London Bridges

In an iconic gospel song Donnie McClurkin sung we fall down but we get up.

Imagine a row of dominoes, each uniformed, waiting for the next to fall behind it. There goes an unforgiving grandmother, mother and daughter each lining up behind each other and falling for the same trick; a stubborn, hard to approach, father who teaches his sons, who teaches their sons who will teach theirs.

Dominoes is one of our most favorite past times. Even if you don’t know how to play the game we are all too familiar with the concept it teaches us. If one of us falls, we are all prone to fall too. But if one of us is strong enough to push back against gravity, imagine how many who came before us we can uplift and how many behind us we can prevent from falling.

Generational curses are often the excuse that many of us use for our troubles. Our claim is that we never had anyone to show us any better. But innovation is not a blind concept; it starts with the idea that maybe there is a better way.

What’s your better way?

Generational curses work both ways. Some of us come from settings where success is a traditional value and for some reason we’ve stepped out of that tradition.

Sometimes creating our own row for ourselves is a bold move. Imagine what’s it’s like at the Kennedy family picnic for Lisa who decided to become a hair dresser. But imagine who they go to when they need an emergency haircut.

While there are generational curses, I believe there are generational cures. There are people who will pioneer of the resurgence of their family by planting their tree in fertile ground commanding for it to grow.

Look around at the dominoes in front of you, and think of the ones you will place behind you. Are we falling or are we standing tall.

I am...

Little girl is what they'll call you. But it is a woman who will respond.

Who gave a man a right to force a little girl to grow up? Remember, puberty won't let you keep believing in fairy tales, and once you realize that the boogie man is a man too, you're more afraid of the man than the boogie.

Sexual abuse involves two people whose lives will never be the same. The victim will always wonder what they did wrong. Was I too pretty? Did I smile too much? Should I have been like my sisters? He didn't do it to them.

What do you tell her, or him, to make them see past a momentary physical pain that torments, stalks and weighs on your heart, emotions and self-worth for what seems like forever.

You tell them to forgive.

What do you tell him, or her, who found themselves so weak, they they needed power of a child's body to validate their lack of self-worth. Searching for what they feel entitled to, they take control. In that ephemeral moment, they is no conscience, only desire followed by demise.

What do you tell him when he looks to another to find love and finds out that she felt the victimization of his lowest moment.

You tell him to forgive.

People who have forgiven themselves for their mistakes do not carry the burdens of what they've done. They are testaments that you can change your life.

You are not sexually abused, you were sexually abused. Then you were a victim today you are a victor.

And you are not a sexual abuser. That suggests that is all you are, and ever will be. Remind yourself of who you really are, outside of a moment when you were weak.

My attempt is not to take up for anyone who has sexually abused someone. I know that its pains are many. I am hoping that we will stop labeling people as they worst thing they have done

Blame Game

“Who else is gonna hire a man who went to jail for killing somebody; somebody you have to call to wake and pick up…nobody” J

Systems are not designed to fix the problems they create. So you create a new system to fix the old one. The lineage goes something like this:

The State begat the education system
The education system begat the jail system and GED programs
The jail system begat the prison system which had twins, welfare and child support

You could contest that order, and I could rearrange it but family is family and they all carry the same legacy: failing urban communities.

At the forefront of every media outlet is the failing school system. It’s supposed to prepare students for their next step in life, whether it’s further education or work. If they don’t get an adequate education life forces them to move on to the next step, unprepared.

So when Ray Ray and Nique Nique apply for jobs and school and are unsuccessful we blame them. In reality fault lies with a system that was designed to fail them. (Yes parenting and self-motivation play a part in this. We all know someone who overcame a bad public school education, but that’s why we call them overcomers.) When they have no money and nothing to do they run around committing petty crimes and conceiving kids who will be born into the same system.

The jail system and GED programs which are supposed to rehabilitate, teach lessons and provide second chances don’t. The teachers who work in GED programs are mostly retired public school teachers who came from the same system who failed these people in the beginning. They are trained to teach 12-year-old 7th graders not 30-year-old 7th graders.

If the State would have done its job the first time the Department of Human Services wouldn’t be overflowing.

It’s amazing that Michigan has such deep budget problems. If you spend the bulk of your money re-correcting the school system’s wrong you don’t have the money to fix it.

But states like Massachusetts and Connecticut are known for having great school systems and the largest populations of affluent resident.

It’s an old principle, if you get it right the first time you never have to do it again. Does this mean I’m saying if the state created a better educational system we could eliminate crime, not one hundred percent, but it’d be a heck a lot less.

I read it in Mrs. Swayne’s classroom when I was in the 6th grade on a red and yellow poster: Education is the key to life. Which makes lack of education….

Words Will Hurt You

Niggas are black men.

Now before you start with black women are niggas too—and we all know some white people who are blacker than us—l am not talking about having nigga tendencies. I’m referring to a socially lived hidden stereotype placed on the black man as being the plague of the black community.

Watch an old movie, they call men niggers, or some variation, and women colored girls.

Fifty years later black leaders decide to bury the word “nigga.” No offense to the NAACP but black men have purposefully been buried for centuries.

They buried niggas by taking away their right to be fathers to their children during slavery, made their wives conduits to birth more slave babies. They buried them by lynching, burning their houses on fire and made them defenseless when protecting their women.

Today, they bury them under child support, unfair judicial practices, assumptions that jail will “rehabilitate them” when they’re 15 years old by placing them in a prison to be mentored by criminals.

In their community black leaders on television bury them, again. Tyler Perry makes some movie that he thinks helps but really demonizes the black man and paints black women as damsels waiting for the right nigga to save her.

To every black woman, we live in a society where everyone challenges the worth of the black man. If you don’t uplift him whether he’s your son, friend, man or brother, don’t ever expect someone else to.

They help us black women mourn their deaths. They herald the black woman as “superwoman.” She is strong enough to raise her kids all by herself and blah blah blah. Don’t you know that before a convicted murderer can be released on parole he has to apologize to the family of his victim?

Thanks for apologizing by plastering on new papers that 75percent of black babies are born to unwed mothers. Thank you for depriving nearly half of all black women from ever having a whole home because so many black men are locked up or out of jail and still imprisoned to what incarceration made them. What is your apology to the black children who will be raised by bitter mothers in fatherless homes? Is it a failing urban education system that places them in the same cycle as their parents? No, really…thanks.

In order for a black man to really be something he has to learn how to act white. But over time when a black man becomes too powerful, he has to be shut down.

When Fredrick Douglass began learning to read he became a threat to his slave master and so on the field he whipped Mr. Covey’s butt with pride in his blows.

Today they bury our fathers; tomorrow they will borrow our sons. Cycles are so harmful because they are natural, it takes hardly any effort to continue to a cycle.

Now to every defender of the NAACP. I do understand they have worth in our community. But burying the N-Word was nothing but a display of how we spend frivolous money.

I know a nigga they could have given 1/10th of the money to who would have kept his business a float that gives young black males a job, a role model, and teaches them work ethic and respect.

I know a nigga they could have given $2000 to help buy his first car so that he could go visit his son. When the pitter patter of feet came he didn’t run, he pulled his pants up, turned his hat frontwards and lived up to his responsibility.

They used stick and stones to break our bones and one word to tear our community apart.

Small steps

I stared into the lifeless knobs on the cupboard in my Grandmother’s living room. I knew it was bigger, tougher and stronger than me. But I was young; I was 12, and it had been mocking me ever since I was eight years old. I was anticipating the day when everyone else would be gone and I would be able to climb atop the cupboard and retrieve my pride.

Years ago, as some type of punishment, I lost something. I never knew where it was and didn’t even understand I lost it. But one day I looked at the cupboard in an awkward stare off, that I was of course losing, and I noticed something of mine it had. I was too weak, frail and small to get what was rightfully mine off its weathered chestnut finishing plate on the top. So for years I walked past the cupboard pretending I didn’t see my stuff atop it’s head but always plotting on the day I’d get back what was mine.

Moving day came.

Everything was gone, moved out of the house, except for the cupboard and me. I could hear those knobs turning,its screech across the floor as its golden knobs scraped the hard wood floors I had just mopped. Without introduction, I let loose on the cupboard. “You took something of mine, and I want it back,” I said. Opening its top door, made of glass, I could see right through him. It gave an expression that I interpreted as a lure. “If you ever want it, you will have to take it back,” it personified.

I did.

I crushed it and regained my innocence.

You always need a foundation...

As I walked on a tour of London, we traced the steps of early suffragist Emily Pankhurst. Many of the buildings in which she had lived, fought and used the resources to make gains for women, are gone.

They have been remodeled, torn down, burned down and abandoned. This really stuck out to me.

No matter how badly a building can be burned, remolded or have whatever happened to them they are still the places where change happened.

Those places where Emily and her sisters walked and worked can always be built upon but the progress the original structures made will always be there. While the Pankhurst sisters were creating change in their environment in that time nothing else could be built there until they left.

When you create change, it will forever be created.

It reminds me of the Civil Rights movement.

No matter how many houses and places where Dr. King lived are abandoned they will always be the place that facilitated change for him, and me.

Revolution starts in some place. That place could be in someone's basement, mind, a coffee shop; all that matters is that it started and they can never be taken away.

As we walked through South London I wondered if those individuals knew where they were, the heart of the Women's Movement.

Their steps were only taken there because of what someone else did.

I want to make memorable steps.