We are in dark times. The coronavirus pandemic. Police brutality. Riots. The Trump Presidency. We have stay at home orders. Unemployment is at an all time high. There are a lot of reasons to feel scared. The future feels uncertain. I want to look at this from a different angle. I want to offer reasons for hope.
The riots are a good sign. It means people are upset at a system that was already failing. It’s been long overdue for America’s racist institutions to revolutionize. That was a good step.
Now is the time for every American to recognize his or her own power. It’s one person, one vote. As terrible as his presidency has been, every American should be voting Trump out of office in November. That won’t happen. We won’t get everyone, but we can still win.
Also, we need to participate more in local elections. That is where a lot of the legislative and judicial battles are won. That’s where we can win the fight against police brutality and racist institutions as a whole.
As Blacks, we need to take our culture back. A lot of our music, movies and TV are stereotypical, offensive and harmful, especially mainstream rap music. That is not entirely our doing. A lot of times, the powers that be force entertainers to make a certain type of film, show or music out of their own racist agenda, which cannot be separate from the larger mechanism as a whole. But, we’ve got our own movie studios and record labels now. Artists have more freedom. We just need to recognize it and stop supporting trashy entertainment.
We need to improve education. Schools in the inner city are a travesty. We can fix that. Either we can give them more state funding or we can rezone schooling districts to distribute wealth more fairly or come up with a more even way to distribute money to schools than through property taxes. And curriculums have to change. We can no longer teach Black students their history starts as slaves. Don’t leave out the part where we were kings and queens in Africa. Again, a lot of this depends on voting. We need to support candidates with these platforms. A lot of independent charter schools are popping up. Let’s keep that up.
And, finally, we need to get wealthy. Studies have shown that the biggest factor which determines someone’s wealth in life is the wealth of their parents. White people got a major head start, no doubt. We weren’t even allowed to own anything. In fact, we were considered property. But, it’s 2020 now. There are wealthy Blacks out here who aren’t celebrities and they walk among us, hiding in plain sight. We should learn from them. Google is our friend. A lot of wealthy Blacks have blogs and YouTube channels teaching us how to do what they did. We should network within our community and take care of our own. Black Wall Street happened because O.W. Gurley bought the land in Tulsa and would only sell it to Black people. He was a free thinker, enterprising and proactive. In 2020, that’s the type of attitude we need. And, we need to stay strapped, in case racist Whites want to bomb us again.
Boss Review 