"Who Taught You To Hate Yourself?"

We have to take responsibility for our children and realize that no one else will build and invest in our children as we can. We also need to monitor what our children are learning not only outside of school but inside as well.

Our Blackness has been a target since birth. And it's not only children living in impoverished neighborhoods. More than anyone else, many of our children and battling real issues and epigenetics. In addition, poverty, hopelessness, and violence can truly affect a child’s mental health. The system is wired to criminalize black children at a very young age. However, when they commit a crime, they don’t get to use mental health as an excuse. Our children are faced with forces such as the school-to-prison pipeline or racial profiling. I could raise my son in the best neighborhoods, send him to the best schools and he will always have some sort of target on his back. Whether it's racist cops or our people. We hear so much about “black-on-black crime”, but who did we learn it from? There was a time when we were the only humans on this earth… minding our business, living under the sun, drinking water, and eating fruit all happy. Then all of a sudden we have gladiators, warriors, colonizers, and whatever else schools like to teach our children about. The same people who brought us generations of genocide, slavery, lynching, police brutality, stop-n-frisk, Tuskegee, redlining, just to name a few of the egregious acts committed. We have laws and policies to continue to cause destruction, lock us up at a disproportionate rate, and make excuses for continuing to kill us. It is so frustrating because it’s like, where do we begin. Where there is a lack of resources, there will be a crime. It’s a war on Blackness. We inherited black trauma and struggles, while others inherited wealth from the stolen labor of our ancestors. This is why I have never been down with the feminist movement. This is about OUR struggles and any movement that leaves our Black kings out is not worth supporting. As long as that struggle is there, we will continue to fight the same battles. People will say, why not support minority-owned businesses. If you are not a Black minority, you are not facing the same struggles. In my eyes, there is no in-between. You're either melanated or not.

Representation matters, which is why I constantly talk to my children about who they are. We buy black whenever possible, support every black-owned business when possible and my kids will hear my same pro-black stories for as long as I’m on this earth. We have to constantly reinforce who we are into our children because by the time society finishes TRYING to tear them down by convincing them who they are and are not, all they will have is our words and what we have taught them. We don’t have time to worry about other races when we are the only race constantly under fire.

How do we fix it? First, tear down all the vacant houses in these communities… Crime hides in darkness. We have to constantly educate ourselves to be able to educate our future. Give the unused land back to Blacks who can do something productive with it. We need to replace the communities that were taken away from us. The modern-day massacres are economics. Stop gentrification. Stop electing officials just because they claim to be for black people. We need more Black officials that can get the job done. And learn to educate ourselves, because when we don’t, outsiders will continuously come into our communities and target anyone trying to make a change for the better. We need more jobs and resources that will help to end this horrible cycle that we’re in. As long as there’s a fight to survive, there will be robing, stealing, retaliation. With this, there will always be a high rate of incarceration and recidivism. But the people in the office, creating laws and policies know this. Like Nelson Mandela said, “poverty is not an accident. Like slavery and apartheid, it is man-made and can be removed by the actions of human beings”. That's why the cycle continues. We have to dismantle the root cause of our struggles, we have to intentionally fight against oppression. We need to get rid of the whole stop snitching thing but also need to make sure that the people hired into our communities to "protect and serve" are doing that.

They need to stop hiring police officers who patrol our communities and know nothing and care to know nothing about our culture and traumas. You know, those insecure, entitled, anal officers who never struggled, don’t know how it feels to struggle and joined the police force for some sort of power trip. Come from surrounding wealthy and even racist neighborhoods. Who carries that original police/slave catcher mentality and gets some sort of thrill out of harming black people. Law enforcement is built on white supremacy, it needs to be dismantled and rebuilt. All of these self-serving policies and laws need to be abolished. However, it’ll be difficult because anytime you’re against white supremacy, they will work hard to destroy you.

Despite being held back for generations, we still come out strong. How many times have we built successful thriving communities only to have them destroyed by white supremacists? There are more than a dozen that I can name off-hand.

And last thing, beating your child is damaging, it's psychologically traumatizing. It's another byproduct of systemic racism. Children need to know that someone loves them, someone, that loves them rooting for them, and that they can trust. There are a lot of people who give up on children and think "that's just the way the child is gonna be as opposed to taking time to figure them out".

We must make our children feel safe, teach them that our ancestors arent just slaves that were bought here on ships. They need to know that our ancestors built this county and invented most of the stuff that is used today, many of our ancestors were here long before colonizers. We come from kings and queens. We created and taught even Europeans STEAM and how to read and write. Without knowing our history, it will only repeat itself. It is up to us to end intergenerational trauma. Or else we are continually breeding and feeding trauma. We're raising royalty!