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Hypocrisy and the Movement

 

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hypocrite1

I was watching television the other day and happen to catch a report about the news conference that was held at the black church in Oklahoma where they paraded this 19 year old white boy who had been seen on the infamous OU fraternity video. And as I watched this kid being paraded in front of the media and surrounded by black politicians and preachers apologizing for his racist remarks on the bus, but I couldn’t help but wonder did he even know why he was apologizing except his father who is probably some high profile person in Oklahoma politics or business had told him to. As I listened to his apology I couldn’t help but think of course he doesn’t know why he is apologizing, all one has to do is turn on the radio, television, or play a dvd and the very word he is accused of uttering can be heard loud and clear.

I began to wonder why do we never hear a Jewish person call another Jew a kike, or why do we never hear Italian singers screaming wop while performing, or why we never hear Asians referring to themselves as my chink, or Hispanics calling each other wetbacks? Could it be that they know what black people refuse to learn, that no one owns words. And that if they publically use it to refer to each other that that will open the door for everyone else. Why is it that black people do not understand this simple lesson? To give you an example I was listening to the radio when this bus incident first broke and on the same day that the hosts were going crazy with the story of the racist song on the bus, the question of the day was should the characters on the show, “Empire” be allowed to use this very same word on television for authenticity? It seems one of the characters thought they needed to use the word to make the show more real. And do you know that 9 out of 10 people who called in that day thought that it would be ok on the show so long as only black people got to say it. I was shocked!

Then it dawned on me, they didn’t understand hypocrisy or they did and didn’t care. You see if a word is bad when I use it, then it is bad when anybody uses it. Profanity is not ok depending on who uses it, it is still profanity. A comedian may use it and you may laugh at it, but make no mistake you understand that you can’t use it at work or around your kids. What makes a word inappropriate is not who is speaking, but the word itself, anything less than that is hypocrisy. Just as it is hypocritical to say that all black lives matter, but not be just as outraged when the killer happens to be black. What gives a life value is not who takes the life, but because the life has intrinsic value. Where are the protest movements and marches for all of the black folks who have been killed by other black folks? Don’t their lives matter? We have to make a decision as a society and as a community that if something is racist it is racist no matter who says it. Every person who used that word publically when it first became fashionable for black people to say it should have been beaten and publically ridiculed. Instead now we have this hypocrisy of its racist when you say it, but it’s cool if I say it. What other word in the English language do we treat this way?

The time has come for us to decide as a people if we want to continue down this road of guilt and blame or do we want to recover. Because in order to recover we have to quit focusing on the blame game and start focusing on not participating in those destructive behaviors that have crippled our communities and made our children statistics.

According to the Brookings Institute there are three simple ways to avoid poverty:

  1. Graduate from high school.
  2. Wait to get married until after 21 and do not have children till after being married.
  3. Have a full-time job.

If you do those three simple things, your chance of falling into poverty is just 2 percent. Meanwhile, you’ll have a 74 percent chance of being in the middle class. These do not require some massive government program or new social policy initiatives. What they require is changes in behaviors and attitudes. There was a time in our community when these things were acceptable conditions for success. We all aspired to them. Now you’re trying to tell me that because of racist cops and white people we can’t graduate from high school, we can’t wait to have children until after marriage, and there are no jobs?

Arguing that bad decisions are understandable when made by a person from a poor, single-parent family living in a bad neighborhood and attending a lousy school is a flimsy excuse that abets the problem and removes all responsibility. Without responsibility and accountability there is little incentive to change one’s behavior.

Let us come together and bury this ugly word once and for all and end the hypocrisy that continues to keep us stagnant. No one gets to own a word and if it is wrong for one it is wrong for all.

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