My base premise was the fact that you were once ignorant and stupid according to you. There was a time when you were not awake according to you.
I was only asking you to give people who are not able to see like you some slack. You didn't always have this awareness did you. That's all I'm saying. Give patience because you remember what is was like when you lacked awareness.
I only mentioned this due to the fact that i felt maybe wrongly so, that you were hard on other black people that are not "pulling themselves up by their boot straps in your opinion.
Your statement although is has truth to it, it can be interpreted in many different ways. This is what i like to call paradoxically oxy-moronic. Yes we should learn to navigate it, the very system according to you isn't designed to promote black success and i would like to it doesn't promote a lot of other positive things either.
So the very system that oppresses we seek justice from it. That's why i used the term "paradoxically oxy-moronic".
I agree with you that black people can and should do better. I know we are doing better. There are a lot of black people doing better it's not all bad. I say it can and should be better for a lot of us. Some of our pain is purposeful and some of our pain is self inflicted.
AI D i hope you can recognize that at the end of the day me, you JFP, chevron dove all want the thing.
The most pristine quality of life for people of african descent in the americas and around the world.
Peace brother AI D i recognize and appreciate your journey.
Actually the system is designed to help themselves and not help others to be successful. Learning to navigate the waters one must swim in needs to be done wherever and whatever environment one finds themselves in, that is if one is survive.
Frantz Fanon made a life time studying the interplay between the oppressor and the oppressed and how it effected the actions within each group. What he came to realize is that in the end they became almost mirror images of each other only perhaps expressing the same inclinations in different ways within their individual groups. If one faction wins upon any confrontation the winner will inevitably mirror his former oppressor in some form or another.
Better intellect than mine can explain it much more clearly but that is what is meant to convey when we use the phrase free ourselves of the white mind....we do not want to rebuild ourselves or our communities mirroring our oppressors world. We don't want that world. That world is a dead end street.
Look at them....they don't even care for their own not even the men and women who fight and die to secure the stolen wealth they gorge themselves on.
F. Fanon also noted that a once 'former' colonized land becomes 'free' it still must deal with and is boxed in by if not the very same colonialists then others of the same ilk. All outside resources must be obtained through those ex-colonizers as they 'own' those resources, all internal resources must be sold and traded to those very same ex-colonizers. So there-by the ex-colonized must take on much the same face as the 'now' ex-oppressor no matter how much it is wished otherwise.
Cape Town was colonized by the Dutch in 1650ish, apartheid ended in the early 1990's.
That alone should give one pause.
Here's an write up on todays Cape Town:
More than 50 years on from the mass evictions that drove anyone who wasn’t white from the city center, the army is need to guard the areas known as the Cape Flats.
qz.com
Those of us old enough can recognize the eerily similar parallels of what happened
to our communities here in the US.
The system is not designed to help anyone but themselves.
Edited to add:
I heard exactly the same thing in the 'boot strap' tirade as Brother James did.
