Stage In The Sky

Here, we have a man named Yung Joc. He’s a rapper, but now driving a ride share service to make legit money, an honest living. In the backseat, you have a couple of females making fun of him. They’re saying things like “what happened? You fall off?” Meaning, you failed in your rap career and you’re no longer popular.

Now, this might sound “funny” or a trivial thing…but this is a huge problem. Especially in the black community, these are things people don’t like to talk about because some are afraid it’ll make us look bad in the face of other races.

Two things. One, consider all of our black men who are in prison for things like selling drugs and committing crimes just to pay the bills. Secondly, consider the our young black boys (children) who are raised in single-mother households, struggling to get by and having to resort to selling drugs…just to keep the lights on. T.I, Jay-Z, even Outkast are some rappers who talked about doing this in their younger days and guess what…a lot of young black children look up to these figures.

Why do you think they go down this route? Is it really because they can’t get a job? Or is it because getting a job at McDonald’s might get them clowned by their peers? This needs to stop. Respect and reputation means everything to a man. It just does.

And then they wonder why good black men leave the hood and never look back. They’ll criticize us for not going back and try to shame us for “forgetting where we came from.”

What if thinking about where we came from doesn’t inspire us in a positive way? Meaning, it inspires us…sure. But it doesn’t make us happy. The determination and fire we feel inside comes from this drive to never go back to where we came from.

And the problem with using this as inspiration is that it doesn’t make us happy. We wish the black on black violence would go down. We wish the black community would accept us even if we’re not into hip hop culture, but we speak proper english, smile, and wear our pants on right.

This video is just one sample of evidence of pressure we face in the black community because of stupid, juvenile individuals. The culture needs to change. If it doesn’t, why would black men like myself want anything to do with it?

And then they wonder why all these black athletes are dating outside their race. And then K. Michelle wonders why her black son “ran off with a white woman.” Could it be that they went where they were accepted and appreciated? Could it be that they saw themselves as men and not “black men” as if they’re chained and bound to these unwritten laws surrounding the popular notion of black culture?

What do I know, right? I only have an 800 credit score, clean record, and no children by baby’s mommas running around here.