Was the Black Athlete & Community better off during Segregation

Let the reader not worry, I was shocked too when I was inspired with the title, pre-composition. That is a sign of genius, you know. My initial reaction was ‘that is preposterous’. There is no obvious qualitative or quantitative measure by which today’s Black post-modern athlete could be compared negatively to ‘professional’ Black athletes during segregation and pre-integration days. But then my mind started fulminating, creating its own hypothesis and methods of analysis and comparison in order to get the desired result; starting from the premise and proposition that ‘Professional’ Black Athletes and the Communities and schools that produced them, were better off from their existence and activities during the eras of Jim Crow segregation. And if I had the time, I believe I could sustain a whole discussion that the Black athlete/physical specimen (the stereotypical ‘buck’) during slavery had certain advantages over today’s Black athlete, but inasmuch as they are similar to the points I’m making about Black athleticism in the post-modern era. I will save that for a future post.

And yet as I started working myself up in a tizzy over my initial fulminations, the prism cracked and I could see the primary composition of colors and shades in the one issue, and the effects of their possible combinations. Thus, to the reader, our primary thesis might be that the Black athlete and the Black community were better off during segregations days. Where to start? Let us start in high school and college for Black male and female athletes, both of which were segregated prior to the Civil Rights movement. Of all the effects one might imagine, it had one incontestable effect on the Black community that no matter how good you were in sports or academics, you were going to a Black high school and college, where you would primarily be taught by Black teachers and professors, and surrounded by other Black students. There was no possibility of a Black boy or girl getting a scholarship to an all-White high school or college. It was illegal; let alone having dreams of playing in an integrated lucrative professional league, that suggests to you as an adolescent that you don’t need an education (because) you are going to be a professional athlete. It was not only socially unacceptable it was illegal. A little Negro child could have been talented as one of Apollo’s best musicians and poets, as smart as one of Athena’s personal disciples, but legal and default segregation meant they would never get the opportunity to display these talents around White people. But they would naturally of course, display these talents around their fellow peers and Black people in the community, and it would have been a source of inspiration and competition to peers, and a source of pride to the community. Post-integration, we were robbed of the effects of being around Black excellence and those who excel, and how observing their habits allowed peers to be influenced, molded, and mentored by older high achievers. There is not a price tag in heaven or hell that can calculate that loss to the Black community with the full onset of integration, and the ‘creaming of our best and brightest’ right off the top of the Black community to supposedly go to better schools that are majority White. What really would have happened if Michael Jordan played for Morehouse instead of the University of North Carolina (during a time of enforced segregation) and played for a Negro professional league (not the Harlem Globetrotters)? What if after, and probably even during his professional career in the Negro Leagues, because of the lack of money, segregation era Michael Jordan would have taught a segregated high-school health class, and PE or perhaps even an academic subject and coached an all-Black high school or HBCU team. Would that outcome, automatically be inferior to what we experience today, for Michael Jordan or the Black community. He like mulattos light enough to pass, and White women too, but we have dealt with that issue elsewhere.

All these Black boys with ‘hoop dreams’ and fantasies in post-modernity, during segregation days could not have the illusion of a lucrative professional integrated hoop dream and fantasy, except to the extent that they could settle for playing professional segregation ‘ball’ for a professional/semi-pro (because White folk are ‘automatically’ the standard) Negro League. That basically meant that you were either playing for the love of the game more than the pay, or there was nothing else you could figure out to do with your vocational and temperamental skillset to earn any income or attention. Let us not be stupid, yea the White boy athletes got more money than Black athletes during segregation era days, but they weren’t getting paid much then in the first place compared to skyrocketing salaries of post-integration professional sports. Yes, they can talk about Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and the elites of White mainstream baseball manhood, but compared to what top tier professional skateboarders today make, one would rather be a professional skateboarder.

Thus, while White professional athletes during segregation were making more than Black pro athletes in segregated leagues, the difference in the amount was far more marginal than income differential today. Once it was possible, even with a side job as a teacher or local coach, for a player in the Negro Baseball Ball League, which technically lasted from 1887-1947, to sustain a Black man and keep him alive for a year, it had obvious advantages over homelessness, profligacy, and zero income. Maybe Negro Leagues couldn’t get enough players when the overall economy was good, but when it was bad, for Black men with the athletic ability, time, and inclination, it certainly would not be considered an unpleasant means of earning some extra income. This would be similar to the life of Black professional musicians in a band (team).

So already we’ve identified advantages during segregation of Black boys not glorifying and fantasizing about lucrative athletic careers after going to integrated schools (where he isn’t expected to work academically), or some kind of lucrative integrated professional league with groupies of all races, and luxurious lifestyles. That was not an option because it was illegal to be around White people for any other reason than serving them. It was illegal for you to think you were around them for any other reason than to serve them. So athletic young Black boys and men set their sights in a far more ‘limited’ way during segregation. During segregation a talented Black boy, no matter how poor he was, even if he was not destined for an integrated sports league filled with riches and harem like depravities, he could very well distinguish himself to the point he could get a scholarship to a Black college or university and thusly improve himself. That was realistic in a way starring in an integrated league for millions of dollars per year wasn’t. Men he knew had done that, men he admired as coaches and players had done that. probably At his segregated Black high school coaches, made developing educated Black athletes the goal, ideal, and for lack of a better phrase ‘idol’ to be emulated; not high-flying celebrity lifestyle contemporary pro-athletes living nearly completely debauched lives.

During segregation days, knowing full well there is no integrated fantasy land of lucrative professional sports as an option, his best shot is either to satisfy the requirements of the Black College or university he or she is attending, and get an athletic scholarship and parlay the ‘free’ classes, food, board, and athletic training into a degree. Sons and Daughters of Ham, there was no fantasy about an integrated world of pro-sports, requiring little intellectual resources and/or training, where he could graduate from high school like Lebron James and get rich overnight…to distract these segregated young Black boys. Best case scenario he got a degree in something, even if it was in physical education where he went to a school and taught Black boys and young men. To use a Christian phrase, that is to say he ‘sowed into’ the next generation. That benefits the community and the local segregated school because of course, no matter how talented he was, legal segregation meant it was not an option to go teach at a White school. Perhaps the young man in question didn’t get a degree from the Black college or university and ended up playing in the Negro Leagues. Whether he played for love of the game at that point, or the fact that at least during the season and traveling with the team to major Negro cities like a kind of sports Chitlin Circuit, he could survive…and meet women…maybe even settle down somewhere.

Were the ‘benefits’ of ‘segregation’ to stop there, I think a strong case has been made that the individual Black athlete, though he has far more opportunities to work professionally, in a dizzying atmosphere of celebrity culture, and extreme wealth, for the majority of them it is a delusion and will disappoint them in the end, the way fewer than 2% of collegiate Black athletes make it to the pros. Many of the others crash and burn into an obscurity the graduation rate at Black colleges and universities would have at least prepared them for. and We know how abysmal graduation rates for Black athletes are at White mainstream colleges and universities. White colleges, universities and the pros cast their old or used bodies out like worn out racehorses. All the while our White overlords who pay us dearly to amuse them by our athletic exploits, act amazed how obsessed the Negro men seem to be about athletics. And they are laughing all the way to the bank. Black people should be embarrassed that while HBCUs struggle and pinch pennies, and suck the government titty, our Black boys make UGA, AL, LSU, Clemson, etc., self-sufficiently rich, and the niggers fund departments in subjects we niggas will never think of, let alone get an academic discipline out of. This is what the White colleges and universities do off our boys broad and strong Black backs!

Steven A, gets animated and loves to debate subjects like the greatest of all times, the best teams in the league, the best players, and the best owners. All of which White people pay him exceptionally well to pretend to be upset about. But Steven A has absolutely no opinions on what Negros need to do to disabuse themselves of this pitiful socio-economic situation in post-modernity damn near 60 years after integration and the Civil Rights Movement. Shannon Sharp doesn’t think it’s embarrassing not just to him, but to Black men and people in general, that he and Ja Morant’s father Tee Morant almost got into an altercation on national TV in front of boatloads of young Black impressionable children. Exceptionally rich Black men, arguing and having spats and beefs that they carry into the public, as if to prove that there is a reason a collection of the richest Black men in America, the Negro 1%, has not proven of any assistance to the Black communities that spawned them, or in improving socio-economic and cultural dynamics for Black America. If anything, during their post-integration presence and rise, nearly every socio-economic statistic (including academics) in Black America has gotten worse. This is even though everyone told us that when our Black boys can go to ‘better’ (read integrated) schools, their academic prospects and the prospects of Black people in general would improve with the new opportunities. And yet it didn’t and got worse! And yet, let a professional athlete nigga get an interception, score a touchdown, and he prances and preens around the field thumping his chest like King Kong on the top of the Empire State building. We should be embarrassed; but we are not, we say these men are role models for Negro children…apparently because there are none other things Black boys in America want to be other than professional athletes and rappers.

What is altogether worse, our elite Black professional athletes have subjected Black people and culture to some of the most embarrassing episodes in recent Black history. Episode I, the Mike Tyson Evander Holyfield fight when Mike Tyson bit (literally) off more than a nominal chunk of Evander Holyfield’s ear. Two exceptionally well-paid Black men, one got so angry at the other that he put a sweaty man’s ear in his mouth and bit it. Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know if you have ever rubbed your finger behind your own ear and smelled it, after a few days without proper cleansing, but I hardly believe the smell I remember encourages me to put some other Negro’s ear in my mouth and bite it until I get enough of it in my mouth to have to spit it out. White people didn’t even need racism at that moment, for it is clear to the world that even rich Black men are brutes and beasts (i.e. it is an inherent trait), no wonder the younger ones are so violent. Episode II involves Floyd Mayweather, who has the dubious distinction, of traveling all the way to South Africa around a sea of poor Black people more startling than anything than he had ever seen in America, and spending half a million dollars…or is it $50,000 in the Gucci shop in South Africa. In Episode II of post-modern professional Black athletes embarrassing Black people and culture, Floyd Mayweather had a co-conspirator; the infamous 50cent. For some reason they were beefing for which the culminating challenge 50cent made to Floyd Mayweather, was to challenge whether or not Floyd Mayweather could read (was literate or not); sufficiently suspicious, and incredulous, 50cent challenged Floyd Mayweather to read one page of a Harry Potter book.

Two rich Black men, who never criticize Gucci, Ferrari, Mercedes, Versace etc., got so angry and worked up at each other that one seeks to purposely humiliate and embarrass the other. Leveling the accusation in an atmosphere where the White mainstream and the other races already think we and our culture are brutish, un-intellectual, and unrefined is criminal against Black people. White folk and Asians wouldn’t dare send their children to be ‘educated’ in majority Black schools. To be around your children is dangerous, why? Because 3rd generation Curtis 50 cent Jackson would be there bullying and intimidating your children and possibly impregnating your White or Asian daughter, and 3rd generation Floyd Mayweather would be there, the other bully, whose talent is ‘knocking people the fuck out’! For God’s sake Negritude! These are self-inflicted shots to the foot, wounds, done by none other than our elite professional spoiled Black athletes and entertainers. What is altogether worse, if I am not mistaken, Floyd Mayweather did not take up the challenge and read a page of anything in retort.

I am told Mike Tyson has an upcoming fight. Has this man not been abused and made a joke of enough? Was the matrimonial plea for help Robin Givens interview not enough. Was the rape conviction not enough? Even supposing he is being driven by financial considerations. Having been where he was, we can only surmise that he has been making bad financial decisions for years, culminating in the bad life choice of fighting another grown man over 50, and even risking a punch to the head. It might be a cruel joke, and in no wise am I diminishing the accomplishments and likes of Muhammad Ali, but when he invented the phrase ‘rope-a-dope’ we thought he was demeaning his opponents, but considering all the punches he took and their presumed effects upon his brain and nervous system, we might need to re-imagine who the real dope was. Taking punches is not a profession, no matter how much somebody pays you. Turning necessary evils into professions is a seat of many disastrous results in humanity.

Fellow Sons and Daughters of Ham, we must continue with a discussion of the negative impacts of integration, not just on Black Athlete as an individual or class of individuals, but upon the Black community writ large. Let’s open the Black community window nice and wide to allow some fresh air to come into this issue. Guess what Negritude, official and Defacto segregation meant that Black ‘professional’ sports teams, needed segregated stadiums to play in, Black team owners. These team owners would use the baseball team as a marketing engine for some other business or concern. So it might be a Black regional insurance company, or mutual aid savings association that sponsors a team in order to advertise its primary business. The team becomes like walking talking sports playing billboards that promote the brand. The better the team does, it strengthens the brand. The owner/’corporate owners’ hire better players by paying them more. The stadium and the varying teams need marketing departments as they traveled (all Black professionals) from town to town. They’d need flyers in advance, flyers on site, promoting the product and the team, which for strategic reasons probably should have the same or similar names or representative symbolism.

Furthermore, a network of segregated housing options for the athletes to live in while they were on the road would be necessary. This would consist of small and medium sized Negro owned motels, hotels, and hostels. In some areas and towns, it would include boarding houses run by Negroes developers and landowners, and simple homeowners with a room to share, in segregated towns along the way. This pumped income into the Black community at an organic level, not a trickle-down level or government run or sponsored level. This is the difference between being ‘planted by rivers of water’ and having to suffice with the rain. Might we not all be tempted by the dramatic intensity of the story of the tragic widowed Black woman with child during segregation days. After her husband dies, she and her son have extra rooms, but little or no income. So she rents out rooms to college students at the local HBCU, passing jazz bands, professional Negro League traveling sports teams, and students from Black elementary, middle and high schools taking trips throughout the south and needing a place in the town to stay. One summer a Negro league baseball team is there for a two-week run against the local team. Quite randomly, a few players take rooms at her house. Only ‘he’ of the players, gives she and her son two of his comp tickets for every game, whether they go or not. Of course, the boy wants to go and is fascinated by the smart, handsome, and athletic stranger. Intriguingly, instead of partying and drinking liqueur at the local speakeasy after games like the other players, he reads books. Far more discretely than the son, our widow admires ‘him’ as well. Furtive sparks fly. A kind word here, a cup of tea, there, a stronger bulb for the lamp in the room because she notices he reads so much. They talk about their hopes and dreams as he lingered over meals where the other players didn’t. One time she told him she wanted to buy some adjoining property and build a proper motel. The city was thriving in segregation. The chitlin circuit and local theatres provided 7 day a week entertainment, while the big Black traditional churches provided 7 day a week community stability and certainty. There was an historic HBCU in the city. The businesses that catered to new Black migrants as they immigrated from the rural areas prospered. There was a sense of confidence that the new Black developing urban had lots of opportunities, even in segregation. They were run by professional Blacks, and Black with the money to ‘make things happen’ on, at, or higher than the level of even the White man himself. Hence Tulsa, but that is a different story. The better and more refined and talented a Black person was, or the more hardworking they were, or the more industrious, you could make it happen, and not only would you not have to depend upon a White person for a job, for a doctor, for a lawyer, etc., you would not even have to interact with White people if you did not want to. (Hence Tulsa). That Blacks wanted and gravitated to and thrived in such a segregated environment, in the complete absence of integration (or fighting for integration), seems to we Negroes in post-modernity like it must have been impossible, but there you have it. It seems almost impossible that Blacks could have thrived in such an environment, even though it was segregated, and perhaps even, quite precisely because it was segregated. For his part, as they talked, the books and studying were because as much as he loved the game of baseball, competition, and his teammates, and how it made a way for him to graduate from college, he didn’t like life on the road. He wanted to find somewhere and settle down, perhaps teach math in a segregated high school and coach the baseball team…let the reader’s own mind fill in the details of the rest of the story as you remind yourself ‘why I write such good books’.

Segregated stadiums required Black food entrepreneurs from the local communities and rural areas surrounding the stadiums to sell the concessions and merchandise. I do not mean to be stereotypical and sexist, but as powerful as the lore and personality of ‘big mama’, making a meal from nothing in hard times, the best home cooking and soul food in times of plenty, you know there would be ‘Big Mama’s’ or a ‘Big Daddy’s’, or Uncle Buster Ribs and Grill meats, cousin Ray-Ray’s (take that Obama) cakes and pies etc. As much as they could they had to buy their ingredients and food stuffs from Black farmers. Obviously, food at the Negro Leaugue in St. Louis and their specialty, would be different from the stadium and foods in New Orleans, would be different from specialty in Charleston, SC where you could get home fried pork skins, made from hogs from Black farmers, fried by the local community Negroes that do that kind of thing. I’ll never forget being in rural SC and going fishing. We caught about 15 or 20 crappy and blue gills each, took the back to my farmer friends trailer on his land ajoining the pond, where he raised crops, hogs, and chickens. We dressed enough of the fish down to fry some and then froze the rest for me to take home. While we were waiting on the grease to heat and the entirety of the fish to fry, my friend brought out home made pork rinds, crispy and thick as the difference between cheetos and cheeto puffs. Sons and Daughters of Ham (no pun intended), while asking what flavor we want (regular, salt and vinegar, hot, and barbecue), he pulled a Kroger or Walmart grocery sized bag full of them with a healthy doese of the various sauces on them. At a couple picnic under some trees adjoinging the farmland where his trailer was, we listened to music and talked thoughout the night, drinking beer and eating fish and grits. Each city in the Negro Leaugue Chitlin circuit would have its own ‘vibe’ and culinary treats and make no mistake about it, all proceeds go to Black people. I doubt you could name me one pro-team or athlete, that has an organic relationship like that with the arena, city, and urban community they play in. As individual post-modern professional Black athletes, they make a killing, the wider Black community doesn’t. But the spillover effects of the paradox of well paid, feted and fawned over Black professional athelets in integrated leagues doesn’t stop there. What we missed out on post-integration goes even deeper.

Each stadium would have a segregated Black food and concessions sourcing and production staff, but the stadium itself would also require employees to take the tickets, and deliver the concessions to the seated spectators. Many of them would be young people and young adults from the local community, where during summer seasons when school is out, but Negro League baseball is in, they can make some money working in the local segregated Negro League stadium(s) selling tickets, concessions, and promotional materials (which often included references to major business owners that sponsored teams or events in order for the privilege of posting their promotional materials). This level of economic interdependence in Black communities in terms of our entertainment (entertainers) and athletics (athletes) has taken a great hit post-integration.

Imagine what it must have been like to go to the Negro Baseball League game in its heyday; in the segregated South or Midwest. The peanuts would be grown and sold wholesale by Negroes and Negresses. The hot dogs/sausages would be grown from ‘piglets’ by Black farmers. These piglets would be fed with feed from Black farmers and slop from Black households. They would be slaughtered and prepared into varying sausages by Black butchers; to be purchased by Black wholesalers, sold by the wholesalers through various ‘representatives’ to independently owned Black stadiums; where they were prepared by individual capitalist Black concessions operators into retail sale form at games; where they are sold by Black teens and young adults at the segregated Negro ‘Professional’ baseball league game. Ladies and gentlemen that is the definition of circulating money within one’s community.

Let me presume to know the readers heart, as I wrote the preceding paragraph. The pride in such a situation, the confidence! We wonder why Tulsa was so ‘offensive’ to White folk that they burned it down in a jealous rage over trumped up accusations…. which doesn’t ignore the fact that even if the accusations and worse were true, and White people were up in ‘they’ feelings, they should have let the law take its course. Whenever Black people are in situation where they either appear or seem to not to appear to need White handouts, help, aid, assistance, reparations, affirmation, and paternalistic condescension, this seems to automatically offend White people in some regard and trigger rage in them. It is not a coincidence that the establishment of post-Civil War Reconstruction era policies, precipitated the rise of KKK, as White folk viewed nearly any Black ‘development’ and ‘progress’ as automatically a threat to them. For some reason, Black progress even appeared to be a threat to White women (see the movie The Birth of the Nation), as ‘liberated’ Black men would chase White women all over the South raping them because of course, animalistic and bestial Black men cannot control themselves around White women, no matter how large the sea of Black women (implied inferiority) is around them. The sad part is that this is a racist stereotype that post-modern Black male athletes and entertainers are all too happy to continue). Sometimes this offense is internalized by White folk at a level so intense that they would rather some Negro athlete prance and preen for some White high school, college, or professional athletic team, fucking White women the whole time, than see a Negro man or group of Negro men and women that don’t seem to need him. On one level they offend the spirit of White people (which is understandable if not inherently logical), on another level, these are dangerous Negros. For once an individual or a group decides to have its own ‘will’, therein lies the possibility that it has a dangerous and destructive will towards…its contemporaries, especially regarding a special level of historic trauma that almost necessitates a confrontation with the former slave master. White folk know deep down that even dogs never forget mistreatment. To think Negroes are less than dogs would be well…uncivilized.

That is why it is better to pay a man you believe could possibly end up being a future enemy, to do the stupidest shit possible with himself in order to entertain you and get himself used to eating at your hand. You should pay him to indulge his wildest fantasies, as long as his fantasies are an imitation, a product(ion) that you can provide…then you can sell the poor Negro athlete his fantasies and profit from his infantile distraction from the simply existential goal of ‘being himself’, and figuring out what that ‘self’ would be absent racism, absent extreme poverty, and absent feelings of inferiority. Furthermore, the White mainstream can make all the money it spent on the Negro athlete and entertainer back, because by marrying White women (and Latina/Asian) and they ultimately inherit whatever is left of these men’s ‘fortunes’ (Kobe). Kobe’s wife is a Catholic. Less than 10% of Negroes in America are Catholic. Be honest, Kobe’s wife sued her mother for the house Kobe bought her mother in reward for her mother providing trusted live in childcare, ain’t no way in hell Kobe’s wife has a list of HBCUs or inner-city Negro high schools that she donates to regularly with Kobe’s money. Any woman who would sue her own mother for Kobe’s money, we know damn well what she plans to do with Kobe’s money. No wonder she’d stayed with him after he strongarmed a White/Latina hotel worker…yes I said it. Not Gayle.

And yet there is another dangerous dimension to the proceedings I am describing. Rooted somewhere in the post-slavery Black consciousness is this subversive, insidious, incipient need…seemingly above food, shelter and water, for White approval. I’ve been tempted to suggest that it is the last, or one of the last chains in the links of the mental slavery that engulfed the Negro after he was ‘physically’ liberated, whether we define that ‘liberation’ as the Post-Civil War Reconstruction Era (Jim Crow Black Codes Segregation) era as distinguished from the chattel slavery we were in prior to the Civil War, or the Post-Civil Rights Era integration. The one link is White approval (philosophical or religious) and the other strand in the same link is the need to ‘prove’ to White people, by being integrated and ‘performing’ for them, that we are worthy and have value, as though their is no independent way or path that doesn’t involve them at all to demonstrate our ‘worth’ in the same global competition that all nations engage in. Those two strands represent the same link in what I believe probably is the remaining link or two in a mental slavery, that has survived two liberations; the post-Civil War era, and the post-Civil Rights era. I’d add a third liberation era, the so-called and quite often illusory ‘Black Power’ Era and as it were, “I’m Black and I’m proud” movements/eras of the 60’s. Even after these three ‘liberations’, Black people still haven’t truly been liberated. And I think to some extent the same last links in the chains of slavery for African America, descendants of Africa, in the Western Hemisphere, applies to North America, South America, and the Caribbean Africoid populations. To some extent we’ve all experienced those ‘liberations’ but yet today at this very moment we are not what we could be or should be. That is to say, politically, culturally, economically, religiously, etc. Wanting it, ‘White approval’ as a byproduct of excellence is fine; desiring it for the general reason of desiring to be respected and well-liked by all, fine. But ‘needing it’ and ‘craving it’; craving White approval and the accoutrements of White materialism as though without it Cynthia Enriva feels violated by fans and media that altered her picture is ridiculous, infantile and incredibly narcissistic.

Part II

One of the things we must consider is whether separate but equal is inherently true or untrue. The ethos of integration teaches that it is inherently untrue. And yet it was an argument made from a position of weakness and racism, internalized and externalized. What is the impact of the idea in Black culture, that absent being around White people, within White mainstream institutions, with some audible and practical version of White affirmation and reparation, the Negro is incapable of a definition of human ‘equality’ (self-esteem). That has been the dominant theme of Post-Civil Rights Era Black culture and the fount of all our politically aspirations. The goal is to be fully integrated in what ‘we’ perceive as a non-racist society; and this is why we celebrate the first nigga to do anything. We’re more excited about the possibility of the first nigga in space, or niggas in NASA, than we are about descendants of Africa having their own space program. We’re whacked out in excitement for the first Black male or female President of the United States of America, when the real miracle would be the first Black male or female president of a functional United States of Africa. It virtually condemns the Negro to inferiority status by default, to be preached to by his own and others that the only way they will make it is if others ‘help’ them and affirm them. In a nutshell, this is the problem with the entire argument of ‘separate but equal’. There are indeed ways for ‘separate to be equal’. Furthermore, if there was any doubt about racism, sexism, classism, etc., there is a way to avoid any doubt as to whether separate can be equal; standardized tests and measurement. The White man can call you, your schools, your teachers, and the shit you crap in the toilet at your Negro schools inferior to his, but when you beat them or are competitive in standardized and objective tests, you’re competitive in football and other sports, your Negro classical orchestra, jazz band & drama program, is competitive at the major national and international festivals and competitions, then the White man has no choice but to accept the fact that the Negro, the Asian, the Hispanic, the Arab whether he or she is separate or not is equal.

But we Blacks did the exact opposite during the 70’s and 80’s. Instead of reacting to White people in Boston and the Southern Dixie states violently opposed to school integration engineering and creating out of scratch private White schools to keep their kids from being around ours, by saying, you know what, our test scores are just as high, our athletics and arts programs are just as good, we don’t need to sit next to you, we begged and pleaded for integration. We chose integration (feelings and affirmation) at all costs, over test scores and objective measures. What is altogether worse, there was a school and train of liberal and post-Black Power thought, that suggested the ‘tests’ were inherently racist against Black people, even though people with English as a second language et al score well on tests. We made excuses for our children. Black people said the tests were racist! Standardized tests are inherently racist! And we don’t want no standardized ‘edumacation’ where you have to read White man shit like Shakespeare, Goethe, Voltaire, and Baudelaire, or listen to Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven to pass the test. The test is the damn thing that saves you from public assumed inferiority silly Negro. A test measure is a basic framework of what one knows, tests don’t measure the totality of what a person knows. For instance, reading Shakespeare doesn’t automatically preclude you from understanding it, or reading Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, or Harold Cruse. Knowing Igbo, Swahili, Zhosa, or Zulu does clearly does not preclude an individual from knowing enough standardized English to pass a White man’s test. Nigerians have education rates in America that rival Asian achievement. That is the same way these East Asian and Indian kids that come over here and ace the SAT did damn good on the English and reading section of the SAT, even though most of them are fluent in their native tongue. Clearly their native tongue didn’t stop them from excelling at the English. But here we niggas go trying to change the curriculum in urban schools such that we must be taught by Ebonics or creative teachers who rap math and scientific problems to the students, so that the little Negro children can ‘get it’. Absent competitive standardized test performance, any group that underperforms is damning themselves to implicit inferiority by negligence. This negligence takes place in two forms, diametrically opposed, but working in unison.

During segregation, for a group of Black teachers and staff in a Black school to find one or more Black students they think should take the White man’s tests and see how they fare, is a different approach to ‘integration’. This fictional segregated Black school, let us say Abbott Elementary, would naturally feel the need and the ability to be competitive, the measure of which are district wide (including White schools) competitions in various disciplines and activities. Identifying Black students that possess the mental capacity, emotional capacity, and family support (that is to say home training), to be competitive at the highest age-appropriate levels (as determined by standardized tests, not race) is of primal importance. Furthermore, creating and designing advanced courses of study for those students to ‘prepare’ them becomes paramount. Part of being competitive as a segregated Black school is to show that even though this school is segregated, we are producing students that take White mainstream tests and excel at the higher and highest categories possibly. The teachers and administration in Black school had an interest in these students. The school had an interest in these students. During segregation days, whether you thought a kid was acting White or not, and let’s be clear, during segregation, whether you acted White or not, segregation meant that you would be around your fellow Blacks. Plus, White acting or not, the li’l nigga went to the District Quiz Bowl and competed with White and Asian students and beat out many, to win a competitive prize. The school and the community take pride in that. And trust me, nerdy and acting White or not, little makes a boy more attractive to girls, than some kind of demonstrable success. If he was shy and had issues with girls before, a couple resounding victories or two, and he’ll find his way much easier.

The teachers and administration in Black schools thus had an interest in student’s success because when their students were competitive, it meant that the principal’s Administrative Ethos at the Black school was working. The Black teachers and staff he supervised were proud they were capable of educating and driving competitive students, that could compete at the highest district, regional, state and even national levels (all without the intervention, integration, affirmation, and philanthropy of a single White person). Segregated Black schools had to do this to prove they were good schools. They had to produce students that could compete. Now Black people make excuses for our children instead of investing the time into them it would take to actually help them be competitive to global (not just White mainstream) educational standards. In addition, seeing Black excellence at work, the nerdy kid at the all Black school that nearly scores a perfect score on the SAT, ACT, or GRE is no longer a nerd when he represents the school and the community in some sort of competition. Then the community takes pride in him or her, and his or her performance. Other Black students in his family and from his or her neighborhood would naturally be duly inspired to follow in his or her footsteps because of the impression of all the attention and reward it gets. Furthermore, they would know, that you don’t have to integrate some big White school or sit your Black ass next to White peoples in schools, to be competitive at the highest levels. It is not necessary. Is that not a fully functional and desirable definition of ‘separate but equal’, that is obviously benevolent to the Black community, but also a ‘blessing in disguise’ to White communities that tend to resent our participation. As a matter of fact, there would be more spaces for White boys on the football and basketball teams without White schools necessarily leveraging scholarships and the promise of White girls and fame to secure the talents of Black athletes. A corollary effect would be that it would create more integration as the success of Black schools convinces Whites and others that letting their children go to a majority Black school is not a death warrant or the equivalent of a ‘Ford Pinto’ quality education, when to be competitive you needed at least a ‘Buick’, if not a Cadillac and Mercedes education.

The predominant feeling during segregation was that for Black to ‘get there’ (as in White mainstream, Government, and Corporate) we had to pass the standardized test; not despise and despite them. That is the difference between Civil Rights era Black politics and contemporary Black liberal Democrat politics. Today it is assumed that if you are super-talented on the White man’s tests, you’d naturally go to White school, or whether you are super-talented or not, you deserve a ‘safe space’ in a White school (even if they have to bus you there and create a completely unnecessary layer of risk to the student). This goes for Black athletes as well. If you pass the White man’s physical and athletic tests and appear to be a ‘prospect’, he will sign you to a scholarship, knowing full well your SAT score was the bare minimum, and that you don’t give a shit about education. He doesn’t have you there to ‘educate’ you, just to use you for his glory until you go pro, or are hurt. The lure of big signing days, pay days, our Big Black brawny ‘manimals’, self-acknowledge and self-described ‘beasts’, ‘brutes’ and ‘stallions’, get paid, and get a harem of light skinned and/or White women and live happily ever after. I am reminded of the Ben Simmons case. His respect for academia, intellectualism, and the sciences and arts was so low, compared to his love for the fame and wealth that a professional basketball career could provide, that he went to college exactly 1.25 semesters. Perhaps the reader is wondering, how did Ben go to college a little over one semester, instead of it being said that he went two and then got drafted into the NBA. That is because Ben Simmons convinced himself that inasmuch as he was only at LSU to get drafted, there was little reason to go to class, other than the bare minimum it took to meet the minimum requirements of class attendance to enable him to play basketball. If ‘the rules’ didn’t force him to go to any classes, he had such little respect for his mind and his image as a role model for young Black boys around the world, that he would not have gone to any classes. He was there to play basketball and do as good as he could on the basketball court for LSU, and wait to be drafted into the NBA. Obviously, the collegiate basketball season begins in the winter and finishes with March Madness. If your team doesn’t make it to March Madness your season can end in February or even late January. Ladies and gentlemen Ben Simmons stopped going to class when the season was over, sometime in February. Keep in mind 2nd Semester is over the beginning of May. Ben Simmons didn’t even go through the motions of just sitting in class keeping his mouth shut to get a grade and have access to plentiful White girls. That is why his career is presently off track. He never valued the things it really takes to be ‘successful’ (as a human being), preferring to do what it took to get to the next level, and then when he finally got his dream in the pros, it wasn’t satisfying because his motives for getting to the pros in the first place were suspicious. They were suspicious in that they had nothing to do with love of the mind, or love of the game.

In the old segregation days, none of that was possible and it affected group cohesion. Shit, none of it was legal, let alone possible for young Black athletes or scholars. No matter how high you scored on the White man’s test, it was illegal for you to go to a White high school or college. So you scored a super high test score or dazzled them at the combine. Then you went right back to your all-Black high school, HBCU or Negro Professional league. Thusly surrounded by the kids from the neighborhood, the kids from your church, the kids from the projects, mulattos, and the kids from the Black bourgeois elite. Segregation trapped all Black people from all classes and categories with each other and as it were, forced us to have to work together and share common goals. The entire atmosphere was segregated. Your dentists, your lawyers, architects, teachers, if you wanted one at all, were Black. Later Jews provided an important exception but that is another story with its own set of complex positive and negative implications. But in the days of segregation, the children of Black lawyers, doctors, teachers, and other professionals lived in the same Negro communities and their children went to the same schools. Even if you could afford to send your child to a ‘better’ or simply a ‘White’ school, it was illegal for you to do so unless your child magically happened to be a type of mulatto that is light enough to pass. Black children rich and poor, talented tenths and bottom dwellers, went to the same school, knew each other and were in many regards united by the common problem of making your way in the world professionally and financially, amid the restrictive racism of the external White mainstream world.

In such a situation, I’m not sure there could be a ‘class division’ in Black people. For even if we self-segregated within all Black settings based on class/education level/financial; human nature and exposure has a way of trampling down walls. It wasn’t like it was possible for a Black person to say to him or herself, I want to go to a White doctor, it was illegal. The web of Black mutual reciprocal need was stronger than ‘divisions’. Even if a Black doctor harbored some internalized resentments against poor Black men, he would have still needed them to cut the grass, carry out the trash, etc., because of course, the idea of it being possible to hire a White man or company to do it wasn’t possible. When teachers and doctors live in the same communities, that is to say everybody not only knows where you live, but knows your children personally, there is a level of community cohesion that reduces the likelihood of malpractice, thievery, delinquency, and other forms of professional and socio-economic malfeasance. Obviously it can’t reduce incidences of crime and abuse completely. But compared to how violent and crime ridden our communities are now in post-modernity, comparatively speaking, I think we can argue rather persuasively that if we lived in the days of segregation, or those days somehow carried on into the present, I can almost guarantee you that living in the Black community would be safer than it is now and the schools would be better.

Which brings up another example that must be mentioned. During segregation, because top Black academic performers and high test scorers didn’t get ‘creamed off the top’ of the Black community and sent to White mainstream elementary and high schools, as well as White mainstream colleges, they stayed around and influenced the academic performance and standards at the Black schools they came from. Their mere presence, and the more high academic performers there is the stronger the presence, raises the performance of, and the standards of, the other students, no matter what their socio-economic station. Those corollary benefits of segregation and its impacts on Black students and schools as a whole are nearly incalculable. But quite often because of the romance of integration, we let our best and brightest Negro students get creamed off the top, where they often go to integrated settings that while nominally being ‘better schools’, quite often resent Black students at worst, or are ambivalent about Black students at best, and where socio-economic and cultural differences with their peers often lead to unpleasant academic experiences. But we celebrate integrators so much we’ll subject our children to getting cursed and yelled at, and the National Guard having to be called to keep a White mob from tearing them to pieces, all the while telling our children we are doing what is best for them. That is how the political and emotional idea of integration at all costs got so interwoven with post-Civil Rights era Black America. We’d send our children through the fires of Molech and sacrifice them, just to say they got something White, and by default anything White from schools, neighborhoods to minds, must automatically be better if they are White.

Part III

Great blessings can quite often bring out the worst in people. Perhaps we might imagine Black athletes prior to integration as being deprived compared to present day post-modern professional Black athletes. Let us ask a few more questions in closing to see if this is indeed the case. Is it that simple and obvious to argue that the present Black athlete is in ‘heaven’ compared to his segregation era counterpart. To say that Black male/female relations are in an odd state, that quite often manifests itself in opposition to one another is an unfortunate truism that has accompanied the Black community in the Post-Civil Rights era. It was like in exchange for integration, and the blessings it brought, we lost (sacrificed) group or Black community cohesion, as well as Black marital/familial and male/female relationship cohesion. For White women feminism and the post-feminist era was a tool, to shape her professional and personal relationship with her man (the White man). For post-feminist Black women, it has not only been a ‘tool’ but a weapon.

The idea of not needing men personally or even as a parent to a White woman is a threat to be leveraged against a man. To a Black woman it is far, far more than a threat, because when the ‘not needing of men’ transitions from threat, into the norm, the status quo, and connotative and denotative reality, it is weaponized. In this subliminal Cold War between Black men and women, Black men are just as complicit. There is no reason in the natural order, to categorically and culturally think it amusing to call women bitches, whores, tricks, chicken heads, freaks, prostitutes, gold diggers etc. That male driven masculine hip-hop defines itself by appropriating such denigrating terminology towards Black women, it is a sure sign of mass Black male psychosis, as is ‘normalizing’ children not needing their fathers, is a sure sign of mass Black female psychosis. It is psychotic because Black men and women persist in this behavior, completely aware of the damage it is doing to our children, and completely aware that no other race of people is in the habit carrying out such a destructive war between the sexes, even though some Muslim women, and Hindu women are dang near in a state of slavery. Even though nearly every socio-economic statistic and crime statistic known to humanity cites the damage parental and familial dysfunction can cause, Black men and women wage the war anyway, with the net effect being a kind of nuclear war of annihilation. This is because the one advantage mutual suicidal destruction has, even though it is psychotic, is that both sides are completely free to do it. Indeed, it is the freedom and power (or the illusion of it) that causes them to commit that act that causes mutually assured destruction in and of a family. ‘I don’t need you’, writ large. In individuals that are parents and thus quite precisely need each other to fulfill their financial and emotional responsibilities to their children, they destroy themselves pretending like they don’t need ‘the other’. Automatically reneging on their responsibility to their children, Black men are willing to pretend like their children don’t exist and don’t need them, and Black women are willing to pretend like they can ‘parent’ all by themselves, like ridiculous superwomen in garters and thongs, instead of tights and capes. These Black women’s children don’t need their fathers at all, not even bother to know them at all. Only, it must be #Blackgirlmagic or #Blackgirlpower that told Black women this because they certainly didn’t ask their children whether or not they feel like they needed a daddy. Just look at paternity court, and you will see grown men and women trying to figure out who their father is/was, largely with the idea that things would have been different or better had they at least known. Feminism and womanism pats Black women on the back and applauds such ridiculous notions and undertakings by Black women to of all the women in the world, be super women by not needing a man…at all! And Black women don’t even get suspicious that most of the educated White liberal women that are patting them on the back are married to men and their kids have fathers. That is the problem with liberalism in general. There is no reason to be absolutely free, and absolutely powerful, even over one’s own life, without proving how free and powerful you are by committing suicide by default or in some cases suicide by police. Black men and women are in a War of the Sexes Cold War, where the only thing assured is mutual destruction, but no side seems willing to de-weaponize. Even if it causes a cold bleak future for our children and descendants who must live with the consequences of the nuclear fallout in our families, like Black Chernobyl (site of a nuclear disaster) kids. The animals that have lived at Chernobyl suffer the effects of radiation, but some deal with it better than others, and reproduction is still happening. But still, every scientist knows and can tell that it is a dangerous place/way to live, and everyone living there for generations since the nuclear implosion of the Black nuclear family is completely contaminated in one way or the other by radiation, whether it shows or not. Let them that have ears, hear. And guess what, most of the mutations aren’t the things we read about in science fiction like two heads, or grossly exaggerated or grossly minimized bodily appendages, the damage is far more subtle than that, even imperceptible. Nope, after the fallout from the explosion forces released by the nuclear fission of the Black family, the kid didn’t go to jail, or flunk out of school, he or she just doesn’t know whether or not they want to be a man or woman when they grow up. At least your alive however after the fallout. Or no, the kid didn’t go through a sexual identity crisis, he or she went through a gang related identity crisis. Or no, the kid didn’t go through any of those crises, the kid is just wrapped up in a lifestyle of drugs, alcohol and the effects of drug and alcohol abuse in one’s family, professional and social life.

Into this chaos of convoluted values, the Black male athlete has been completely liberated from traditional economic, moral, cultural, and political standards of what constitutes Black poverty, as defined by the Black working class, and the Black bourgeois (the majority of Black people). Monetarily, they are an elite of Black people economically. What is the 1% for White people, becomes the 0.5% for Blacks. Furthermore, they are liberated from segregation by (economic) default, that is to say socio-economic segregation. Thus they have access to White neighborhoods, White women, and White elite material pleasures in a way the average Negro doesn’t. Furthermore, because after integration their athletic gifts enabled them to get into White High Schools, White Colleges, and then the economic elite, their pool of women was much wider than it would be in segregated circumstances. Their ‘tastes’ followed their circumstances, leading to a preference for the ‘White meat’ (if you will). This should not be looked at as inevitable or the result of moral or cultural imperfections. One tends to get used to the familiar, even if one despises it at first. Surviving on it, because of the lack of availability of the of ‘other’ (Black women/dark meat), begins to function therefore as a self-fulfilling curse. A man simple-minded enough to wear the same socks and underwear every game (unwashed), because they bring him athletic luck (prowess), is not that far above getting used to ‘White trim’ (to use Eddie Murphy’s classic phrase from the 48 Hours Movie Franchise). I am reminded how odd it looks/sounds/ and feels that prized Black athletes at the University of Georgia are driven around to strip clubs, Liquor stores, and impromptu drag races along downtown Athen, GA streets, by a coterie of young nubile White girls/young women devoted to the ‘task’. Of course, this situation is duplicated and intensified if the young Black athlete is ‘lucky’ enough to go pro. Then he will have groupies of all races, and it is his to choose his ‘delight’ from night to night like Solomon from the Bible or some Islamic emir from the age of Islamic conquest.

Inadvertently the post-modern Black athlete has become the fault line in the dysfunctional relationship in the family life of Black men and women in post-modern America. During an earthquake, the fault line(s), that is to say the crack in the earth, can open and run for miles, running through neighborhoods and even entire cities. The post-modern Black male professional athlete is the fault line in the ‘Cold War’ between the sexes, because just like one side of the earth (as it were) pulls away from the other, the Black male athlete and entertainer has a ‘wicked’ reputation and propensity for voting with his feet and choosing White women, Asian women, Latino women, and probably Arab women to if he could get his hands on enough of them, as opposed to Black women (traditionally defined). You know how ‘we’ feel ’bout that’ ‘pretty hair’. Who could blame Black men, Black women idolize all these women’s hair as better than their own, and to prove it they spend a small fortune on not only the regular purchase of it (Asian hair), they spend a small fortune ‘regularly’ getting a ‘trained’ or experience ‘professional’ (hairdresser/beauty shop) to install the hair upon their heads. God gave you some, but you buy it, even though it is the definition of an unnecessary expense, even a clear element of conspicuous consumption, purely for the sake of vanity and to be seen by others. This is even though everybody, and I mean everybody knows that’s not your hair, knows those are not your eyelashes, and knows those are not your fingernails. But you dear sister, think you are fooling somebody because they are too embarrassed by your shockingly low self-esteem, to tell you to your face and ‘joan’ you because of your low self-esteem.

So enamored are Black athletes (and many of Black men) of their post-segregation new toys (groupies of all races), and unfettered access to White women, that they will quite often rob Appalachia, the rural White deep country Southeast, and rural White America in general of its trailer parks most prized possessions; White women just as uneducated and uncultured as he is, parading around with each other like they both have a prize or treasure, when in actuality they both have trash, an illusion that is a projection of their low self-esteem, damn near the biblical definition of ‘the vanity of their own imaginations’…the fulfilling of the proverbial lipstick on a pig on both sides.

Have we even paused to wonder why Tiger Woods would date White Waffle House waitresses, after living a lifetime of never, ever, having been rumored to date a Black woman (that I know of)? Clearly it is not because his objective or subjective standards are so high. The only thing that could possibly cause such an oversight in his life (never dating Black women) is that he has apparently avoided them on purpose. He doesn’t even condescend to even make it look like he appreciates dating a Black woman even if she is a mulatto light enough to pass. Only ‘full White’ can get Tiger’s attention. Thus, it is not a coincidence that his ex-wife and baby mama was a former Swedish model; blond haired, blue eyed and all, the Whitest you can stereotypically get. Hitler’s version of White. This is the irony and paradox of the Negro athlete. In order to break the bonds of racism, he fulfills every racist trope he can fill for the White patriarchy which views him (the Black man) condescendingly and patronizingly, through a race-based lens of ‘noblese oblige’ where he must ‘take care of his darkies’.

ROUND I

For their part, Black women play out the War Between the Sexes in their own weaponized way. Black men and women are being challenged externally and challenging each other at the very roots of our self-esteem as members of different sexes within same race. The Black man’s behavior, appreciation and appetites reflect non-Afro beauty standards; something to be taken as an insult to Black women (and their mothers ergo themselves)….”Take that in the War against the sexes you Fat Black nappy headed bitch”!

Ah, but like a ridiculous game of the dozens or what we in Atlanta call ‘joaning’, Black women respond in kind. Nigga, you ain’t shit, you triffling, you lazy, you ignorant, you a liar, bad parent/role model, and we Black women outperform you in the White mainstream world academically and professionally. You’re a habitual felon, a danger to yourself, no good to anybody, not even your child, who I am taking away from you and letting some interchangeable nigga I met at the club two weeks ago move in and pretend like he’s your child’s daddy. Take that Nigga.

BOTH PARTIES KO EACH OTHER OR A TECHNICAL KNOCKOUT OR A ‘TIE BY DECISION OF THE WHITE MAN’ IN THE FIRST ROUND

In the internecine War Between the Sexes, we might have gotten each other told, but we certainly didn’t improve any damn thing about our relationships, our marriages, and most importantly our most precious resource our children. Niggas and Bitches certainly did express themselves didn’t they, both were free to say what they want, damn traditional roles of men protecting women, and women maintaining modesty. No patriarchy stood in the way of Stella getting her Groove Back or Glorilla and Meg tha Stallion twerking their way to the top. Everybody is doing precisely what they want to do, free as a bird, and the result is pure misery. Everybody is in therapy including our children, because of abandonment issues and dealing with the effects, affects and implications of broken Black male/female relationships. People are trolling the internet like animals in heat, playing with iPads, swiping back as forth and the computer sends them another head shot and profile of a potential mate’s profiles. Then we hook up, and think this level of sexual ‘freedom’ will bring happiness or fulfillment defined sexually or in terms of a viable relationship. We celebrate the lunacy of going to a club, entering a drunken pill induced haze and in such a state choosing someone to have sex without any protection. How is it we live in a society and culture that would celebrate such a thing, and normalize it as what partying is and means and the desired result of successful partying.

Who suffers but all these lonely unfulfilled Black men and women that can’t form meaningful relationships and partnerships that transcend the temporal; and children who suffer worse fates like underperformance in in academic settings. Furthermore these children are more susceptible to behavioral issues and self-esteem issues that nearly always result from childhood feelings (trauma) of feelings abandonment, inferiority, and weakness.

As we are incapable of valuing each other as Black men and women, by default we cannot be valuing Black families, and we become what we call each other, a nation of dead-beat dads, pimps, thugs, hustlers, etc., and bitches, whores, tramps, gold diggers, series baby mamas, and hens in projects like a chicken coop by populated roosters that come and go. The net effect of which is the cascading negative effects on all concerned parties of a series of baby daddies and mamas. Other races turn on the 6 o’clock news, paternity court, or daytime television, and see us embroiled in never-ending rounds of Black male/female familial psycho pathology, where it is treated as amusement and a joke, further trivializing ourselves in the eyes of the world. What is altogether worse, we think it entertaining as well. That’s why every two-bit ambulance chaser hustler and every two-bit for profit college or ‘training’ school puts its commercials on at that time….because there is a sucker born every minute, and when you meet suckers that insult their own fathers and mothers, and their own children’s fathers and mothers and by default, their own children on national television, you know indeed you are dealing with a foolish people that can get taken in by anything. It never fails or limits itself to one generation of familial trauma. It nearly always manifests itself intergenerationally. The (potential) baby daddy and baby mama might be youthful childbearing age presently, but it goes without saying that usually, at least two preceding generations were trapped in baby mama/baby daddy dysfunction as well…and you can see the seeds of dysfunction in the next generation the older the child in question is when they start to seek answers regarding their paternity. In other words, by the time they start trying to repair the damage in their own individual, and their children’s lives, they’ve already recreated the seedbed of the trauma in their children (the next generation).

In closing, there is one last element of this that adds insult to injury and further is symptomatic of our low self-esteem. The Black male athlete/entertainer doesn’t value Black women or Black families much at all, or the Black community because he certainly doesn’t live there, as it were surrounded by his people. He puts his money where his mouth is, he shows his values precisely and shows by voting with his feet what he values in life, like Jesus said so very eloquently, where a man’s treasure is, there his heart is also. Do not take my word for it, look at how they represent themselves. Post-Modern Black athletes are some of the most money grubbing, luxury loving, jewelry loving, car loving, trinket & technology loving, people in the world. Rappers I’ve never heard of own collections of exotic cars worth being on White folks’ television shows. Young Thug himself, who as I type is within a day or two or release under the terms of his probation lived in Buckhead. It was because Young Thug wanted to live the good life, and to live the good life one must be surrounded by White people. So Young Thug led a life of luxury in Buckhead, while he did his dirt in the Black community with us as the victims, not his White Buckhead neighbors. Kanye West has platinum teeth, his nigger teeth weren’t good enough I suppose. So he got the white man to make him some platinum teeth, and then he complains how the White man and the Jewish man who sell him gold and platinum teeth, cars and other luxuries, are somehow using him. This is as though some White or Jewish dude forced Kanye to marry a whore out of low self-esteem, and to make terrible financial, intellectual, and theological decisions.

Mike Tyson had a lion or tiger at one point in the arc of his financial life…that is, until he could no longer afford to have an exotic pet because he had gone broke because of a pattern of extravagant living, for which possessing a ‘Liger’ was just one in a series of bad decisions. Majoring in living expressly designed as conspicuous consumption is important to Black men, especially the poorer they were in their lives growing up. When I was in seminary, there was a guy there that used to come to class every day with a Steve Harvey style suit on. I shared a Pastoral Care and Counseling Class with him, and one class period he shared the story of why he wore a suit every day to class. When he grew up, his family was poor and he had older brothers, and sisters. The brother’s clothes would be passed down to him, and thus they would either never fit, never be in style or be nearly worn out by the time he got them. Needless to say, children being children, his peers picked on him for his worn-out clothes and shoes. At some point in his early life, probably middle school age, he made a decision that if he ever got the money, he’d wear a nice suit every day, no matter what the occasion. So much so was this the case that he wore suits and dress shoes to class every day and I don’t remember ever seeing him dressed down or in jeans or slacks.

Far be it from me to assume the behavior is always pathological, for we are all creatures of habit; and yet it is a credible argument to suggest that compensating, and overcompensating, and renouncing, and over renouncing (swearing off like a curse upon oneself) is the same thing as a pathological habit. To continue, Black culture is like cauldron of human beings who happen to be Black (for they could be any other race) overcompensating because of perceived and real trauma. Because of historical reasons, Black people, descendants of Africa, Sons and Daughters of Ham, don’t have self-esteem by tradition means like breeding-aristocracy, education, facility in foreign languages and cultural refinement, high levels of professional development, or artistic talent in an established discipline. So our parvenu, Neveaux riche athletes and entertainers get the self-esteem the only way they can…purchasing it from the White man in the form of houses in White neighborhoods, cars White people build, stocks White people pump and dump, jewelry White folk make (but niggers in Africa in abject poverty quite often dig up), and vacations in places White people told them were exotic, when we niggas came from the definition of an exotic location. White folk make you pay for your own ignorance.

And that my beloved brothers and sisters, Sons and Daughters of Ham is the primary reason for our current failure as a people, not just descendants of Africa in the Americas. Africans are just as deluded and fascinated by the Babylon the Harlot style materialism of the White mainstream world and plentiful access to White women. I am noticing now how many Africans have come up in boxing, MMA, Soccer, and Cricket; and looking at much of their behavior, reminds us very much of the American Negro post-integration.

CONCLUSION

After all that, no, I am not suggesting legalized segregation was a boon to Black people. Neither am I saying integration didn’t have benefits for Black individuals and communities that were perhaps impossible by any other means. I asked the preceding questions, made the arguments, and raised the issues to highlight the complexity of the problem for Black people in Post-Modern America. Things are not always as they seem, nor are the reasons for things as cut and dry as they appear to be, or as our Negro politicians, academics, BLM, or our aging decrepit Civil Rights era leaders and influencers suggest they are. Let us be perfectly clear here. One of the worst episodes in Black American life was the era of the Booker T. Washington v. W E B Dubois debates. The truth of the matter is that Black people needed BOTH strategies. Booker T was right, we need to do what we can with the skills and talents that are around us and at hand, think in practical terms, and maybe not put all our eggs into the basket of integration. That is to say, create working class and petty bourgeois terms and strategies about what ‘development’ and socio-economic and political ‘progress’ look like (independent of the White mainstream and White mainstream institutions). It’s important to keep in mind that creating Black development independent of White affirmation, assistance, financing, sympathy, reparations, set asides, etc., does not mean being antithetical to White interests or opposing White interests or framing things like it’s us against the world. As a matter of fact, proper Negro economic development would reduce the White public perception of the downsides of affirmative action, like unqualified DEI hires, and the perception that Blacks are getting jobs ahead of perhaps more qualified and talented White people, etc. and reduce racially based political tensions in America exponentially.

At the same time, guess what, W E B Dubois was correct too! We need to strategize legally and structurally about gaining access to White mainstream resources through litigation, moral persuasion, philosophy, non-violent religious ethics, and integratory attitudes and strategies. WEB and Booker T were both right. The time they spent arguing and wasting Black people’s time thinking it was an either/or choice was one of the most destructive episodes in Black politics. It made no sense. There is nothing mutually exclusive about either tactic. For that matter, it is quite possible to have NOI Nationalist type attitudes and beliefs operating right alongside integratory opinions and strategies in the Black community. It is a level of intellectual nuance most of our current leaders are incapable of, but nonetheless it is possible. Thus the choice is an issue of temperament, not a moral dilemma.

Just as traditional ‘Black nationalists’ (such as the NOI) were ‘wrong’ in arguing literal and legal separation (at all costs) from Whites and White mainstream culture, integrationists (at all costs) were wrong to think that the mere optics of integration and inclusion, necessarily affect marginalized groups positively, and in a way that is automatically better than what they had before, when they weren’t integrated or affirmed. And that goes for ALL marginalized groups, no matter what the ideology.

For instance, I am sure that the LGBTQIA+ community loves the fact that they can hug and kiss in public and have their relationships affirmed and taken seriously in courts of law and general American society. And yet, the bar and grill where the Stonewall riots happened in 70’s, and the surrounding gay scene and community, has a special place in the hearts of the LGBTQIA+ community quite precisely because when it wasn’t ‘popular’, ‘hip’, ‘politically or socially acceptable’, or ‘mainstream’ to be gay, in public or in community, they (the Stonewall Community) did so as an insular community and network. At that time the movement wasn’t so much about acceptance and affirmation, as much as it was about looking to just be left alone and not harassed for being gay, and the freedom to build and exist in their communities freely.

African Americans face a similar dilemma. The parallel fits even further. Post-Modern American society is inclusive, that is to say White mainstream society is inclusive. But the way it uses gay people; the way it personifies and commodifies gay people is a stereotype and caricature of homosexuality. In essence, in exchange for ‘acceptance’, ‘toleration’, and even ‘affirmation’, the price is you must amuse the mainstream, make them laugh, you must be amusement. Hence the Black athlete, ‘the beast’, the ‘stallion’, with an athletic prowess that makes research scientists question whether or not Negroes have a genetic advantage in sports (the old White men can’t jump question), even though the Europeans and other international players are increasingly able to dominate their Negro counterparts in the NBA. No one wonders any more if like Jimmy the Greek assumed some 25 or 30 years ago whether or not Black Americans had a sports genetic advantage because of slavery. The success of athletes from Africa and other places in the world, have destroyed the myth of Negro physical superiority. And yet the stereotypes of the ignorant bestial Black athlete that cannot control himself around White women, and the Black athlete dumb enough to ‘drop’ (spend) $50,000 at the Gucci store and be proud enough to tell people, still continues unabated, and apparently post-modern Negro Athletes are in no rush to disabuse White America and the world of those stereotypes and myths.

Black psychologist Frances Cress Welsing does an interesting ‘take’ on the psychology of the Black man, athletics/sports in America, and (to use a phrase), the interests of White power and White supremacy. Generally speaking, according to Cress-Welsing, the ‘interests’ of White power and White supremacy revolve around and is rooted around White fear of the genetic superiority of Black DNA when it comes in contact with the DNA of other races. Her theories of genetics aren’t the point here. For Cress-Welsing this goes way back to slavery and segregation, and laws against miscegenation. In her theoretical structure, Whites must subordinate and control Black men (By any means necessary). This is done using White mainstream institutional forces such as the Prison System, and creaming the smartest young Blacks right off the top of the Black community and raising them early and often in integrated settings where implied racists stereotypes are the norm. They are thus alienated from the Black community and loyal in an inordinate and unqualified (a priori) way to what they perceive as the superiority of White mainstream culture and leadership. Note that this is ‘carrot and stick’ approach to managing Black men. When we niggas get out a line, and we have no talent academically, athletically or in entertaining and amusing the White man, we get the stick. If we can run that ball, shoot that ball, pass that ball, or sing and dance, act, and shuck and jive for White they will pay us royally to entertain them and make sport for them. I’ve never heard tell of a White man or group of White men deciding to pay the smartest Negro(s) they can find to come up with development strategies to improve the Black community. Nope, but they will pay Lebron James a salary higher than the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of some small countries to dribble a ball. They will not pay a group of intelligent Black people to do anything, but they will pay Kevin Hart, Michael Strahan, Shaq, and other already famously wealthy Negroes to continue being fabulous and entertaining them; and be a role model to younger generations of Blacks in believing that the best job in the world is entertaining and amusing White people. Fuck school.

Being paid to entertain somebody is not a crime or necessarily an exploitive relationship. Being paid royally to entertain your former slave master (even after 55 years after integration and 160 years or so since slavery in the old south), should arouse some suspicions however, especially when instead of paying you for your intellectual, business, or organizational achievements, your former slave master pays you to play games and carry on amusements for him. Look at the crowds at public professional sports arenas, it is nearly always mostly White, and truth be told, these days only the well to do and wealthy can afford to watch our niggers run up and down the court dunking and swinging from the rim like trained monkeys courtside or in the best seats. Not too many kids from the projects that produced some of our most talented athletes has a practical chance to watch his favorite athlete at the local area because the best seats for the best games are priced well higher than thousands of dollars.

That being said, in honor of Dr. Frances Cress Welsing and Dr. Amos Wilson, pioneering Black psychologists working with the issues surrounding how White racism in general, and the qualitative and quantitative natures of our ‘traumas’ in the Americas, has affected the psychology of Black people. Some Black academics and intellectuals feel that their work can be qualified (if not dismissed), as just another way of blaming White people and White culture for all Black people’s problems. And yet, their basic premise must be true at some level. It would be difficult to believe that 1) the past 500 years of American history had absolutely no specific effect(s) on the psychology of over 25 generations Black Americans, and what is altogether worse 2) that White mainstream secular ‘therapy’ can automatically help Black people deal with some of those issues, when it has not even acknowledged the possibility that the slavery, Jim Crow and Civil Rights experiences, have shaped how Black people think about themselves, and look at the world around them. Don’t get me wrong, Dr. Cress Welsing and Dr. Amos Wilson were trained in what is for all intents and purposes European and western psychological techniques and traditions and never hid the fact. They were different because they tried to apply those techniques to the unique pathologies of Black people and the Black community, quite unlike the endless psychology majors Negritude is spewing out from White and Black Colleges and Universities like projectile vomit, whose purpose in life seems to be to get a good job working for a White mainstream therapeutic organization, and not rocking the boat with too much (for lack of a better phrase) ‘nigga shit’ like a critique of Negro psychology. A practical Critique of Negro Psychology, marketed and sold to Black people, would be a great book for some Negro trained in psychology to do, but they will not do it, quite precisely because no White man is paying them to do it. While we are on the subject of Black authors that have delved into the subject, mention must also be made of Harry Edwards.

Dr. Edwards has a PHD from Cornell University and has written books and lectured extensively on the experiences and concerns of the Negro athlete during segregation and after integration and the rise of Commercial Professional Athletics in White mainstream America. He describes the commodification of the athlete who is literally the mascot of a city (like an animal), as his image and likeness is cast by Mattel into some action figure toy. He also has documented how the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement affected Black athletics. This essay is long enough however, and we must move forward in closing this momentous work. This last section is a tribute to the work of Dr. Frances Cress Welsing and Dr. Amos Wilson; beacons in my intellectual development, not because I always agreed with them, but because it was so interesting, so much fun, and so stimulating to my own nascent psychological aspirations. I was encouraged and motivated to take a more critical look at Black culture, to decode what underlies how African Americans think (which by default must at least be similar to how other historically oppressed minorities ‘think’ in some regards through the Lifecyle of their oppression and its transformation into self-reliance). From that, relatively objective criteria for analysis can be generated. There must be ways and means, psychological and sociological terms of analysis, concepts, and theories that would benefit Negritude. The current situation of ignoring Black psychology unless it becomes criminal pathology or has criminal pathological implications is neither useful nor helpful. It is like saying the 6 o’clock news is a crime deterrent, because theoretically, no sane person wants to see him or herself on the 6 o’clock news for committing some crime. And yet we know damn well, the 6 o’clock news is no crime deterrent, and may unfortunately be encouraging the criminal behaviors it claims to be reporting, in order to highlight the problem for politicians and bureaucrats to fix.

I’d also like to give mention to Dr. Umar Johnson, Naim Akbar, and there are others who have given much thought to the subject of Black psychology and its implications about our historical and current quality of life as a people in America. As for Dr. Umar, he is unique in that however much I ever agree with him, there are certain aspects of his appeal, character, and critiques that I find unnecessary and inordinately messy. That being said, I think there is much value to the insights and attitudes he and younger generations of Pan-African style psychologists, counselors, and thinkers offers.

In tribute to Cress Welsing and Amos Wilson I offer the following reflection. Let’s talk about my imitation of the Frances Cress Welsing style examination of sports as a function of ‘White Supremacy’ (as it were). Let’s begin by extrapolating some basic facts. (1) The White man will pay Negro men exceptionally well to gain proficiency with his (the White man’s) balls (EVERY pun intended). I say his (the White man’s) balls because (2) last time I checked, basketball, football, and soccer as we know them today were invented by White people (notwithstanding historical antecedents). (3) White people also ‘invented’ the balls that these sports are played with, and White people (for all official intents and purposes) are the sole manufacturers and distributors of these balls. Thus, I am not wrong in surmising that indeed, these are the White man’s balls. If I designed them, I made them, and I supplied them, would they not be my balls. Ergo, wow, White men pay Black men a lot of money to gain proficiency with their balls.

We find the Black man being paid handsomely (every pun intended), to play with the White man’s balls. At one moment, the Black man is shooting the White man’s balls in hoops, the next running with the White man’s balls to score touchdowns and points, and the next kicking the White man’s balls into nets. The whole sports enterprise, magically and coincidentally, revolves around niggers playing with the White man’s balls, and the fact that the White man will pay you handsomely to play with his balls. We don’t need to have a seance to channel Dr. Frances Cress Welsing to know immediately that something in this proposition and trend smells funny.

Hundreds of thousands, nay even millions of young Black boys in inner cities and rural areas all over America are practicing with the White man’s balls, learning dexterity, fluidity and skill with the White man’s balls. It is a life-or-death matter, because the poverty in their lives can be so crushing, and the other opportunities for a better life like education, seem so distant and unattainable. The White man’s balls are not only the way to a better life, but it could also possibly make you rich beyond your wildest imagination little Black boy, if you are really good at playing with the White man’s balls.

If you can kick his balls with precision, shoot his balls with skill, pass his balls, juggle his balls, like Steph Curry dribbling the White man’s balls between his legs, one hand, two hand, behind the back! Before every game Steph warms up by playing with the White man’s balls. What a beautiful dream for little Black boys to have. I can grow up and get paid to play with the White man’s balls. No, like Ben Simmons, I don’t give a shit about education or putting knowledge in my head, the only thing my nigga life depends upon is how well I play with the White man’s balls.

…or entertaining the White man, singing and dancing, shucking and jiving for him, rapping for him. Sing me them old songs of Zion like Mahalia Black woman, or twerk for the White man you pick. Or rap me one of those songs about the inner cities and projects, the violence, the prostitutes, the bitches, the whores, the pimps, thugs, hustlers, broken families and utter dysfunction. Yes little Negro boy, we will pay you well to do that, but we’d never pay you to create ‘Zion’ (actually be religious) or fix the inner-city projects.