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Man, my obsessive compulsive side is showing.

I’m looking at my blog and I am examining what posts I have up and there is a lot of racial stuff going on here. I’m not sure if it is subconscious or not but processing the issues of black and in particular black men has been growing on me for quite some time.

The post I have below “Black Pathologies and Unemployment” I think really made me focus on the issues of black men a bit more than normal.
My gut feelings are still the same. Black men are an endangered species, we have a very bleak future ahead and I frankly don’t think there is a damn thing we can do about it.

I had to first process and think about all of the positive black male role models in my life and unfortunately there are way too few. My grandfather Deacon H, was a strong pillar in the community, one of the founding fathers of a church, pretty successful in his work life before he passed, raised a decent family, and was the first black man I remember
being addressed as sir by white men.   I loved and honored him, and
still do.

My father, though crazy now that he is older, was a successful business man, had a successful work life, was a strong presence, and was a flawed but decent dude.

My two brothers are strong family role models for their children, have good work ethics, and are good decent people. My middle brother is former Navy and my older brother is a Minister.

I also had to process my black male friends and the quality of those individuals.

Many of my best friendships were from my Air Force days.  Tim, Vic, Bobby, Wayne, Fred and a host of others all are doing well, have great kids who are on the straight and narrow, good fathers and simply good people.

I continue to process about this and it never occurred to me before now that I NEVER had a black male teacher and only six black teachers during my entire K-12 days.  Keep in mind I was born in Los Angeles, raised in Oaktown and finished school in Alabama. Surely I should have had a few black male teachers in all that time?!  There was one black assistant coach in Baseball, but that was it.

During my military days, I did have a black male drill sergeant that I greatly respected and a black male commanding officer during tech school.

After my military days my first civilian boss was a black woman to whom I owe quite of bit of my success to, but no significant black men as co-workers or community acquaintances.

I served on countless boards and community bodies and I was the only black male on all but one, the school desegregation committee.

The community I live in you can go an entire week and not see any black people, not counting my female co-worker.

I once bitched and moaned that you could not find any black folks working in the community and since then Best Buy has hired a few black folks and a couple of restaurants have a couple of black women employed.

While thinking about this post for the hell of it I turned on the TV and scanned through all the cable channels available to me to see how many black men I see. The results only further depressed me.

Out of 90 of so channels the only example of black men were:

• A McDonalds commercial where this black dude get a McDonalds gift card.
  I saw this commercial 3 times!
• A Moesha commercial, a bunch of takes of folks acting silly.  This show did win several image awards but if you judge it by the commercial it looks like simple silly Negro buffoonery.
• Sports center - Negro athletes.
• Spin City - The gay black dude.
• The Wayans Brothers, I kinda like the show but more Negro buffoonery.
• Maury, but thank God he had white trash on his show at the time I peeped and the black men were bodyguards.

Thank God for Grey’s Anatomy, ER, and the CSI’s decent black dudes not being portrayed as gang banging, gold “toofus” buffoons’.

I’m 43 years old and I see immense societal canyon black men have been placed partly because of our history, partly because of racism, and some at our own hands and minds.

Below is a post “Are Black Men Retarded” that highlights some of our own failings.
I’m thinking the young black men today are screwed and I’m not sure there is a damn thing we can do about it.

If I had the money and the media access maybe I could attempt to make a dent.

But who am I, this issue must not be that important otherwise there would be far more black media types (Oprah), Black actors, politicians and businessmen dealing with the issue. 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 19th, 2006 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Blacks, Liberal Education.
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