My name is Sabrina. I am learning Swahili. I understand English very well. Thank you for stopping by!
What is my blog about? This blog will be about my various musings on subjects that catch my fancy. The majority of the time I will write in English although I intend to incorporate more Swahili as my grip on the language improves.
"Before accepting anything, ask yourself “Does it make me or my children stronger?” If the answer is “No” then reject it.
If the answer is “Yes” then embrace it."
If the answer is “Yes” then embrace it."
I came across this while on a website that discussed homeschooling and teaching Afrocentric children. I thought this was an interesting point that should be taught to our young black women of today (early 20s) and older. A more apt question that should be applied to the overall Black community would be to ask "Does it make me or my community stronger?" We are living in a world dominated by the "me" concept rather than the "we" concept. The "I" society is what I will refer to it as from this point forward as Bob Marley so eloquently put it.
It is increasingly important that we get back to the unity in community. While over the years I had grown cynical about the plight of the Black community, I'm observing more and more that the Black community in America isn't as disjointed as I had previously thought. TuPac once said, "we used to be a close knit community, now we're just close strangers" and that assessment still holds true. I've been guilty of slapping on the label of "no hope" in certain situations. The first true argument that my husband and I ever had was when we were dating. He was gung ho on reforming and uniting Black folk. Now he's from another state while I hailed from South Carolina. I was in my early 20s and he was in his late thirties. I told him plain and simple, "you can't save every black person." This assessment came from dealing with the Black people of good ole SC as I hadn't lived anywhere else to be more positive about it. I told him to stop wasting time. Boy did he get mad! Now I hadn't gotten into studying the "why" behind why Black people are the way they are but I was right on the money with my observations none the less. I have grown more over the years and here is what I think about the situation now.
We are communicative among one another but from a more negative than positive perspective. When I lived in a black community, my major complaint was that minding my own business was met with hostility. I take the approach of "I'm not bothering you, don't bother me" and "hello, how are you, goodbye." For whatever reason, my neighbors took this wrong and seemed intent on bothering me and harassing me, even though they knew the contact was uncalled for and unwanted simply to get a rise. It is an innate part of us that desires to be sociable. I possess it also, although over the years being in a far more urban environment than the one I grew up in, I have become less so for the sake of safety. This is why I limit speaking to those outside of my immediate family circle.
I had this same approach when I was growing up also because I was teased a lot. This was met with hostility also and claims that I thought I was better and remarks of "who does she think she is?" and things of that nature. It was interesting (and annoying) to be an adult and still be among those adults who possess that childlike immaturity still. It has been diagnosed over the years most familiarly as the "crabs in the bucket" syndrome. When one tries to get up and out the others grab him/her and pull them back down. When I was living in my apartment in the Black community alone raising my children I didn't have many problems. As soon as my fiance (later husband) moved in is when all hell broke loose. Most of the women in the complex were single and raising children and I now possessed something they didn't have. My "do unto others" attitude was taken out of context and a mentality was attributed to me that did not exist anywhere but in their convoluted minds. Likewise when in school I was considered smart and talented. Concepts and such came to me easily (still do) and I rarely struggled with my studies so I was henceforth targeted by my peers to their hostility and abuse at what they perceived they couldn't do and that some how I was "flaunting" my own abilities in their face. I, in turn, wanted to be left alone, in peace. I wasn't spared this from family members either and had to deal with a lot of lost opportunities because of my little say as a child then.
Now that I'm older I have read more and have done more research into the why behind the prevalent negative communication within the Black community. We didn't leave Africa that way. Our collective minds were molded by the enslavement process and those attitudes became so deeply engraved within our psyches that even without the physical enslavement, we as a whole still remain mentally and psychologically enslaved to the point of madness. The sad thing is most will never realize it. It isn't something I elect to lose sleep over. Marcus Garvey wrote in response to claims that he wanted to take all Africans throughout the diaspora back to Africa, "We do not want all the Negroes in Africa. Some are no good here, and naturally will be no good there." No sense in trying to save them all. The first thing that people need to change before all else is their mind. We can tell young black women all day to think about making themselves and their offspring/generations stronger but until they make up their mind to do so, they will lapse back into whatever frame of thought they possessed beforehand. We can't make up their mind, we can only plant the seed.
