Nappy Headed Black Child

The excuse of all excuses.

I cant begin to explain how much this frustrates me. I have talked w/ many brothers and sisters about community, cultural responsibility and many related things and i always seem to run into that excuse. To be perfectly honest i understand the sentiment. Du Bois said it best when said "To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.” However the thing is that investing in your people building up your community and living better financially are not two things that are opposed to each other. But again the issue is not so much the excuse but the idea of the individual over the community that undergirds it.

The American ideal of rugged individualism is a fundamental to the american psyche (which is rather comical cuz in times of hardship you always hear about taking care of each other and the like). Now our people traditionally communal it our traditional way to be about each other. There is a saying of the Xhosa tribe of south africa that says I am because u are and u are because i am showing our interconnectedness and unity . As opposed to rene descartes I think therefore I am showing individuality.

if you really wanna get deep with it on linguistic level if you were to translate "i think therefore i am into Akan the would be a misunderstanding about exactly what you were trying to communicate. The person speaking Akan would ask you, (i think there fore i am) You are what, where? In Akan their word for exist "Wo ho" contains a spatial element. Meaning that to them unless that person or anything for that matter exists in relation to something else it doesn't exist. Again highlighting the idea of interconnectivity.

Furthermore as Black people in a wht supremacist nation, we cannot do what wht people do and expect the same results. Morality aside that is just the reality. Due to the oppression we face, individualism makes us complicit in our our own destruction. Particularly when ur exploiting ur people as the vehicle to achieve personal goals. We know about white privilege we know racism still runs rampant. Your personal acesent wont protect you cuz your just one person or at best a small group. Wht supremacy is a ideology of power than can only be dealt with by mass opposition.

Fact is Getting Money first wont help anybody not even you.