I'm Just Trying To Make It Easier

My baby brother is probably really pissed at me right now. He can call the older one and get a few pointers. I know I get on my brothers and some of my friends’ nerves. I realize there are times when I’m talking when they wish I would just shut up and let them do what they want to do. I had a moment like that this morning. I’m always fussing about something. They should know that I only spend that kind of energy fussing about things if I care about the people involved. It’s not that I want to control what they do or that I think I am better than they are. I make mistakes all the time. It’s just that I have been out in the workforce on different levels since I was 18 and there are certain things and appearances you don’t see that much. On average you just don’t see many brothers with tattoos all over and a mouth full of gold teeth sitting in the meeting room. Even if the meeting is full of black people you don’t see those brothers much if you see them at all.

Everybody has the right to make the choice to do what they want to do. You can dye your hair green. You can get a bone pierced through your nose. You can get a tattoo of a shotgun right between your eyes. If you can pay for that no one can stop you. Just understand that if you do there may be some things you won’t have access to. This is especially true for young black people who barely have access to some opportunities anyway. I think I might be a little harsh when I see it happening with my people and I tend to go off a little. It might sound like I’m being a hater but I love them and I have nothing but the best intentions. I’m just trying to make things as easy as possible by eliminating unnecessary reasons for people to exclude them.

I blame the community for all of this. Someone is going to read this and get mad at me but that’s fine. We always romanticize the idea of the hood rebel that defies all odds and ends up CEO of a company or some other big position. Now we got regular everyday cats doing the same things the thugs are doing without any concern for those actions coming back to haunt them. Sure, there’s a guy somewhere that went to jail, got out and made himself a successful business person. For every one of those guys there are thousand’s more that can’t find a job emptying trash cans. There are thousands of cats with homemade rap CD’s waiting to be discovered by some big time producer surfing the net. For every Soulja Boy there’s going to be hundreds of grown men not focused on doing something else waiting for that break. Ladies, you can get your baby daddy’s name tattooed on your neck but you better be so talented that people have no choice but to ignore that.

These people you see thriving with these kinds of things are not the blueprint. They are the exceptions to the rule. They know that more than anybody. We all are not making it over the hump this way. We don’t want to admit that because the reality is a lot to deal with. We’d rather think everything is going to work out fine just the way it is. I wish it would. I hope it does. Experience has shown me it’s not going to work out like that so I’m going to keep on supporting my people and pissing them off at the same time because the situation is too critical to cosign on bad decisions. I love them all too much for that. At the end of the day all I really want is for everybody to have the least amount of drama possible.