What will it take for black folk to truly start valuing themselves, and start working in unison to destroy those who devalue them? I ponder that question right now as I reflect on the article I read this morning, L.A. Crips Gang Founder Executed in Calif., by AP writer Kim Curtis. Being that I have only half way followed the Tookie Williams drama, reading this article today brought home the magnitude of psychosis and self-hating behavior so many of us black have embraced. This myopic diseased, distorted and debilitating mentality that expresses itself in so many ways amongst us in America. The mentality that at its core is black folk don’t matter, and black folk can be mocked, ridiculed and debased at every level of American culture, while we passively sit back and tolerate it, simply look the other way.
Don’t get it twisted, I am not talking about the execution of Tookie Williams by “The Man”, or by a “Corrupt System”, I am talking about the extoling of this nigga by so many people who are looked up to, and who are supposed leaders of OUR community. Check out the following:
…Singer Joan Baez, M A S H actor Mike Farrell and the Rev. Jesse Jackson were among the celebrities who protested the execution.
Among the celebrities who took up Williams’ cause were Jamie Foxx, who played the gang leader in a cable movie about Williams; rapper Snoop Dogg, himself a former Crip; Sister Helen Prejean, the nun depicted in “Dead Man Walking”; and Bianca Jagger. During Williams’ 24 years on death row, a Swiss legislator, college professors and others nominated him for the Nobel Prizes in peace and literature.
This is who these people fight for, a murderous, charismatic, death creating individual who reflexively after the damage was done felt the need to write books to salve his dirty soul. These people put themselves out there for a man who was the cornerstone of a ‘gangster’ movement that has left untold thousands of young black men dead or in prison, thousands more sons, daughters, and significant others alone. This man was a cornerstone of chaos and destruction, a wild mentality that held communities in fear, scared business and jobs away, and advanced the drug trading and death in so many areas of our nation. This is the man these people fight for.
Our young men are dying,
Our young men are being incarcerated at staggering proportions
Our young men are being irresponsible as men and fathers
Our young men are depressed and oppressed
Our young men are simply dropping out of existence
And Tookie is what these people fight for, and so many of you followed them into the fight for, a man who represents MOST vividly what a sellout is, a race traitor is…but he writes childrens books for the fatherless children that his cult of death helped propogate.
So Tookie needed to die and I don’t take that lightly nor joke about it like other buffoons, morons, and crackers have, but yes he did need to die. The time is now where we STOP making martyrs of those who destroy us from within, and we stop turning a blind eye to those who maliciously, seek to profit off of our destruction. Period. End of discussion.
