Whats Wrong With These Niggas?

I tend to have a critical eye.  I like making little observations about people and places but there is one group of people that always confuses me.  The young black generation sometimes bothers me with their styles, their music and their acceptance of Chris Brown makes me ask “What the hell is wrong with these niggas?”

In my ongoing exploration of the issue, I’ve come up with only a few things. 

1:  The struggle has been lost

If you ask kids today what blackness is, they’d say crazy things like “We don’t have to pull our pants up” or, “We make all the good twerk videos.”  This is what happens when you let Disney and Viacom define culture.  Minority cultures get completely ignored and children are left to come up with their own answers.  Children, being children, always find the dumbest answers.  Most of it is my generation’s fault.  We didn’t really hold the mantle of responsibility very well.  We didn’t produce 2chainz or Trinidad James but Flavor Flav is all ours.  Come to think of it, even though we came up with some great entertainers, we didn’t produce any real leaders.  We just adopted the older generation’s and honestly, the era of marching our way to equality fizzled out way too long ago and we never really came up with another strategy.  There’s no wonder today’s youth measure their blackness in terms of “swag”.

2:  It’s getting good out there

We have a Black President, BET has competition with 2 new networks (Bounce TV and TV One) and the new black middle class has firmly seated itself in the American fabric. Their offspring are being left with nothing to struggle against but the umm, well, nothing.  Trayvon Martin’s death gave them a media fueled rallying point but as the media forgets, so does its sheep.  With no gangs, no crack epidemic and with their parents even removed from the black power movement, the black youth have nothing to identify themselves with accept the browner version of white angst.  Part of me applauds the progress that Black kids and White kids can now join in their pointless consumerism and rebellious backlash.  Another part of me really wished that we would do something better than just integrate into mainstream culture’s hollow pursuits.  Is that what the struggle was for???

3:  Black Hollywood, the joke’s on us

I was blessed to be young before Tyler Perry’s distorted view of blackness took the masses by storm.  I shudder what would have happened if I was young enough to take those caricatures as my future.  The rest of Black Hollywood isn’t much better.  The only good movies about Black people are still based in slavery.  There is no real effort to explore modern blackness.  All of the characters now are just white personalities played by black actors.  Again, I applaud with one hand but cover my face with the other.

4:  The disconnect

Lastly, I would be remiss not to acknowledge the fact that the Hip-Hop generation let this mess happen on our watch.  We not only failed to tell the youth that it isn’t cool for men to wear pants that they have to oil up to get into, but simpler things like rap music should actually have rhyming lyrics.  We let these kids come up with their own thing all the while forgetting one little thing: Young people are stupid.  That, in essence, is the root of the problem.  We let stupidity flourish in the name of creativity and that shit just ain’t working.  If we are to steer the youth in the right direction, we have to remember that the fight against stupidity is a battle that we are all in and we can’t expect anyone to be a soldier without first giving them the proper training.