From The Ramparts

Real African Fathers An Endangered Species

Real African Fathers, An Endangered Species

“We must now increasingly be in search of a way to give the Black boy a sense of becoming a man, a clearer sense of self and of purpose, responsibility to his roles as father, husband, a sacredness of self and others in the context of a more attentive family and community network of adult collaboration.” The Making of the Black Male Shortage-and its Implications for the Black Family Nathan Hare Ph.D. and Julia Hare Ed.D

As AmeriKKKa celebrates the marketing ploy called “Father’s Day” we should mentally process the wanton irony/hypocrisy of it all. Black people and Black families in particular are under relentless and ruthless assault by the Euro-AmeriKKKan system, and we have been since our arrival here as captives in 1619. Until the Post Civil Rights era we knew our condition and circumstances were clearly the result of an egregiously racist socio-economic and political system that made color caste and ancestry the dominant form of discrimination. However following the passage of the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act in the ‘60's and the establishment of “affirmative action” in the ‘70's which were specifically designed to cool out Black militancy and serve as the soft glove working in conjunction with the ruthless hard fist of COINTELPRO and other government counterinsurgency programs to destabilize, compromise and undermine Black leadership and destabilize the community.
Black males in particular have been demonized, criminalized and maginalized in increasing numbers in recent years as the Euro-AmeriKKKan economic system has had less use for us as laborers in the domestic economy and we have shunned being used as cannon fodder in their imperialist wars. Africans in AmeriKKKa have been stigmatized by the mass media, we have been and still are denigrated and made to believe our pathology is our fault when in fact it has been/is politically and culturally induced by our oppressors. Our African ancestors invented the concept of family and over time took it to a whole ‘nother level in terms of complexity, functionality and practicality. So it was/is imperative for the Europeans to destroy all semblance of the African family structure if our forced transformation into chattel and mindless self-hating zombies was to be successful and complete. It is a testament to the resiliency of African people, our ancestor’s indomitable will and connection to their African social heritage that they attempted to overcame the devastating impacts of slavery, Jim Crow apartheid to even make forming families a priority.
However our oppressors were/are equally determined to destroy us. They know the best way to weaken and debilitate a people is to condition them to be disorganized, fragmented and outer directed. What they no longer do on the plantations, a way of life that has disappeared, they formulated ways to do in the cities using social and government policies. For example in the mid ‘60's in order for a Black family to get Aid To Dependent Children or welfare an able bodied man could not live in the home. Given the high unemployment, the massive job and pay discrimination that existed at that time many in tact families sought ADC and welfare to help make ends meet or as their main source of sustenance. To get the money, food stamps and coupons they had to comply with the policies or else the Welfare Workers who visited the home to see if conditions were being adhered to would cut off the “benefits”. So more and more men started abandoning their families. In another blatant attack on the institution of the family, states made getting a divorce easier both from a governmental and religious standpoint. Thus we have experienced a downturn in “stable marriages”, (if there ever was such a thing in AmeriKKKa) which is why we see so many families headed by single (usually female) parents. These are, as I often reiterate, public (and religious) policy decisions formulated by white men that have negatively impacted our communities in major ways. These policies and our choices flowing from them have helped shape much of the dysfunction, pathology and disorganization we see around us.
These public policies have helped make Black men marginal and obsolete. Couple these specific policies with the massive importation of lethal drugs into our communities, draconian drug laws and sentencing policies that have fueled a gargantuan expansion of the prison industrial complex, add failing educational systems, easy access to weapons and media (print, television, motion pictures, CD video games) that devalue life, promote violence and thuggery and we can see why we are in the predicament we are in. The primary target of all of this has been Black men. In fact the popular group Public Enemy’s logo was a black man in the cross hairs of a police (the state) gun sight!
The pathologies that permeate our communities are killing us. We have a whole generation of young people who not only aren’t prepared intellectually or vocationally to support themselves or a family, they definitely aren’t psychologically or emotionally prepared to live in a racist culture bent on destroying them. As a result, they are co-operating with and inadvertently supporting the genocidal programs of our oppressor. I should not use the pronoun “they” because we elders are just as guilty! COINTELPRO impacted us also. We went too far underground, we gave up the resistence, we sold out the freedom struggle and have allowed the oppressor to set the tone and tenor for our existence.
For example the notion of and even the word struggle is no longer in our vocabulary! We turn our children over to our enemy for their education and we do absolutely nothing to counter the negative values being pumped at us 24/7 on media owned by our enemies and a small group of apolitical/comatose “Blacks”. Black men are being criminalized daily and the really sad part about it is, unlike the tradition started by D. W. Griffin, and followed by the rest of white media, it is now being done by Black folks like Russell Simmons, P Diddy, Snoop Dog and other socially irresponsible Sambos. The plantation system is alive and well in AmeriKKKa.
Just as during slavery, Black men today cannot or have chosen not to take a direct role in raising, protecting defending or nurturing their wives, children and families which is having a devastating impact on our children and our communities. During slavery whites didn’t recognize unions or “marriages” of slaves. But we did! Our ancestors honored those unions. But today only the marriage ceremony is popular in the Black community, not the institution of the family! The divorce rate is over fifty per cent and climbing. Things are so bad now our young people view getting married as “acting white.” Imagine the descendants of the people who invented marriage and family saying something like that?! Within a social context such as this, being a man is not defined as being an in the home father, the protector, provider for the family and a positive role model for the community. In today’s milieu, being a man is being a pimp/hustler, disrespectful of self and kind or the latest low life sociopathic fad.
African notions of manhood and fatherhood that withstood thousands of years of challenges, pressures and tests, even the Maafa, slavery and Jim Crow have almost been obliterated in less then two generations. This is not an accident, nor is it entirely our fault. It is definitely by design. Unfortunately too many of us have internalized the anti-African values of our oppressors or we succumbed to their menticidal agenda. The only solution is a global movement to teach, retrain and model African manhood from a perspective that meets the needs and demands of today. Time is of the essence, yet we have no sense of urgency, no survival plan. If we fail to develop a counter strategy to the Europeans’ genocidal agenda we will end up worse off than the Native Americans.
This is not hyperbole. Katrina should have taught us a cruel lesson. Our survival is our own hands. If we fail to do whatever is necessary to produce a generation of African warriors/problem solvers/saviors we will have failed ourselves, the ancestors and our progeny and we deserve whatever happens to us.

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posted by Junious Ricardo Stanton @ 7:17 AM