When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, “came of age,” so to speak, we were taught in American civics and citizenship classes that the ultimate redemption in all of life, and the quality of living, is based on attitudes, values, and beliefs. Attitudes, values, and beliefs, as well as motivations and perceptions, all determine how we are going to act, react, or respond in any and all given situations and circumstances in life.

As a matter of information, this is not a season to “blame others” for the sins and misgivings and errors of Black people, or to deflect on “whose fault it [racism] is,” but only to re-state and re-emphasize the fact that ‘evil most definitively does not come in a color,’ or a race of people. White people are most often the very evil that they claim to see in so many Black people, who are no more and no less evil than themselves.

Given that, I present to you, Dear Reader, in this, the forty-sixth year since April 4, 1968 – “shortly after 6 p.m.,” the Top 5 Reasons why White America has Failed Its Black Citizenry:

(1) ATTITUDES: There is a high need and desire of a faction of white America to draw on the economic devaluation of Black people living in poverty or circumstances of being poor as “lazy” when history and time have proven otherwise.

The simplest and most complex story is that Black people built the cornerstone of America, its backbone, for a lot of lazy white people; and did so without pay for nearly 400 years. But that’s history now…so let’s speak in terms of Y2014 and the desperate “reaching” of certain white persons of the Republican ilk to paint a very ugly picture of “welfare queens.”

They are, caricaturistically-speaking, single Black women, Moms, who live in ghettoes and inner-city areas. For their continuing “separatist/nationalist” highly racist views of how most Black people should be treated and perceived, even pre-birth, why should it matter to us what they do, or think?

Because they are the ones still majorly in control of the money, the media and the domestic militia that is feeding the perception. Indeed, it is their own “slave mentality” that is the kindling that stokes the fires of racism and its ‘road dog,’ poverty.

As a matter of note: For white America’s attitudes about Black women, about Black single mothers, Black men and fathers, about their need to use and deceive Black people to get what they want and walk away, for the predatory lending scams that bilked us out of house, home, and land; the siphoning of money out of the government and our communities and then calling it a day; for their attitudes toward our Black children and youth that has self-imploded into our front and back yards; for their banking scandals on Wall Street and theft of our land and property; for their need to call reparations “compensation for harm and damage”, but reparations for Black America is “just about money;” for the infiltration of their school-to-prison pipeline that crumble away our future and Black infrastructure; for their attitude that they are, somehow, ‘entitled’ to our labor and ideas at little to no cost to themselves; and for their insidious attitudes and ideologies that we “owe” them when it is actually the other way around; and for their penchant to lie about anything and everything Black people have done since the beginning of this world. For their need to control the conversation about “all things Black” as if they have a clue what it’s like to BE Black; and for their beliefs that they are not ONLY entitled to “free and low-cost” labor from us at all times, as well as that their ideas and actions and motivations that ‘some’ people do not deserve to be properly compensated for the work that they do to this very day … we reward this certain over-bloated faction of white America with the Black America millennial citation and award for “Bad Attitude & Insubordination of the Current Century.” 

(2) PERCEPTIONS: In the Disney movie, The Tale of Despereaux, as well as so many others, there are hidden racist references to Black people–particularly Black women–that many people miss.

It wasn’t just the correlation of ‘Despereaux’ to President Barack Obama, but actress Tracy Ullman as the voice of “Miggery Sow.” Miggery was the fat white ‘ugly’ female with freckles who was good for nothing other than slopping hogs and waiting on the beautiful milk-white blonde Princess Pea (the voice of Actress Emma Watson). Now, given the fact that someone is going to think this is paranoia (it isn’t), “Miggery Sow” is intended to mean “Black Pig.”

Remember when the demand for a Black Disney Princess turned up a Louisiana-bred Cajun-cooking cafeteria queen with an overly-friendly frog for a boyfriend? Hollywood has hardly-ever-almost-never been race-friendly to Black people, but just the fact that the Princess kissed the frog and ended up turning into a frog herself says a lot about their perceptions of Black people. They can’t even get a small thing like a fairy tale right when it comes to African-American women, the daughters of the first queens and princesses that the world ever knew.

For that matter, Tyler Perry couldn’t go to Hollywood and portray Black women righteously in all their glory – good, bad, ugly, stereotypical, or even absolutely fantastic – without white people running interference with his efforts. With the help of majorly Black women, Perry became something more than a homeless man on the streets looking for a voice for his own ‘Aunt Madea’.

In the final analysis, this desperate need of white people to put their grubby greedy paws on anything and everything Black people touch and turn it into total mental garbage is a mitigating circumstance in the continuing degradation and devaluation of Black America.

(3) BELIEFS: There are still far too many Black people out here who don’t know, or don’t want to acknowledge at least, that crack, and even heroin and cocaine, would never have made its way into mainstream Black America without certain white people’s help and assistance, and even their approval.

Throw some guns in there for good measure, disable their ability to protect themselves and use them on the REAL enemies who come for no other reason than to ‘steal, kill and destroy’ (Jn 10:10, NKJV); and then take what was intended for the beautification of Black people and turn it into acid, dust, and ashes, and there isn’t much more to be said about the origins of ‘God-don’t-like-ugly’ in Black America. To top that off, all Black people- -young Black males- -needed was one MORE law on the books that give racists their supremacist authority to shoot Black teens for nothing more than ‘loud music playing‘ and the wearing of ‘white-skin-unapproved’ clothing apparel.

It is a fact that the majority of Black folk (including Africans) -rich, poor, and otherwise- were doing just fine in the world before certain white Americans decided to find another way to “do slavery.” Once the chains, whips, plantations, and non-payment for back-breaking labor was essentially outlawed, slavery nevertheless continued in so many other ways that served only to enrich ‘those’ whites and devalue Black people.

Indeed, always ‘give credit where credit is due’.

(4) VALUES: There is only one valuation for white people who love to use Black people who do do wrong to justify their racism against all Black people in general: Money…and money’s best friend, numbers.

The only thing they do better than racism is use their own personalized statistics, snippets of self-developed Black crime numbers, that is, to justify their point – to “prove” how really awful Black people are and how badly we all deserve to be punished from the time we wake up in the morning until the day we die. They pull their ancestor’s well-known white trash methodologies off the plantations, bag it up by the garbage loads, dump it in Black people’s back yards, leave the ‘isht’ there and hope it sticks. Sadly, too much of it does stick. Though that alone says plenty about their over-arching racist mentality, it would be too simplistic to leave it there.

It goes much deeper than that: Right down to their rotten core and lowest common denominator in the animal kingdom of instincts – fear. They run only from their own made-up and internalized Black boogeymen, though they will never see ‘thousands’ of Black people actually climbing over their insulated lily-white suburban fences coming to behead them.

(5) MOTIVATIONS: There is only one question left regarding the persistence of the politics of racism at the insistence of plenty of white people around the world: Why?

There is no single answer to what motivates white people in America, and those certain others of Anglo-European origins, to keep up the emotional bias and hatred to this very day. The answers become even more complicated when it comes to the social movement, economic actions and non-stop sanctions intricately tied to racism.

These are prevalent activities meant to forever demean and diminish Black people/people of color in the West, and along with them, the Africans of the East who still live in Africa. Perhaps (and definitely) many of those ‘answers’ can truthfully and richly be found in European’s Romanesque obsession with their own self-styled ‘god-complex‘.

Some, a lot of, white people have an uninherited inherent need to identify their race with the “god” who made them superior to all others, the ‘gods’ who demanded that they become richer than God Himself, and then commanded them to wield that whiteness and their economic stance in the world as a weapon to prove how superior (a/k/a ‘grandiose and arrogant’) that they really are.

EPIC FAIL.

By the way, this is a wrap, but reparations for Black Americans whose roots are based on slavery/civil rights, are still due and owing. However, a great faction of Black people fight against reparations along with their white friends.

If America has to actually pay for what was done, for what is still being done to this very day, it will be driven into REAL bankruptcy, instanter. And by this, this nation, this Dis-united States of America, will fall harder than did the Roman Empire.

Selah.