Let me explain “nig-norant.”
There is a familiar saying about “Black” people in America, whatever you define black to be: If you want to hide something from Black people, put it in a book. Don’t play – a great deal of us have heard it.
Are we (some of us, a lot of us, too many of us Black folk?) intentionally staying blind to our own truths about our history and current lives on this planet because we are incapable of learning (learning-impaired), or because we simply do not care and don’t WANT to know?
Given these types of mindsets, it appears that W.E.B. DuBois was correct in assessing that only the “Talented Tenth” of Black America is capable of learning. Maybe DuBois was correct in assessing that the Talented Ten Percent are the only Black Americans capable of even making what will turn out to be a mostly failed attempt to ‘civilize’ the other 90-percent – The Untalented Ninetieth.
On last night’s radio show, The Legacy of a Nation: Joshua Generation-“Introspection About the Seventy-Two Percenters,” I had a pretty decent amount of online listeners. But one of three live calls that came in happened as the show was about to end for the night.
It soon became very apparent that the male caller, who claimed to be a Black man, called for no other reason than to emphasize and drive those stereotypes home. Not necessarily just the stereotypes about Black women as single parents, but the stereotypes about any and every Black person that he wanted to talk about at the moment.
Long story short, not only did he finally admit that he was off-topic and that he had not heard the first more than two hours of the show, but he also used his own personal experiences as the basis for formulating his opinions about all 72-Percent of the Black women who are single parenting at this time.
That awkward moment when YOU think what THEY think is important…
No matter how many times I attempted to bring him back to the show’s topic, it was literally his only purpose for calling…to degrade Black people, and to misplace American politics and how they work in the Black community. He then finally did what all of his kind and mentality eventually do, took his moment to generically “run a road” up Black women’s behinds.
Of course, since that appeared to be his only mission and motive for calling in, it was clear that he was obsessed and fixated on what he wanted to talk about, in spite of the show’s initiating topic.
This caller was not only very belligerent and “nig-norant” in his conversation style, but he insisted on shoveling all 72-percent of these Black females who are single-parenting in the same box that he was living in. He also displayed the average person’s inability to connect to a subject and stay with it. In that vein, he not only confirmed that the stereotypes (about Black people/women) are true, but he became, or morphed into, a living breathing caricature of the very ignorance that he was talking about himself.
Here’s the deal.
When I check places on Facebook or other social media where many people tend to hang out, I also search for truly intelligent Black people (that objective “Talented Tenth”) to have a proper conversation with. I find, instead, many Black people (and ‘allegedly’ Black people) who appear to be spoon-feeding the very root of the stereotypes.
They often paint a broad brushstroke across Black America with issues that are peculiar to themselves; and they also broad-brush the stereotypes that subjectively validate and confirm what a very ‘white racist’ America says about all of us.
A guy whom I talked to about Black people in Chicago (and all over the nation for that matter) shooting one another, said that it was because they are “starving.”
The reason we have food banks and food stamps in America is to try and keep people FROM starving, but it is a fact that without these food banks/stamps for the poor and hungry and the starving, there are people -a lot of poor Blacks especially- who are unable to afford food, jobs or no jobs. However, any man or woman who can afford a gun and some bullets to shoot people with isn’t ‘starving.’ True enough, last I checked, weaponry and ammunition was not free and the one who sold them is at the grocery store shopping with ‘your’ munitions money. So…
Where do these people come from?
The same information is available to all of us, so they really don’t have an “excuse” (thank you, President Obama) for not knowing, let alone not knowing what to do about it. Of course, there is every possibility that they love being intentionally nig-norant…and if they like it, I love it.
This knowledge definitely deserves the universal “chicken-egg” treatment across the board.
Chicken) Are these stereotypes mainly true for all Black single parents/(women)? Or…
Egg) Are Black people so severely psychologically battered (a deep and brutal symptom of PTSS:post-traumatic slave syndrome), that they work overtime to make themselves fit into the mainstream stereotypes so that they become true just so we can have something to beach about and blame other people for?
If the former is true, then any other conversation about these matters are null and void.
It helps with our understanding of why Black people are internally and intentionally self-destructing in America – apparently because we want to and are insisting upon it.
If the latter is true, then the answer is easy, if taken logically.
It means that racism in America has done such a magnificent head job on Black people [rewrote our realities] that we have not only totally lost this battle to “find ourselves” on the landscape of the world, not only have we thoroughly lost the right to fight for our human rights, but we’ve also taken leave of our very common senses as a race of people.
Queens vs The Court Jesters: Are some Black folks “for entertainment purposes only”?
By the way, the last caller of the evening, a young lady who stated that she is a single parent (i.e., “co-parenting” with the father of her child) said, in a nutshell, that Black men are the root of the problems Black women have.
She also stated in no uncertain terms that she wishes “somebody would wipe all of us Black folks out and start over again.”
Not to say that that hasn’t happened before, but tell me she’s wrong.
And prove it.
REFERENCES
The Time and What Must Be Done/Part 39
The 72-Percenters: ‘Baby Mama’ Drama
JOHN HENRIK CLARKE: Featuring Wesley Snipes
I am a black man of Jamaican heritage and I am mighty proud to be of the black race. I truly love my people and I will love them much more when they understand that material things of the finest will no change a damn thing as to what other races think of us. Therefore please make sure that your children are well Educated.