
“Financial Freedom’s Our Only Hope…”
When you own nothing, you can’t control your own fate
My older Brother Ade often talks about how we would have progressed had we not been enslaved and the entire continent of Africa had not been underdeveloped. He posits that it would be something like Black Panther’s Wakanda. But we’ll get to that later.
To be Black, whether in America or any place in the Diaspora, is to be in a place of constant outrage. Sure, you may see us dancing and partying but what’s behind that behavior is often something dark and repressed. That something is called powerlessness.
The root of that powerlessness is White Supremacy which we will also get to later.
But aren’t you tired of being outraged? Don’t you get sick of sending links about the latest trifling ass shit that white folks have done? Aren’t you all ‘what if’d’ out?
I think I am. I’m tired enough to recognize that all the bitching and moaning won’t get me anywhere…or will it? We’re going to jump into that also. And some people might not be happy.

Imagine this headline.
Famed Black Directors, Spike Lee and John Singleton have signed a deal with O, Oprah Winfrey’s Network, to begin work on a straight to series show, Nazi, in an alternate reality where Nazi Germany has won World War 2 and Jewish people worldwide are subjected to interment in concentration camps.
Man….the ADL, Israel, and the Democratic and Republican Party (which disagree on everything BUT Israel) would make sure that Spike, Singleton, and Oprah not only didn’t make the show, they would make sure that none of the parties above would make a show of any sort…ever again.
And rightfully so.
The relationship between the Zionist and Black American is strained at best but no humane person would want to see the atrocity of another drawn out for sixty plus years.
But the execs at HBO disagree. They seem to think that a show where the enslavement of Africans continues beyond the already 310+ years into modern times is an excellent and compelling story.
Of course the difference is, Black people are not a united front and, even if we were, our ability to affect change is compromised by our lack of desire to sacrifice.
If Black folk were really outraged by HBO execs decisions to greenlight such a reprehensible project, all of the Black actors and creatives would leave their HBO produced shows, every Black person that has an HBO/Cinemax package or HBONow account would discontinue their subscription.
And we wouldn’t stop there. We would stop support of each and every Time Warner ran company. That would be TBS, TNT, all Turner Sports packages, Cartoon Network, Hulu, DC Comics…I think you get the picture.
While we may be small in number, it’s no secret that we’re the largest consumers of media. That 13.2% may not seem a lot but show me a company that’s willing to lose $936 million dollars* for a TV show and I’ll show you…shit, nothing. No one would do it. There’s never been a production in the history of radio, tv, or film that cost nearly a Billion dollars.
Protests and pickets…we done that. But for some reason, whether it’s our lack of respect for history, or our lack of discipline, we fail to recognize the success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott or the Nashville Sit-Ins (which also included boycotting all downtown Nashville businesses).
Those protests brought their respective cities to their knees where the money spoke a more clear language than anyone’s conscious ever could have.
Where those protests fell short was they never sought financial independence.
If all of those Black creatives working at HBO that we mentioned above, and if the Black HBO subscribers, and all of their sympathizers decided to pool their money together, or added on with Oprah, and vowed only to work with Oprah, I guarantee you Time Warner would make it a point to fire each and every one responsible for making a stupid ass show about 21st century slavery. That’s the kind of bitching and moaning that would mean sumn.

Mmm.
How nice it must be to have a fine cocktail served to you in a restaurant with faux bullet-holes. You could make believe that you lived in your newly gentrified neighborhood back in the days when New York City boasted 1,842 homicides in a year (1988).
How brave would you have been to come sip that fine cocktail in a crack decimated neighborhood?
The fine owners of this establishment left no rock unturned. They even give you a cool, watermelon wine, aptly named 40 Ounce Rosé in a paper bag. How sweet is that?
I won’t even give that shit hole or the insensitive owner the honor of being named. And, sure that type of cultural fuckeduppery is extreme, we been living like that in our neighborhoods for as far back as I can remember.
I’m Muslim. Born and raised in this country, and for the past 26 years have been treated like shit by Johnny Come Lately Muslims who feel that Black American Muslims are somehow second class citizens to they, who left their Islamic countries to live in the land of the free and brave.
On one hand they’re critical of us if we don’t wear Arab-centric clothing and speak with an Arab-centric accent…as if somehow that determines how Muslim we are. On the other hand they sell my Black brothers and sisters every forbidden item known to Allah — from pork to pills, from porn to poisonous powdered milk. They have a monopoly on the corner stores.
But they’re somehow “More Muslim.”
Meanwhile, we don’t do our own nails (The majority of the nail salons are not owned by us). We don’t sell ourselves liquor (same). More often than not, we don’t even make our own fried chicken.
The Black community is only that in name and population. We’re talking about the so-called ghetto here, where the majority of us are renters and the neighborhood businesses are not owned by us (it’s always funny when uprisings occur and buildings are set on fire, the media always finds that idiot to say, “they’re burning their own community”).
I promise you, you’re not opening up a cigar bar in Chinatown and calling it the Opium Den. You’re not. First of all, you might not live, but second of all, you would feel totally uncomfortable doing so. Whatever your opinion is on Chinese people, and whether you knew the history of the Opium Wars or not, you don’t feel that the Chinese people are powerless.
I’m shook when I go to Chinatown, particularly in New York where I can walk for blocks and blocks, rarely see English or anyone other than Chinese, where stores abound with fruits and vegetables that I’ve never seen, on streets with the elderly and young intermingling like humans are supposed to.
You never see them protesting shit. Why? They own their own and ain’t no one coming up in there opening up some culturally insensitive crap…if they want to live.

Ade should be contributing to this section. He knows the ins and outs of Wakanda.
What I know is Black folks have been siced since first seeing Chadwick Boseman in Avengers: Infinity War. T’Challa wasn’t just a bad mothafucka, he was rich, self-assured and was the ruler of the richest nation in the world…although that part ain’t in the movie.
We then took a collective gasp when we heard that Fruitvale Station director, Ryan Coogler, was going to be directing. We’ve seen the sense of humanity that he’s brought to characters in both a movie about the murder of Oscar Grant and the son of the fictional Apollo Creed.
But we lost our shit when we saw the first trailer during Game 4 of the NBA Finals. Black Twitter exploded with links, Facebook lumbered behind with screenshots. Excitement abound. I ain’t seen Black people celebrate like that since OJ got off (the first time)…ok, maybe when Obama was elected, but you get the point. We was happy.
We do know why Walt Disney/Marvel is making this film, right? Money, of course. Ryan Coogler took a moribund property, Rocky, and made Warners $74 million dollars with Creed (and, unlike Spike Lee, who made Universal $44Ms, he stays below the radar).
What if Marvel decided to shit-can the whole project because Coogler went over budget or some other complication? What if they never wanted to make the project at all and Coogler was trying to raise the budget via crowdfunding (I’m sure it would be north of $100 million), would we pay for it?
The reality of the situation, like we talked about here, is 100+ years into the business of exhibiting motion pictures, we still don’t own any studios or have anyone in the position to greenlight films.
Aren’t we tired of asking for permission to feed the demand that we know is there? Are we satisfied with Wakanda being a fantasy world or do we want to have a rich, vibrant, and competitive society…in real life?
We know that Africans were the first to smelt metal, the first to map routes over the Atlantic Ocean, we built the pyramids and all that. We know that Europe underdeveloped Africa by first enslaving some of our great minds to navigate to the west and cultivate the land. We know that later Europeans chopped up the continent in a veritable natural resource pie.
We know all of that. Then what happened?
Way back in the 1930s the Honorable Elijah Muhammad taught that the Maker is the owner, it’s the first lesson that every member of the Nation of Islam must learn upon becoming a member. The almost cliché phrase, “do for self,” was coined by Mr. Muhammad in this era.
Fast forward 60 or so odd years later and a great producer/song-writer moves back into the neighborhood that he grew up in and slowly starts buying and developing surrounding properties. He’s slandered and constantly spoken ill of but he continues to build, taking over six troubled schools and starting another (his organization, Universal Companies, now educates 4,700 students).
That organization, with the motto, “Improving Communities, Changing Lives,” opened up a much needed senior citizen housing unit, rebuilt and refurbished the childhood home of the founder, turning it into affordable housing, and did the same with hundreds of others. The man that we speak of is Kenny Gamble, the city — Philadelphia, and the work that he’s doing is unprecedented. Gamble has been able to do all of this by utilizing the tools that other developers use — grants and donations.
Kenny Gamble is often cited as saying education is the key to moving the neighborhood forward.
Now some odd years later and Jay-Z’s similar message on finance has been greeted with mix reviews…at least some of it has. Ain’t no one talking about Jigga’s commentary on the music industry; not taking those parasitic advances, owning your masters, etc. Nope. His message has been reduced to money phones and our ability to buy or not buy real estate and art.
In both the Kenny Gamble and Jay-Z example what’s at play is one thing — Vision. Being able to see that one’s own individual fortune only goes so far is the thing of visionaries. That’s what causes one to want to be productive. That’s the motivation behind Hov’s line “Fuck what we sellin’
Fuck is we makin’?”
There’s a name for organisms that consume and never produce — parasites — that’s “something that lives in or on another organism (its host) and benefits by deriving nutrients at the host’s expense.”
I know no one would want to be called that. Hell, I hate the thought of it. But what we’re seeing, and what we’re suffering from is we now live in a country that doesn’t need us.
People are made to believe that resources are limited, jobs certainly are, so survivor instincts are kicking in. Aside from the fact that stereotypes of Black people persist, the disproportionate rate in which we’re incarcerated stokes those flames.
No one respects us.
The only way for us to regain that respect is to take charge of our destiny by creating outlets for expression and regaining control of our communities. Or we can happily watch the fantasy of Blacks enslaved in modern times and buy cocktails with faux bullet holes where we once were murdered…and complain about both.
The choice is ours.
*that number is derived by taking 13% of Time Warner’s Revenue from 2016

