Cut your grass and the rest will follow!

I recently saw this post on facebook from a Black man:

"Rant about black folks who want everything but refuse to do the basics for themselves: Earlier this week I commented on a local black radio discussion regarding attracting investment to central city neighborhoods...my prescription was to have residents demonstrate that they care about their neighborhood by cleaning up trash, plant grass if your lawn is bare, become proactive against elements that create opportunity for crime (i.e., monitor children who are just hanging out causing disruption, report crime to the police, turn on porch lights at night, etc)...people will invest in attractive neighborhoods, no business wants to locate to an area where folks don't show care...few want to invest in a business where residents aren't prone to calling police if there are break ins and thefts...the talk host poo pooed my solution to which I said then just let their neighborhood remain an armpit..I can't help black folks that refuse to help themselves...I certainly don't want those kind of black folks living around me"

As I read his post I just kept hearing EnVogue singing in my mind "Cut yo' grass! And the rest will follow!" It's hilarious to think that we are still talking about how Black people need to behave in order to get the same benefits that white people do, no matter how they act. White folk can ack'a fool but no one will ever tell them writ large to clean their yards, take down those Confederate flags, or discipline their bad kids because inherent in these biases, Black people are still seen as being in need of being controlled. Wether that control is internal or external doesn't matter. Just to keep the driven, wanton, lustful, Black masses, with their jiggly, big-bootied, neck swiveling, angry Sharkeshas from slapping a ho (unless its on reality TV); to the cherry lip-glossed Sapphires ensconced like queens on the throne on welfare; to the BBC mandigos, slangin' molly along with rap lyrics named Rasha'ad who got five baby mammas they don't take care of; and who cares if they don't 'cause they all going to prison were they belong anyway. America loves the affectation of Blackness until they have to wear the label itself then every mutha fucka wants a refund.

So here's what I said to him:

Many people (both Black and white) think the problem in poor Black, inner city areas is strewn garbage on the street and ill-behaved children. You like to blame disinvestment on people who don't clean their lawns or fit the way you think a "good Black person" should be. So why don't you use that same fervor to push business owners to build factories in cities anymore. For years, in the north especially, manufacturing jobs help lift many Black people out of poverty. Where are those jobs now? They have been sent oversees. Yet I don't see many conservatives demanding those jobs to come back. What I hear is a lot about deregulations and trickle-down economics. Unions used to help lift Black workers out of poverty. Black people were the driving force for unionization as a matter of fact. Yet union membership is actually lower now that it was BEFORE the FLSA was made into law 80 years ago. Wisconsin governor and presidential candidate, Scott Walker, prides himself on destroying unions. In the 1970s a man with a only a high school diploma could make a good living by working as a skilled-laborer on an assembly line, with good healthcare and benefits; now a man with just a high school diploma can only get a job working part-time at Micky Dees or Target for minimum wage and no benefits. If you're a single mom working 2 jobs (and remember even a woman receiving TANF has to work PT) the last thing you are going to think about is cutting the grass.

If you want the neighborhood to change you need to talk to the banks. Have them offer loans in these "trashy" neighborhoods to bring back a good housing base. Often times in these areas you describe as bad, a homeowner has to pay HIGHER interest rates than in a suburban community. So what this does is bring in slumlords who buy cheap housing for cash then rent them out. HOw about giving incentives to Black working families to move back into these areas. Many of these older neighborhoods had families at one time, but with Black flight, high interest loans, red-lining and the sheer cost of being poor many of these places have now been populated with low-income renters.

If you want these neighborhoods to change get rid of "broken windows" policing. Often we think of Black inner city neighborhoods as crime ridden when many aren't. When I lived in The Bronx, my zip code had a much lower crime rate that some of the city's more affluent neighborhoods, yet all my white friends (who had been mugged steps from their apartments) kept asking me why I lived in such an unsafe area. Stop-&-Frisk is another example of over-policing. Each year in New York City over 500,000 Black and Latino young men were stopped by cops for no reason. The overwhelming majority of them were found to have no warrants, guns, drugs, etc. If we had any other program with a 97% failure rate it would have been stopped immediately, yet this continued for over a decade because there was a perception that Black youth commit crimes all the time. Also over policing leads to the removal of millions of Black men from their communities. Right now if you are poor, white and use drugs and live in a rural trailer park you are 4 times less likely to be arrested for drug possession than a poor Black kid living in the inner city. Right now we have hundreds of thousands of Black men sitting in prison whose only crime was having a small amount of weed/ pot or crack on their person. Those men could be out in the community working, building homes, keeping up their lawns.

If you want the neighborhood to change give parents a reason to relocate to the area. Change the policy on schools (use vouchers, charters, fix the broken public schools, anything and everything to help get those kids on track). Telling somebody to plant flowers or sweep their sidewalk doesn't prevent their local schools from failing. Get rid of the school-to-prison pipeline. In a recent study it was found that in Wake Country, NC a Black elementary (yes grade-school) student was 11 times more likely to be arrested for an in-school infraction than their white counterparts. People are far less likely to go to college if they went to a school system that failed them from 1st through 12th grade. Failing schools produce failing adults.

If you want the neighborhood to change then force the city to put funds back into these places. We have starved our cities to death with tax cut after tax cut after tax cut that only end up benefiting the riches people in the community. We have been tricked by the GOP into thinking our tax cut, which may buy you a couple pairs of Jordans and a few extra pizza runs will help you. What these tax cuts do is keep more money in the pockets of the rich--who don't spend it, they just hoard it--while defunding much needed public services like buses, light-pole maintenance and the public defenders office.

So let's repeat: the prescription to bettering a neighborhood is not cutting grass or disciplining children, its creating good jobs that pay people well, keep them healthy, give them low interest loans and other incentives to buy in the neighborhood while providing their children a solid educational foundation at the same time keeping up the infrastructure. It may sound like a lot but we see this formula replicated all across America, in predominately white suburbs. We know it works there so let's apply it to inner city neighborhoods as well. But telling poor Black people that its their fault businesses won't employ them or banks won't give them money simply because they have raggedy houses with burned lawns or bad-assed loud children is not only condescending its a lie.

The season of the witch

 Her friend Chrysanthemum Applewhite, with her sultry lips and pale skin, had finally let her hair grow out. Solstice thought it looked pretty down but the green changeable taffeta evening gown the woman wore—with the double-straps and basket weave bodice was just too drab and austere for her tastes. Solstice wanted something daring. Something unforgettable. So she chose to have her personal seamstress run up the same dress Bette Davis wore earlier that year to the Oscars, altered to fit her own style of course. Bette’s dress was dark but Solstice wanted something more soulful. Hers was made of gold metallic tulle with an attention-grabbing collar of peacock feathers that ringed her face with a flourish. Her chocker of faceted chrysoprase was dramatic but it seemed subdued compared to the massive yellow sapphire cocktail ring she wore on her right hand. The same hand that held the glass of champagne she had just spilled on the man now holding her.

     Solstice was tallish for a woman with a light complexion. “Café con leche.” is what her Dominican suitor kept calling her. More Ethel Waters than Lena Horne with bright red hair that she hated and often described as—“an angry nappy bush”—was constantly at odds with a comb. She reigned over her New Year’s Eve party with the confidence of a tiger over its domain. An ecru impresario who plied her guests with expensive gin, hot jazz and an expansive showmanship snatched directly from Josephine Baker’s groundbreaking performance in “Un Vent de Follie” of the Folies Bergère. She saw the show that was eventually made into a movie starring Maurice Chevalier, Merle Oberon and Ann Sothern. She had met them all at its 1935 Paris premiere with Shaka Tiberius—oh how she missed his touch with those broad militaristic shoulders and generously large hands. That dark mahogany skin and his lush mouth that curled into a devilishly succulent smile when he felt horny or mischievous. Antonin Crissuki put on quite a show himself that night for Maurice and the girls at his notorious after café club Chambre du Sang, but she digressed, Latin men and champagne had that affect on her. The revelry seemed to come to a stop as if a red light was turned on; and she, just for a moment, savored her own greatness. The two-and-a-half thousand square foot ballroom sat on the top most floor of her doublewide Convent Avenue brownstone in Harlem. When you went to a “Solstice Macaffey Affair”—always in quotes, always italicized—you were guaranteed to have a wonderful time. A sitting Queen of Witches would have it no other way.

We got 99 hate groups but Black Lives Matter ain't one

"MARTIN LUTHER KING AT COMMUNIST TRAINING SCHOOL"

There it was. In big bold letters. Festooned across the top of newspapers and pamphlets; flyers and billboards. Postcards and mailers. The leader of the Negro movement was backed by communists. In a photograph Dr. Martin Luther King is highlighted, usually printed with a large black arrow with his name inside, sitting along with other "communist sympathizers" supposedly being trained. The photograph had been taken at the Highlander Center in Tennessee. An important incubator for anti-segregation activists that had a long storied history of fighting for racial justice and human rights. The Highlander, situated on rolling hills in the lush high country of Tennessee, had been pushing for unionization, women's rights and integration across of the South for decades. At its height of influence in the 1950s you couldn't throw a stone and not hit a future Civil rights icon; there was Rosa Parks talking strategy in 1955 before the bus boycotts, there was Pete Seerger, Charis Horton and Ralph Abernathy confabbing.  You had James Bevel and Bernard Lafayette working on SNCC's next move while singing "We Shall Overcome" to break the tension. The Highlander was closed by the state for "inciting public panic" in 1959. In a now famous standoff the county sheriff evacuated the center's building and padlocked the door. Myles Horton, the founder, stood by and watched as reporters flashed photographs. As the sheriff walked away Horton turned to the phalanx of media people and said defiantly "You can padlock a building but you can't padlock an idea."

The photgraph itself was innocuous. A lecture had been given at the Highlander but the words across the top were damming. It didn't matter if the origin of the picture had been planted by the Ku Klux Klan. The smear campaign had begun. Dr. Martin Luther King and his horde of communist backed minions were here to bring violence, unGodliness and white slavery to the United States. Many southern newspapers ran the picture and the accompanying story as a rallying cry for Southern whites to wake up. Rise up. To support and defend their Southern heritage at all costs.  Of course this was only a part of a large COINTELPRO (COunter INTELligence PROgram)--which is a series of covert, and at times illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations. These schemes were often facilitated by media. With this backdrop in mind we should not find it shocking that Elisabeth Hasselbeck suggests the Black Lives Matter movement is a hate group. I'm surprised that this didn't come sooner.

The goals of Hoover's machinations were simple:

1. Create a negative public image for targeted groups (e.g. by surveilling activists, and releasing negative personal information to the public)

• Think of how #BLM member Shaun King was "outed" a few weeks ago for not being Black. 
• Think of how the 2 #BLM Black women who organized the strike on Bernie Sanders's Seattle rally were called out because one of them was a former Palin supporter and was labelled as a radical Christian.
• They claim that civil rights organizations exacerbate race relations and cause violence as in the recent shooting of a Texas law enforcement officer, but are silent when two cops are gunned down execution-style in a Las Vegas pizza shop and covered with the Gadsden Flag (Don't Tread on Me) which has become the standard of the Tea Party.

2. Break down internal organization

• Think about all those news pundits who keep saying nobody knows what the Black Lives Matter movement really is all about. Even though it has been stated time and time again, on Facebook, Twitter, their website, by members, by me. You just keep hearing this drumbeat of confusion and disorganization. Why aren't the journalist doing journalism instead of conjecture?  

3. Create dissension between groups

• There's a rule of thumb used in Civil Rights. If the media can find one Black person to refute the claims of any Civil Rights organization, that organization is automatically discredited. We saw this after Dr. King was openly criticized by the Black elite after his blistering "Beyond Vietnam" speech where he excoriated President Johnson for his slow-pace on fair housing here in America while spending millions to send troops to die in Vietnam. They told Dr. King he was being ungrateful and petulant. A year before Dr. King died a poll was conducted that showed 53% of African-Americans viewed him unfavorably.
• We see it now as FOX News parades out a string of "coons for coins" who are all too happy to denigrate Black civil rights leaders and organizations. These so-called "experts" are willing to make the most outlandish and incendiary claims which in turn vacates Hasselback, Doucy, Hannety, O'Reilly, Coulter and others part in race baiting. They can easily say "See this Black hates Obama; he doesn't think racism is real; Black people are lazy, dangerous and sad. And because we love our own magical Negro, Dr. Ben Carson, the other forty-five million of you must be wrong."  

There are other tools in the White Supremacy gadget box like restricting access to public resources,
restricting the ability to organize protests and restricting the ability of individuals to participate in group activities. All of these are done to dilute, distort, defame and deflect the organization and our attention away from the real matter at hand. To keep the narrative away from the systemic death, destruction and denigration of millions of American lives. So while Hasselback's comments are controversial and she will take some heat for it; the truth is her sentiments were scripted for her years ago by an angry, racist zealot sitting in a marble fortress fighting against the forward momentum of racial justice. From his heart of darkness he has created a still formidable matrix that uses misinformation and apathy to prop-up an untenable situation, one that we must not only confront but affirm that BLACK LIVES MATTER.