I don’t dress like today’s youth and luckily my era had a different dress code. I, however, am afraid that we are telling our young boys that how you look makes a difference in whether or not you’ll be successful in this country. We all have a problem with the “thug” look as if those brothers didn’t “tie down” to go to interview for the last five jobs they didn’t get.

In my supervisory career I’ve interviewed literally hundreds of young black males and females and I have yet to have even one show up sagging, in Timberlands, with doorags on or a wearing a wifebeater or a turnup skirt or anything that any employer would seriously have a problem with. I’ve had them show up with no skills to speak of, no experience and lets say very rudimentary language skills but they had on probably their best suit, a pair of shinable shoes and in most cases a tie and jacket (may not have matched the slacks, but the brothers tried)

So I believe that we have to tell them the truth. Unless you are going to the potential job site, no one knows you are a thug by the info on your application, unless you put part-time thuggin down as your current employer.

Your skill set makes you qualified to interview for the job. Your demeanor and bearing at the interview gets you the job. So we blow a lot of hot air about today’s dress codes in the inner city but our views of “respectability” is based upon the culture of the people we say are oppressing us. Why do we remove our hats when we enter a building, why is the “uniform” for politicians dark blue, dark gray or black single breasted suits and either blue, red or yellow ties, why is a tight fade with maybe a few, not too many, waves “neat” but dreads are not? Putting it simply, its based upon white culture. WE make the determination that a MAN does not look like a man unless he has on a suit.  Various mainstream media engage in “verbal assaults . . . on the African American community. In their minds, Trayvon deserved to die for wearing a hoodie, and any black man who isn’t well-versed at acting as white as he possibly can deserves whatever he has coming to him.”  Dr. Boyce Watkins, http://www.yourblackworld.net/2013/07/black-news/dr-boyce-don-lemon-is-an-angry-white-man-who-just-happens-to-be-black/

We then tell them that once you look like a man, you’ll be treated like a man. Why then are there thousands upon thousands of young brothers unemployed? Are we seriously saying that ALL of them are “thugs” or “thug looking?” Then all this rap we give about white supremacy and white privilege and racism and unfair, discriminatory hiring practices is all bullshit. Just shine your shoes son and they’ll hire you. Come on people, we know its deeper than that.

Those of us who have made it to a certain level of success within our fields know that it is much, MUCH bigger than that. Look at the article just this week about the young brother with the 5.0 gpa. He looks like one of the regular brothers in the hood. We are saying that if we make everyone carbon copies of the non-threatening black man, that it will be all rainbows and sunshine in the neighborhood.

The only problem is, a lot of the people longing for that fictional utopia are either not old enough to remember when we did look like that or if they are old enough, they have conveniently forgotten that we have NEVER had it good in the country. We were treated unfairly when we had only burlap sacks to wear, look closely at the videos of the civil rights era struggles, those brothers have on suits and ties. So for us to tell these young brothers that their chances of success are anything more than marginally improved by not sagging is a disservice to them. We need to tell them the truth.

We need to tell them that they need to learn skills. We need to expose them to all the free educational resources they have at their disposal. We need to tell them that in order to get hired anywhere in this country, they have to play the part. They can’t talk to potential employers the same way they do their guys on the block. They have to be willing to at least temporarily divorce themselves from their old way of thinking and write a new chapter in the book that is their lives. A book that will continue to be written each second up and until the day they die.

We must convince them that they have one chance to get this right because if they make it to even 30 years old with no job experience, chances are more than likely they will NEVER get hired. The cruel trick being, the powers that be don’t have show their racist tendencies by saying “I didn’t hire him not because he was black, I didn’t hire him because he was not qualified.” What made him not qualified? His previous accomplishments, or lack thereof, not the fact that he sags on the block. Overall, most white people could care less what we do or wear in our neighborhoods.

White women still clutch their purses a little tighter or stand in the opposite corner away from black men whether they are sagging or have on a $1000 designer suit. When we go to trial in Amerikkka we’re just as likely to get the book thrown at us and sentenced to all day whether we are wearing a suit or not. The police departments from one end of this country to the next execute us with impunity no matter how we are dressed. In the end, if the problem is simply black men and our style of dress, then what problem do they have with black women?

Drops mic and walks from stage, dripping blackness