Black-America’s Dormancy.

It is shock­ing, the sense of apa­thy and unwill­ing­ness of America’s Black pop­u­la­tion to take its future into its own hands in a uni­fied and decid­ed way.
Statistical data and analy­sis show we do bet­ter when we unite, yet the data is sum­mar­i­ly ignored and dis­card­ed. There is almost a sense of res­ig­na­tion to the idea of sec­ond class cit­i­zen­ship in some quar­ters. In oth­ers, the absurd expec­ta­tion is that the white man will even­tu­al­ly change, act human, and right some of the wrongs he did. Equally absurd, is the notion that all we have to do is pray.
( I thought I read some­where that faith with­out works was dead).

The fic­tion­al Doctor Huxtable (Bill Cosby) told his son, Theo, (Malcolm Jamal Warner ) that his brain would not explode if he stud­ied and retained what he had read.
My expe­ri­ences when talk­ing about the issues, hav­ing had numer­ous con­ver­sa­tions with many and var­ied African-American friends and asso­ciates, are either blank stares or dis­in­ter­est­ed indif­fer­ence.
On rare occa­sions, some­one [woke] seems to care, or is appro­pri­ate­ly informed on the real­i­ties of the issues at hand, we gen­er­al­ly dis­agree on the approach­es nec­es­sary to reme­di­ate those issues.
The tragedy in my hum­ble esti­ma­tion, is not the lack of “militancy”,(though nec­es­sary), it is the lack of his­tor­i­cal curiosity.

The issues of which I speak are not of grav­i­ta­tion­al fields and black holes, they are rather sim­ple issues, like, school board meet­ings. Voting. Paying atten­tion to the issues. How issues affect peo­ple’s lives. How apa­thy and the lack of curios­i­ty about the issues, and the will to par­tic­i­pate in the process, empow­er oth­ers who do not care about our inter­ests, to cre­ate poli­cies anti­thet­i­cal to our well-being.
Sadly, we either delve in blind reli­gios­i­ty on the one hand, or immerse our­selves in mind-numb­ing excur­sions of las­civ­i­ous plea­sures and enter­tain­ment.
We ignore our own inter­ests as if they are some­one else’s prob­lems, oth­er peo­ple’s bat­tles to fight. We delight in neg­a­tiv­i­ty and infan­tile clich­es, that’s where we rev­el and find com­mon cause.

We seem to care pre­cious lit­tle about the intran­si­gent and can­cer­ous prob­lem of racism, police-abuse, the dis­parate jus­tice, and edu­ca­tion sys­tems which exist.
I am dis­tressed that to a large extent and sad to say, the lev­el of aware­ness on the part of my African-American broth­ers and sis­ters is woe­ful­ly lack­ing, as opposed to peo­ple from Africa or the Caribbean.
Shockingly, it is as if a plu­ral­i­ty of the peo­ple with whom I con­verse lives in total dark­ness and have pre­cious lit­tle curios­i­ty about events hap­pen­ing in their country.

Video games, Reality TV, Netflix movies gar­ner much of the atten­tion of our peo­ple on the one hand, and cult-like reli­gios­i­ty pret­ty much occu­pies the mind of oth­ers. Even though the aver­age African-American with whom I cross paths have smart­phones and unlim­it­ed data.
The data is hard­ly ever used for edu­ca­tion and or infor­ma­tion. Entertainment is the num­ber one thing the data is used for.
During President Obama’s Presidency, one good­ly gen­tle­man asked me, “is Obama still in there”?
I stood there with my mouth agape, caught between the desire to lash out at him, yet frozen in dis­be­lief, unable to get over the shock of his dis­in­ter­est.
How could he not know who the pres­i­dent of the United States was?
If you have no idea who the pres­i­dent is, how do you know who your sen­a­tors, congressmen/​women, state and local leg­is­la­tors are?
After all that Black peo­ple sur­vived in America, he could not both­er to be awake for the dura­tion of the first black presidency.

It is I believe, these twin demons of blind reli­gios­i­ty and lack of curios­i­ty which will keep Blacks in America mired in the mud and morass of per­ceived infe­ri­or­i­ty for gen­er­a­tions to come.
It is exact­ly as a result of these twin demons which caus­es our ene­mies to brush us aside as inconsequential,.….unworthy of respect and dig­ni­ty.
It is for those rea­sons which cause every eth­nic group which enters the United States, (no mat­ter how poor and dis­pos­sessed), to look at us as the peo­ple least wor­thy of respect.

Instead of tak­ing seri­ous­ly these crit­i­cisms and engag­ing in intro­spec­tion the default response is to cas­ti­gate and demo­nize the mes­sen­ger.
No one wants to hear that the things they have believed all their lives are pro­pa­gan­da and lies fed to them in an effort to keep them sub­ju­gat­ed and befit­ting the stereo­typ­i­cal per­cep­tions of ³⁄₅ of a human being.
”[Yes but],” gen­er­al­ly fol­lows any state­ment of fact which cuts against the grain of the reli­gious dog­ma we have been force-fed all our lives. “Yes, “I hear your facts, “But, “I am dis­card­ing your truth, because I don’t want to both­er learn­ing any­thing new, even if its the truth.

Mike Beckles is a for­mer Jamaican police Detective cor­po­ral, a busi­ness own­er, avid researcher, and blog­ger. 
He is a black achiev­er hon­oree, and pub­lish­er of the blog chatt​-​a​-box​.com. 
He’s also a con­trib­u­tor to sev­er­al web­sites.
You may sub­scribe to his blogs free of charge, or sub­scribe to his Youtube chan­nel @chatt-a-box, for the lat­est pod­cast all free to you of course.