If We Want Reparations, We Must Cut Off the Pookies & Ray Rays

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By: H.T., H.T.’s Blog

As of right now, I had to cut off a friend of mine who was crashing on my couch that is the worst kind of Pookie and Ray Ray: one who comes from a good background and to be cool amongst arguably the worst kinds of people. I cut him off because, from top to bottom, when I let him use my keys to stay at my place, he brought random hoodrats and drug addicts over to dick around and scare my neighbors (I live in east Lansing, these tend to be the worst people Jolly and Cedar Street can offer) and now this man is facing a legal case for having sex with a minor in my apartment and keeps trying to flex on me to stay silent when frankly this isn’t something to stay quiet about and he knows it. I bring all this up because right now this is what I see in what faces regular black people like say me or Gil versus people like Young Blakk and Ambitious.

Part of the reason I understand Gil’s perspective is because I was more or less raised with people who think like him. My mother is very educated, my father is very intelligent in his own right, my grandmother was a teacher and taught me to love reading and her sisters were all educated and some also were teachers as well. People like this guy never appealed to me because all that appeals to me about him are basically surface level pros but are people with deep cons that make living life INCREDIBLY difficult. See, for all the talk about upstanding black men like Gil or I are bitches, the reality is that these are people that feel they’re stronger because they’ve managed to get by and survive harsh, unlivable social climates, but fail to realize that the reason people like us leave them isn’t because we aren’t cut out for it, but rather we know there is more to life than the hood. The hood is not an objectively bad place, but the actions of the people that live there make it hard to live in. As the show The Chi shows us, there’s always a CHANCE to make the hood a less fucked up place, but when you live in a area where a very small yet incredibly violent subset of people live there and give zero fucks about HOW they get by, this is how the hood gets its bad reputation. I’ve been to the south side of Chicago to visit my family there, it’s not all gangbangers and violence, but there are violent PEOPLE. There are bad people in every type of community, hell even Asians have a gang problem and a lot of pro-black babblers will tell you white people love Asians more than blacks because they try their damndest to act white.

When Barack Obama tells young black men that they don’t need to spend all their money on chains and strippers to feel like men, yet people shame him and say that he’s pushing respectability politics, I have to ask an honest question: do these people want black men to reform, or do they just want a slightly less savage generation of men? Because if you want black men to stop being terrible, some level of standard has to be set and maintained as far as what will be tolerated and what won’t. Yes, we understand that black men who dress a certain way or look a certain way are exempt from racism, but this isn’t about racism. This is about simply having act right as for generations we’ve raised men who just amongst black men themselves have acted with zero couth and all religion lost. As a so-called “respectable black man” I can tell you first hand that a truly hateful white person can only learn tolerance, you’ll never learn to teach acceptance of other races, so in small pockets of time, it’s best to focus more on getting one’s lives better for themselves and everyone directly affected by their actions.

If people who loved the message about financial responsibility that Jay Z was trying to pass along in 4:44, then the first black President’s message on how to achieve success should be a good companion, but instead it isn’t. We simply say “don’t waste your money on jewelry, shoes and gold digging women” as a bad faith argument. I dislike Pookie and Ray Ray because they live these lives of constant stupid actions and thoughts that always result in black people like me who were NEVER cut out to be a Pookie or Ray Ray having to suffer in some way. And please understand, Pookies, Ray Rays and Bonquishas are RAISED, not born, and that’s why I hate when people say the black community is so fucked up because of black women. No, the black community is fucked up because a lot of us normalize shitty behaviors and logic and there’s a growing number of black people able to not raise their kids with this bullshit logic and prosper. It’s not that black nerds are better off not dating black women, it’s that the average black nerd is raised in the same environment as every other Pookie or Ray Ray and think that just because all the black women they meet there like Pookie and Ray Ray, ALL black women like them. But thats just not true. Fact is, black men like me give up, move out and away from the hood because trying to be functional around people that think being dysfunctional is the norm because of racism, slavery or whatever is why so many men like me give up.

The reason why people like Gil look at men like this with such loathing or…whatever he feels, I’m not psychic, is because when we discuss reparations and people saying what you say, using logic that sounds literally like the rantings of a 40 ounce sipping ex revolutionary wino, the fear is that in the end, yes, we DO need a bit of respectability politics as far as the kinds of people that we need to convince the government to give money to. Because quite honestly, when people like this are made the face of ADOS wanting reparations, this is all we see as far as endgame:

Please understand that I don’t think he’s an idiot, but I do think that people like this are, well, flawed. Flawed to the point at which giving money is usually a shitty idea as it doesn’t actually SOLVE the problem that could possibly make things worse, that being the potential sink of there being a class of black people that are not the kind of black people you want being the face a rapidly wealthy minority of people, mainly because in the end you face a situation similar to giving cocaine and a claymore to a silverback. Yes, I know how that sounds, but understand that there really are black people you just can’t give money to as all they’ll do is waste it as their only wealth aspirations are as far as what gives them standing in their low tier economic system. These ARE the kinds of people that if you give them millions of dollars, these are still people who will want a Walmart super center rather than build their own with their money, which they could easily do. But best believe, with people like this, the strippers will stay paid, every corner will have a barbershop, hair salon or nail place, there will be no shortage of clothing stores like Mr. Alans (yes, I know that’s too regional, fuck off) or K&G, liqour stores will be everywhere, but that isn’t the main reason I say don’t give us all money.

If it were up to me, black people’s reparations would be exemption from federal income tax and free college, but giving straight up checks goes back to the problem I mentioned with the analogy about giving coke and a claymore to a silverback gorilla: a check for a lot of black people that have zero act right to begin with ALONG with propensity for violence given they are put in aggressive scenarios can only end in more ignorance and maybe even more violence. Remember, ADOS includes gang members in areas where their direct rivals are right next to them. They could leave, but to avoid the dreaded sell out label, they’ll stay and keep being idiots in fights over colors, or sets or whatever and stay at each others throats even when they can go back to their ghetto kasbahs and live in peace. In the end, it wouldn’t shock me if you gave a lot of these people millions of dollars, all they’d do is move out every non-essential to their gang or crimes person and stay to off each other, basically enclosing themselves off for well…no good reason.

Education and tax exemption, especially in states that don’t have income tax, would give a lot of black people with good careers a chance to live great comfortable lives, but education is how you figure out who’s cut out to live that life. Sorry, but if black people are to be better, we need to be willing to cut off the black people that have no drive to not live in a fucking bough or at least no think that growing up in one makes them better people. I’m sorry, but respectability politics matters when you are considering growing wealth and the possibility of joining growing black families of wealth with others or even non-white wealthy people. Nothing kills the vibe like looking up at a family get together and realizing your marrying into a family that still suffers Ray Ray who got millions but chooses to still live like a slob because he’s a “real nigga”. Fuck them, fuck their logic, and fuck defending these people because they look like you and me. If anything, this is probably the biggest reason non-ADOS black people have the least amount of sympathy for us, because we don’t have the same judgmentalism as they do with their own people and because we haven’t held each other to better standards, this is why African Americans are so mired in the shit that is our image and why when even one of us steps out, we are called sellouts for daring to buck the trend. Yes, I am better than you for not having random kids, or getting arrested and choosing a career that isn’t shitty, unlike YOURS. Let’s not pretend that so much of our problems now isn’t that as a community we’ve learned to treat dysfunction as normalcy. Do you really want to give it millions of dollars or do you want to give it one last chance to educate itself and not be shitty?

Call me a sellout or classist if you must, but please understand that we need to stop being ok with the groups of black people that do the most damage and add the least. How many more entrepronegroes do we need? How many more rappers or dancers? How many more barbers or hair stylists? How many more myopic endgames do we need to see go nowhere before we realize that we need to be willing to cut off this great amount of dead weight.