Back in the day and not so very long ago, when Tyler Perry infamously hopped out of the broke-man stageplay realm in Atlanta, Georgia, and made his way to the vast riches of the silk screen with “Diary of A Mad Black Woman,” (Lionsgate), his model main character, Helen McCarter (played by actress Kimberly Elise), got a mad piece of Black woman from her Aunt Madea, played -of course- by Tyler Perry.
The truly “big wow no-nonsense moment” in the fairytale movie was this one…
TOO BUSY OUT SHOPPING WHEN YOU SHOULD HAVE BEEN CHECKING THE DEED!
…and it spoke volumes.
Most were so busy harping on Charles McCarter, the one horrible Black male in the movie who was the focal point of Helen’s redemption, that they entirely overlooked the other five or more good ones that were depicted, including Helen’s “Orlando” (Shemar Moore) himself. Mental ‘okey-dokeyness’ in Black America, once again, prevailed over big timely messages in this case, as well as in many others.
All across the United States, to this very day, we have Black people doing a lot of talk about how President Obama’s presence has worsened race relations (as if they could have gotten any worse after Reagan’s legacy and all those before him); and also talking about how President Obama is so good at job creation “if you’re not Black.”
Well, here’s the skinny-dip on that issue, while we are busy “okey-dokeying” Obama on the federal level and focusing on him instead of looking within ourselves and our own homes and communities, and while we were not paying attention to the way we do business and spend money for answers and positive fruit-bearing solutions, here it is: While white people were busy buying up and selling all of the land, deed, title, and property in America because they either had or mostly stole the right to it, and whilst they were busy using our labor and hard work to become producers and job creators and doing the work it took to blindly steal the nation out from under us while hiring their own skin color and tossing us the used up leftover “garbage pail kids” downgraded jobs; Black folks were busy “out shopping” with that welfare plantation paycheck instead of checking the deed. Guess where the sayings came from “Champagne tastes on a Coca-Cola Budget” and “We’re all just one paycheck away from welfare and one house note away from homelessness.”
We have a deed and right and title to this nation, PERIOD. It’s time out for the gross consumerism and shopping that made the slaveholders and their post-slavery corporate, banking and political henchmen totally correct about Black people’s mentality when it comes to self-preservation, and that includes Nike and Michael Jordan’s cheap $2 China-made shoes.
Yeah, Madea said THAT isht, and got it dead right.
Well-known around the world for gross and over-inflated over-bloated micro-economic consumerism above long-term investing, the psychology behind it is- to say the least -both masterful and totally short-sighted at the same time. The only ‘shopping’ we should be doing -LITERALLY- is investing in our own home-grown businesses and communities, like everyone else in the world does.
On the masterful side is the insidiously hidden plot to rage against Black America by all means necessary, and where there is always a racist element to this society no matter how hard we work or what we do, and if we dare to call it what it is, we are called “racist” for throwing it on the table while they are not called racist for doing it.
And if we dare to demand money, real money and benefits, in exchange for our hard work and efforts, that ‘element’ of white privilege who have nothing that they actually earned for themselves will still call us “lazy” [for refusing to work for free].
And to top all that off, while reading and hearing about stories like “Wilmington on Fire,” or about “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and what happened on the Rosewood Plantation in Florida, and what still happens to this day that underscores the demand for reparations, we even understand very well the P.T.S.S. (post-traumatic slave syndrome) spoken of so well by Dr. Frances Cress Welsing and Dr. Joy DeGruy.
Because of P.T.S.S., it is still very easy, even now, to destroy Black people who built and still build their own communities, homes, churches and schools; and yet, the United States government sanctions it without relenting or even uttering a just word about it. Or even worse, the federal government totally overlooks it by harking back to and trying to relive a past through “Selma” that means nothing in this age, an age where it couldn’t even act WITHIN its own powers to protect the voting rights of America’s Black citizens that were taken away, or shaved off, by its own American Suprem(acist) Court.
It’s scary, however, considering that though we have a Black President nowadays who is on his way out in less than two years, that the United States federal government still ‘sanctions’ the senseless murders and destruction of Black people and their homes and families across the nation by refusing to act on it, and with no relief of justice or reparations to be seen anywhere on the impending horizon.
On the short-sighted side, there are Black folks who work their asses off day and night and don’t take the time to pool their resources and bring their ‘whatever-have-you’s’ to the table in order to become job creators so that we don’t have to keep begging racists who are the descendants of slavers for jobs and work.
Truth told, the way things are sitting in the world right now, Black people working in their government (and not the ‘gofer-ment’) and paying attention to and actively participating in their politics on the local levels ought to stop or at least impede the racist horses of the past from getting out of the gate in the first place. On our end, this isht should never even make it to the federal level, because it should have been handled at home before it went that far. You don’t let them out the gate at home, they don’t run in the nationals. Period.
Let their self-made slave shackles remain tied to ours until they stop trying to bind us and run from us at the same time.
Too many predominantly Black areas in the U.S.A. are still being run rampantly and uncontrolled by socialist and supremacist whites who mean to keep Blacks in their historical places, no matter what. In majority-Black places like Ferguson, MO, and Montgomery, AL, too many whites are still controlling Black lives and livelihoods, and in the worst ways possible. Most Black people won’t even acknowledge it, let alone discuss what needs to be done about it.
Not all Black folks, of course, laid down, rolled over, and accepted it like Helen McCarter’s “wuss-arss” character began during the first two acts of this classic African American movie.
But then again, enough numbers of strength didn’t raise enough hell and havoc in order to make a dent in the foregone damage that was done, either. What was personal to Tyler Perry’s Helen character has real-time GLOBAL implications for Black America:
-“I did all this as his wife and he PUT me out” (of MY shit).
-“He made me sign over my rights just in case he was successful.” (He did? Was he holding a gun to your head when he made you do that?)
-“Oh no! We can’t do that, Madea, the guard will never let us in!” (Who the hell has time to be asking “The Guard” for permission to access your own shit, seriously).
Black America has been holding solid and well-kept right and title to this country for a long time, just by the UNPAID WORK ETHIC OF MORE THAN THREE CENTURIES ALONE, not even to begin to speak of all of the low-ball slave wages that we accepted while our achievements, discoveries, and accomplishments SINCE THEN have helped to turn this country into the greatest nation it ever was. We just continue to sit back like a “Helen McCarter” abused woman caricature and watch them take OUR SHIT, and then ‘tax and spend’ us into global war hell on the Republican Party’s watch.
Side Piece Note: Most Black football and basketball players, and some Black golfers don’t even get this dire piece of our economic dilemmas as a whole. White people who pay Black professional sportsmen to work for them are only basically putting that money ‘on loan’ while they let them hold it and pretend to own it by tacking some largesse debt to it in the form of an over-priced market-useless house and a blinged out “ride.” (or 10 or 12,…) They then send in their white girlfriends, daughters and sisters, and sometimes even their wives and mothers, to take it all back (in the divorce proceedings that will inevitably come over some dumb arrogant shit), and to put it back in their coffers. They often view Black men as weak enough to keep falling for that ‘white blonde socialist entrapment’ every time, and they definitely do NOT view Blacks as worthy of “all that” money, no matter how hard they work for it.
There are only three (3) questions left to ask Black America, or “African Americans, whootdewhoot,” on this circus-laden go-’round:
(1) When are Black people going to stop sabotaging each other on the demand for reparations; and
(2) When are we going to stop paying THEM to tell us who we are and what we are here for?; and
(3) When are we going to stop reacting to our trials and tribulations in this world like a scared, troubled, and woe-filled abused woman who runs back to her “lover boy”, the same one who makes promises he never intends to keep whilst simultaneously and multiplicitously screwing the white women that he prefers, on OUR dimes?
REFERENCE
I got no nothing for no doggone Medea or Tyler Perry! Comedians used to not just speak out on the issues of the Black community, but folks like Dick Gregory, Redd Fox, and Richard Pryor, invested millions into both Black Movements Civil Rights and Black Power! Perry down there worth half a billion and aint did a thing for the Black community, or said a mumbling word about all the police lynching and not even a word of support for the Sister running for governor in his home state! From what I see, he wears a dress and womens undergarments , as a drag queen poltically and economically towards the Black community