanted to see is if he would actually get a fair trial.

He did; but now we know that it was only because he had money, fame, and because of the notoriety of the case itself. Black and white America, and others the world over, watched to see if what typically happens to Black people with less resources than OJ would happen to OJ himself. In the end, conviction or no conviction, he did get a very fair trial.

Most of us Black folk have extraordinary and peculiar issues with “fair trials and fair sentencing,” regardless; and even the problems of not being convicted in the absence of solid evidence, while shady and false testimony looms over us at times. We have even seen, in the case of Marissa Alexander of Florida, good and feasible testimony being kicked out of the evidence-gathering procedures.

The only question we have yet to answer is “Why?”

Deeper than racism is the inherent power-structure need of certain European-constructed whites to be in control and to maintain their forward face as the supreme ultimate authority of everything that their eyes and minds survey in the world.

That be us; and it does spill over into the fact that we have trouble trusting each other; not only on the criminal matters, but also on the civil matters when it’s time to part ways and divide the spoils of a legalized union.

8 The Restructuring of American Court Systems

When Black America — its multiple core of “leaders” who were left after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. that is — opted in to racial integration and its motherless spawn, assimilation; and opted out of sovereign justice and reparations, the common everyday people (the ‘untalented 90th’) were left to clean up the political mess that was left behind.

Some of us chose to ignore it and “party on,” drugs, liquor, wild sex, and all; and still others – angered about the fact that somebody dropped the ball before passing the torch – continued to try to carry the messages that were instilled in our lead constituency between the years 1954 and 1968.

After the overall plan of Civil Rights was taken off message on April 5, 1968, “divide and conquer” came to Black America with a vengeance, and in top mythical Willie Lynch form.

And when it hit, it hit in a manner that was worse than the divide and conquer mechanism that had already taken place between poor whites and poor Blacks. It got to the point where we were not only ‘not good enough’ to go to church with or be buried beside them, or even fight alongside them in a war, but to the point where the mandate of the Dred Scott decision was driven home in no uncertain terms in America’s courtrooms. In the words of Roger B. Taney, who ruled over Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857) as Chief Justice, “the Black man has no rights a white man is bound to respect.”

When discussing the restructuring of the United States Constitution, which has yet to include Black people as equal citizens except by two or three revocable “coat hanger” amendments regarding civil rights, equal rights, and voting rights, it can’t be approached without a proper reckoning of this nation’s faulty and nearly inhumane justice systems when it comes to Black people. By that very mandate “a Black man has no rights a white man is bound to respect,” then the natural order of humanity dictates that a “white man makes no laws a Black man is bound to respect.”

Maybe the lessons learned in Los Angeles and San Jose, with a model police oversight committee fashioned after our Canadian neighbors, is in order for Black America.

Free, at least.

9 The Art of War: The Politics of Rationalizing Solutions

All decisions made in the world, from the antiquities, are based on only two main global factors: Emotional or rational.

Even if we hark back to Sister Mama Sarah/Sarai and her rash decision to turn her handmaiden Hagar over to her husband, Abraham/Abram, in order to bring about God’s promise of the delivery of a son in her old age, Sarah overrode a rational faith in her emotional haste. She laughed when the Lord told her she would have a son, and when she was approached about it, she swore she didn’t laugh; but the ‘Angel’ of the Lord told her “Oh but you did laugh.” Why you laughing, Sarah? Is anything too hard for God?

Needless to say, that decision to be faithless ultimately cost Hagar and her son, Ishmael, their right to a lawful inheritance in Abraham’s household. Indeed, Isaac was the son of the Promise; but Ishmael was still Abraham’s oldest son. Sarah’s irrational faithlessness cost them both.

Yet, Ishmael was still redeemed; and the children of the brothers have been at odds, to say the least; at war, to say the most, ever since.

In the book The Art of War by Sun Tzu, once noted as the “white man’s Bible” in corporate America (still is), it outlines the steps of master strategies, rationalized thinking, that would help highly organized troops to win the battles that led to the winning of a war. The operative words are ‘HIGHLY ORGANIZED.”

In its undertakings, the book takes into account what should happen when some of the strategic battles are lost along the way, i.e., ‘contingency planning.’ Lost battles do not mean a lost war. Oddly enough, even dead smack in the face of racism, the real “war” that is going on with Black America has nothing to do with white people. It is the one on our own home-fronts.

The first step to internal strategic and rational healing, especially with social co-dependents such as us, is admitting that we have a problem in the first place. Trust in the process comes before the necessary healing takes place; and we are in need of HEALING in Black America.

If we cannot admit to the role we play in the continuance of the problem, then healing from the abuses of the past will not, cannot, come.

There is a serious problem with our attitudes, values, beliefs, ethics and mores when it comes to one another — but it is nothing close to what white people say or think it is. And we are, in fact, to blame for more than what we are willing to admit, or more than what some of us even know exists or thinks is possible.

The absence of a core and definable Black leadership, and the absence of a solidifying mindset about the way we do business with one another (regardless of how we may feel – or not feel – at any given moment in time), is painfully obvious.

As mentioned before, even with the infighting, the one thing all white races of any ethnicity seem to be able to stay visibly cohesive on is opposing and haranguing Black people.

Too often, we take the virtual racist carrot of subservience, the color-ridden whipping stick (what we like to call “uncle-tomming”), and the affirmative action “diversity lollipop” that goes along with keeping our economics, and therefore our very lives, in the corporate back pockets of America, and of Europeans the world over.

We have learned to literally and systematically and metaphorically hate and distrust one another because of it.

The only question we haven’t answered yet is “Why?” Is it necessary? Answering that question may lead us to a more rational solution on how to get it resolved; on how to wage war on the divisiveness instead of on each other.

10 The “Black Leader” Issue: Negro Intellectuals in Millennial America

In his book “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,” Harold Cruse sufficiently, in the space of 565 written paperback pages, said that Black leadership failed us. That was in the mid-1960s; and he found no less than 28 different ways (or chapters) to drive that point home by leveraging the one and only Harlem Renaissance as evidence of that failure.

He talked about everything in this book, including economic nationalism, the partisan economics of real estate and Black landholding, the association with the Communist Party, the well-known emerging artists who were supposed to take us higher (not ‘get us high’) through their artistry; the riots in Watts, and the real relationship between “Negroes” and “Jews,” especially during a time when Negroes were being confronted by Black activists who demanded that we stop calling ourselves Negroes and start calling ourselves Black; and proud.

During the Harlem Renaissance, W.E.B. DuBois’s “Talented Tenth” was supposed to step forward and demand a seat at the table as a force to be reckoned with in Black America; but it didn’t happen. They settled out, saddled up, and rode out with the given social adjustment period ‘lollipops’, then tried to integrate themselves into a society that would never accept them. A society that would never consider them “good enough,” no matter what they did, how they did it, or who they did it with.

Cruse wrapped up the ‘crisis of the Negro intellectual’ as one with a severe problem with their own cultural identity.

Without that identity nailed down, he said that we end up having to identify our Black and Brown selves in a world filled to the brim with white, red (and might I add “yellow”); and he said that a bunch of “…negatives cannot possibly equal a positive.” Us-v-Them doesn’t even end on the Indian reservations, let alone the corporate plantations.

In 2017, this book “The Crisis” will be 50 years old.

Not much has changed except that Blacks in Harlem who once identified with the Communist Party without shame or embarrassment have morphed from being majorly Republican into Republicans with a twist of liberalism–or ‘blue dog’ Democrats (i.e., “DINOs” – Democrats in Name Only).

Now we end up in yet another precarious position where we have to self-identify simultaneously as Black nation-builders, and as staunchly and civilly American while we’re at it.

We currently stand in a hell-fired ball of mass confusion that says, understandably enough, that we as Black people do not value what white people value. Until and unless we get caught up in the white majority “system” that demands it and forces us to become something other than what God created us to be, their values are not our values. We tend to have more respect for the sanctity of life over materialism, unless pushed to have to survive–not God’s way, but by white man’s self-centered social structures. When pushed, we get just as conniving and murderous as they are; and we really should know better than that by now.

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. – Romans 1:20

In 2008, Black people were not prepared for the onset of a Black American President. Given what we have managed to accomplish in the nearly six years since he was elected, we also won’t be prepared for his leaving office in 2017 either. When it comes to the insidious ‘Trust Factor’ that suffers consistent death amongst us, we are no more prepared for Obama to go away than we were prepared for him to stay, or even to be elected the second time.

The infighting over what’s Black, what isn’t, and who is or isn’t “black enough” is taking far too much time away from the larger matters. Black Americans are the only ones who have the power and temerity to take this America, our America, where it’s supposed to go in the future.

We were once empowered to lead the Children of Israel, the birth tribes and the adopted amongst us, to the Promised Land (the earthly copy of how angels live in heaven). The Lord God took that away for a time and gave us The Times of the Gentiles until we get the message; or until He ends this, whichever comes first.

The Lord God never empowered us to lead ‘because’ we were Black, that black/white mentality was a European [or Yakubian] social construct that had nothing to do with God. However, why God “made” us Black is something that can only be found in the rich deep dark fertile soil of the upper Nile River Valley, where Eden was founded. (Genesis 2:7)

Regardless, He did tell our most royal ancient ancestors, coming out of third son, Seth, and ultimately Shem and unto Kings David and Solomon and then onward, to get it done. The Lord chose Judah (Israel’s fourth oldest son with our ancestral Mother Leah) to lead the way. 

It was never the adopted “European jewry” of religiosity that was supposed to lead the way to the Kingdom of God, but the actual ancients of the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, of which we are the Semitic birth inheritance seed.

In the meantime, in God we trust, but our corporate trust factor -in spite of our many magnanimous differences- is to fulfill the destiny that we were initially called to fulfill from the very beginning.

To say the very least, and then some, about TRUST amongst Black people: “How can a man say he loves a God whom he has not seen; and say he hates his brother, whom he can see?” – 1 Jn 4:20

***

The 12 Steps of Black American Co-dependency and Trust

1. We admitted we were powerless over others – that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and lives over to the care of God as we understood God.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being, the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other codependents, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.