I keep hearing it.

“I’d like to apologize to the youth. Our generation dropped the ball.”

Really. When? NO, we did not.

We did what we could with what we had available to us and with the best knowledge we had available at the time.

We did not know then what we know now. We did not have then what we have now.

We apologize for integration, in a sense.

Integration killed our moral arch, and our spirit to build within our own communities. But at that moment in time, it was necessary and expedient for several reasons:

1 It answered the question, what is out there that we missed out on? Without integration, we were limited and only saw what we did see through a narrow dark hallway.

2 It gave us more than a “glimpse” at what our ancestors had built and died for that we had never really had access to. The world was wide open in places where it had never been opened before.

3 It answered the “what if’s.” What if we do integrate? What will happen?

Now we know.

And we also know that it shouldn’t have lasted as long as it did. We were supposed to take what we learned and go home to build and rebuild, not hang out there in LaLaLand with them hoping, wishing and begging for acceptance and “love.” That was taking things too far.

But I was one of those children who lived a twisted backward life. I attended integrated schools in Colorado and Michigan before I ever attended a segregated one in the south. Yes, this was in the 1960s. The north was pretty much complying with Brown v. Board, 1954, even as the south pretty much refused to do so. On both sides of the race equation, Blacks and whites down south did not want integration to happen. Why?

We know “why” with white folks. Same-o, same-o with them. Always has to do with race, always with the “skin color” issue they can’t seem to get over.

Black people, however, weren’t having issues with white people’s skin color; figured they couldn’t help how they were born. No.

Black people, the adults of my younger days, that is, said that since we had never really recovered from the Radical Reconstruction, or the shutting down of the Freedmen’s Bureau, and had never really “overcome” as a people, the last thing Black children (mostly poor and too many still living in total squalor), needed to see were white kids with shiny cars driving to high school, wearing the latest clothes and shoes from the most expensive stores in town, and living in “magical kingdoms” that very few of us -if any- could afford at the time.

They feared that we would end up “forgetting about our school studies and lusting after material things” before we even began to understand the importance of an education. By the 1980s, Black youth -mostly the young men- were gunning each other down in the streets over jackets, sneakers, and blingy exorbitant crap that they couldn’t take to jail, or to hell, with them. More important than books and lessons, were what you LOOKED like when you went to school … a lot of us spent too much time in school being ridiculed by whites and other more ‘wealthy’ Blacks for being so poor, with messed up hair, and for dressing so “tacky.” Today, I’m a staunch believer in the merits of school uniforms at least through high school, and partially funded by other private and public resources for those who can’t afford them …

and they are many.

What is there to apologize for? Looks like the older folks were right.

Things aren’t much different for “Negroes” up north now than they are for “Negroes” down south; and quite frankly, the ones “up north” don’t have an excuse for this continued racism. They were into integration long before the south was; they had a head start, so to speak. White people’s reasons for not wanting to integrate were wrong,  but Black people had it right all along.

Sure, we did grow up in the ” Party Partee Par-tay!” generation.

And it was the most hedonistic and selfish generation in the history of the nation. But it wasn’t so hard to do, what with coming out of our safe protected havens in all-black neighborhoods, where we owned businesses and were in charge of our lives, and integrating with a bunch of hookers, drunks, and drug addicts.

Everybody -with some exceptions- was all about self: I, me, mine, I got mine, don’t worry ’bout his. This is true.

However, the difference back then was that MOST of us, almost without exception, didn’t bring that “par-tay” home to our children.

We still had a Village, and that Village kept the children and the old folk safe and fed, no matter whose they were, and regardless of everything and all else.

All the younger generation of the 1980s and later managed to come up with were “orphanages,” “homeless shelters,” and “nursing homes.” Put away, worse than a pile of dog crap, or a pig, or even the family pet parakeet, anything human that disturbs the senses, and sensitivities, and makes us feel responsible for THEM.

WE did not do that. Not our generation. No way.

In a sense, though, there is some fault to be had in what we are watching happen right now in mass media.

Those integration starts did take the old-school ‘Whores of Hollywood’ out of the Red Light District in Dallas and put them in the White House and in fancy homes in over-priced neighborhoods, according to what we see on television and in movies these days. Kind of an “upgraded” and reinvented form of Blaxploitation, it is.

Back in the day, cursing was called “excuse my french,” now it’s just blatant and out there. WE did not do that, it was learned behavior. The pornography for the ears and minds that is constantly on display and being paraded around nowadays stayed mostly underground and hidden away from anyone who was under-aged.

This was the generation of folks, however, who excused themselves for doing drugs with their own children, who allowed them to watch porn, or even taught their children to drink, like “they’re going to figure it out anyway, may as well start at home.”

WHATTHEHOLYHAYELL was THAT all about?

Black parents back then often whipped their children for more reasons than just to be “whupping” on them.

Some of those youngsters in my age group were talking about dropping out of my high school, were caught doing doing drugs with white folks–something we knew nothing about until we started mingling with them; or they were caught sneaking their fast behinds out of windows going places they had no business being.

Many parents would come close enough to killing them for even thinking about it. “I brought your Black ass here, I’ll take your Black ass out,” they used to tell us. None of us ending up actually dying or having psychological issues over it; because it was the Truth above all Truths.

My own cousin got her big ol’ head dunked under a faucet with ice cold running water until she came to her senses. She dropped her butt back in high school, got a DANGED good job because of it, and later thanked her mother for saving her life.

We know of fathers who told sons who said they would never go to college that they didn’t have a choice. We know of dads, real ones, who chose their daughter’s husbands for them … said they weren’t marrying “any old junk in the streets” and messing up their bloodlines in the future.

It was the right thing to do then. Still is now.

Grandma and Granddaddy were not a joke. Older people didn’t play, they made us go to church, they didn’t try to make “friends” with their children, and they didn’t fall all out in the streets acting like idiots and spreading everybody’s business all over the place. We were taught to respect our elders, we passed that on to our children, but our grandchildren too often do not respect us.

Don’t get it twisted … gossip happened. Rumors happened. Folk talked. But we kept it to ourselves for the most part, in OUR community —  it was all us and no one else. We didn’t have ‘hoods, we had communities. And as far as the “white folk” were concerned, nothing we did or said or had or believed in was any of their damned business.

We held it right and tight at home.

Certain things weren’t said around young fledgling ears, and most of our “junk” didn’t come falling out in the streets any old kind of way. We certainly did not go on television telling white folks how we did our hair, cooked our food, and raised our children. It wasn’t any of their business then, it still isn’t now. Not really.

Did we “drop the ball” on the Civil Rights Movement? Pretty much, yes.

Not so much the integration part, which should have been temporary anyway. It was the radical shift that came about with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. just before he was assassinated. He could have been President, he had to be murdered.

But what real difference did it make that by April of 1969, Black folks in the south were pretty much done with the Civil Rights Movement and acquiesced to integration and assimilation by the Fall of 1970? Integration meant “shut down all the Black schools and tell them if they want to integrate, they better come to us.” That was not a good thing by any stretch of the imagination, true.

Dr. King talked about the fact that we were “integrating into a burning house.” But Dr. King also had no choice BUT to talk about non-violence under those circumstances, circumstances which have changed tremendously.

Dr. King even mentioned at one time that we (our parents and grandparents, that is) were headed to Washington, DC, to get our “check.” It was because THEY (those whites, that is) actually dropped a ‘wrecking ball’ on the Freedmen’s Bureau. They told Black people, “we don’t owe you anything … as a matter of fact, you better consider yourselves lucky if you so much as manage to stay alive another 24 hours.”

We’ve been talking a good game about reparations ever since, and it hasn’t happened yet. Not even with THIS generation.

Who is dropping the ball now? In the Joshua Generation. And why?

We tried to teach our generation respect and reverence for our older people. They have not passed that on to their children. What is it, really, that is stifling Black people from moving forward as a whole, in light of the fact that freedom, which was not a choice for us at one time, now is.

Where do we go from here? Who will lead the way? Is there even a “we” any more?

Who let the U.S. that is “us” go. Or are we so safely integrated into and under the system of white supremacy and assimilation that we may as well throw in the towel now and turn what is left of our souls over to the dogs?

We’re experiencing a resurgence of OVERT racist activity, as well as covert, in the Obama Administration because the generations that came behind us are not only NOT “Black and Proud” for the most part, but are also easily blinged out by any lie white people tell them.

This is not meant to disparage the younger people who are out there doing their part and everything they can do, but the politics of a more youthful Black America has gone so far astray that this generation is seeing things we thought we would never see again.

Like him or not, our generation did enough to pave the way for a Barack Obama Jr. This generation is not only not paving the way for a Black president in the future, they’re sitting back allowing the gerrymandering and political “poll taxes” of the 1960s to re-emerge; even allowing the powers of Republican politics to put in place Citizens United to stop a Black President from ever being elected again.

That did NOT happen on OUR watch. We made inroads, in whatever large or small ways we possibly could. Whatever our ‘Black issues’ may be with Mr. Obama as a President; suffice it to say that 40 or 50 years ago, it wasn’t even possible.

There are even protests going on around the nation about the current matters with police brutality that are not organized and have no clearly-defined leadership because this generation does not rely on their seniors and elders to guide them, but just falls out the doors demanding and screaming, as if that is going to do them a bit of good. But it’s better, I suppose, than nothing at all.

As to you older people … we did a lot more with a lot less resources, and while simultaneously dealing with a multitude of more racist activity than they will, perhaps, ever see in their lifetimes-THANKS TO US.

Our 40 years worth of wilderness wanderings were not all in vain. The Moses Generation yields the mic.

What the future holds now is up to those who are left, in this The Joshua Generation.

As I listen to Dr. King and remember and reflect on what was going on when I was just a child,others around me are watching The Whores and Criminals of “Empire.” All blame for the errors and wrongs of future generations rest with them.