We need to focus more of our energy on the things that we can change going forward so that we can stop losing our children in the first place!

Take a look at this chart, at its peak in 2010 Black unemployment was at 16.8%. This was due to the economic downturn under the previous president.

Over the next seven years unemployment went from 16.8% to 7.8% for Black Americans, that’s a 9 percentage point drop and Black unemployment was cut by over 50% under his administration.It currently stands at 6.6% in 2019.

Now with that info in hand, why do we allow 45 and his cohorts to brag about Black unemployment?

The going narrative is that Black unemployment is at an all time low thanks to his administration but under his administration it only went down 1.2% points. I’m not Albert Einstein but I know a 9 point drop versus a 1.2 point drop is way better. Yet we continue to allow him and his surrogates to play up the fact that Black people are doing better under his watch.

And one of the worst things about this narrative is that Black people are parroting it as if it’s true. As a way to make it seem like Obama did nothing for Black people and 45 has.

This needs to stop, if you see an uninformed Black person or any other person saying this, please point them to this chart and let them know that under 45 we’ve only moved 1.2 percentage points versus 9 under Obama. So stop with the BS!

#changethenarrative
#thehiphopphilosopher

Disclaimer: if you did not do what’s posted below over the past few days, please don’t come at me talking shit, if you did, I welcome your response on why you did it!

A little over a week ago I posted a joke about R Kelly, which subsequently started a shit storm for about 4-5 days. People got mad at me, I was called out of my name, and a FB friend of mine received the same vitriol because she was posting things critical about Kell’s too!

The biggest retort during those days was that white men do the same thing and get away with it, so we should be just as mad and should use the same amount of energy to be critical of those people too. The other part of that was that we were helping to bring a Black man down.

So me being me, I took what they said and decided I’d do an experiment.

The experiment was to see if I stopped talking about R Kelly, would the people who trotted out memes of every white sexual harasser they could find actually use their energy to continue addressing the white men that they claim get away with it.

Crickets!!!!

But guess what happened, some of them posted memes of Oprah and Gayle saying they were in cahoots with white supremacist for interview the MJ accusers and R Kelly. They didn’t use their time and energy to go after those white men, they used their time and energy to go after and bring down two Black women.

Yep, that’s what happened. So I guess it’s ok to bring down Black people that YOU accuse of being in cahoots with white supremacy but it’s not ok to bring down Black people accused of pedophilia?!

Marinate on that!

A problem in our communities is that we have been conditioned to think, us over I, or we over me, so we go about trying to fix all of OUR problems at once, as opposed to fixing our own personal problems first, which inherently fixes the whole! The problem with this thinking is that you cannot fix the whole without first fixing the individual parts of the whole!

For example, if your car breaks down do you instruct the mechanic to fix the whole car, or the part of the car that’s broken, even if it’s more than one part, each part needs to be fixed individually! Or if you go to the doctor, will they fix your heart and lungs too if there’s no problem with them, or do they fix what’s broken, in order to heal the whole!

Each person is his/her own component of the community/whole, and if each one of these individuals fixed the problems that they cause, the whole would be healed! For example, can we stop all gang banging tomorrow? No! But can we stop all gang banging over time if we fixed the things that cause our children to join gangs? Yes! So each individual that we can stop from joining a gang, helps the whole community!

At the end of the day, the reason why we can’t heal our communities as a whole is because everyone is on different levels of the overall problem, and attribute to different parts of the overall problem!

We can’t stop drug dealing if we don’t have jobs to offer the dealers!

We can’t stop gang banging if the kid comes from a broken home, and seeks fatherly or brotherly love, if we can’t provide that!

We can’t build profitable businesses that hire the drug dealers, if we don’t support our own Black owned businesses when they open!

And we definitely can’t do anything for our communities if we don’t understand these basic analogies!

This past week Gucci released a Black face turtleneck with a lip hole and cheap trick colored lipstick surrounding the hole.

My first thought was who the hell wears a turtleneck with a hole in it, which quickly gave way to, what the fuck were thinking with the red lipstick?

Then it hit me, these asshats went to the racist free publicity playbook, in an effort to get people talking about the brand. It’s worked perfectly for the other brands that have done it over the last year or so. Remember the Prada monkey purse trinket, or the H&M monkey tee.

They took a quick hit of negative publicity surrounding racial charged fashion faux paux but got millions of dollars worth of free publicity for their brands during their respected news cycles.

All they did was issue a half as apology, pulled the “we didn’t realize that it was culturally insensitive” item off the shelf’s and continued with business as usual.

Have we stopped wearing any of those brands, no!

Are we going to stop wearing Gucci, I doubt it!

So what should we or can we do?

I suggest doing what Trevor Noah jokes about on The Daily Show. Make these “oops our bad corporations” pay Black people every time they do something like this, or we should boycott them until they do.

Not in the form of you get a stack, or you get a stack, but we should demand that they donate to a grassroots charitable organization ran by Black people, if they want our business going forward.

We need to go in knowing what we want in order to get what we want and give them a time table, so we won’t get caught up in an endless boycott that we’ll end up breaking a few months from now anyway.