Some concluding thoughts now that Black History Month has come and gone.

Last week a beautiful young lady caught up with me in MugShotz and told me that she was so happy that I did not have any allegiances with people here in the area.

Her point was that I was free to write whatever I wanted, without fear of upsetting any of my friends.

She is correct.

I could name my friends on one hand and still have fingers left over.

The main reason that I don’t socialize much is because I can only endure but so much hypocrisy, and the world has become exactly that in my view, a big ball of hypocrisy.

If you know anything about me at all then you know I’m nobody’s choirboy.

I never try to put on airs that I am someone ‘better’ or ‘smarter’ than anyone else, I just try to pay attention to what many people ignore and write about it.

My travels across the globe as well as my life experiences, good and bad, help give me the perspective I have now.

I share most of my fondest memories about the world not with the people in the world who are considered the elite or upper echelon, but rather with my brothers and sisters in the ‘hood’ who have not had the benefit of good leadership since the late 1960’s.

I have been to the ‘hood’ on four different continents and guess what, the hood is the hood no matter what country that you live in.

You see many, (I wanted to say most), black people who took advantage of the works of frontline soldiers like Dr. King, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Shirley Chisholm and others like them, began tasting the sweet nectar of the American Dream and forgot about the struggle in the ghettoes.

Many of the leaders we have in front of us today are people who stood in the background while their brethren were in the faces of their oppressors insisting on change, dying for freedom.

If they didn’t forget about the struggle altogether then they began categorizing the people who were on the low end of the totem pole as

a lost generation, or just discounted them altogether.

Which is why they have no chance whatsoever of reaching today’s youth.

Once the kids in the ghetto feel as though you have elevated yourself above them, they no longer want anything to do with you; no matter how many programs or seminars you host, they will not change their viewpoint of society.

They might not say it to your face because of course it has been suggested to them that they might want to respect their elders, but the disconnect between the haves and have-nots as well as black youth and black adults in this country has never been greater.

Basically, black children look at the generations that preceded them and they conclude that all we did was get into bed with our enemies.

A 17 year old high school student in Fayetteville told me last week that when he studied American history what jumped out at him was the way black people stopped fighting for what was theirs and decided to just go along with what white people thought was the right thing.

The young man said he didn’t understand how black people got so deep into church and other aspects of American society when it was this same culture that was responsible for their enslavement to begin with.

Whoa! This was a just a kid playing hoops at the local recreation center.

From the mouths of babes huh?

You see the war that blacks must fight right now is more internal than external.

We first have to redefine what it is to be black in America, then lose stupid descriptive terms such as African-American, ridiculous concepts like Kwanzaa and vehicles for our perpetual demise such as Black Entertainment Television (which has not been owned by anyone black since 1999).

Africans did not name their own continent Africa and the natives of this country did not name it America, so when you claim that term African American, you are claiming two names given to groups of people by Europeans.

Kwanzaa is just flat out ludicrous from every conceivable vantage point, and trust me, if there was

a station called White Entertainment Television, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would be picketing them right now.

The reason we have lost the youth is because we lost our culture, our history, our names, our religion and obviously our minds.

We will never recapture the youth until we can show them the same passion, courage and willingness to wage war against every facet of society that contributes to their struggle.

February is not enough time to accomplish even a smidgen of that effort, and in my opinion makes the concept of Black History no more relevant than ‘affirmative action’ when it comes to sheer effectiveness.

As long as today’s youth feel that we are &uot;sleeping with the enemy&uot; then expect them to not only continue to rebel, but to get more organized and passionate about their rebellion.

Just like some of you used to do.