Noblesse Oblige

To be perfectly honest, as an African-American male myself, I dislike these kinds of messages. I feel they work to perpetuate the entire problem.

I don’t think the black community is holding themselves down, I feel the highlighting of the problematic sectors of the community works to paint a negative picture overall that non-black people, who assume these things to be true, can’t help but associate these mentalities and images to the community as a whole, and black people can’t help but feel they must relate and associate with. It’s all very self-fulfilling.

There’s far too much of these kinds of negative messages, especially in the “indie” or underground rap community (they basically rely on mainstream rappers giving the black community a bad name so they can make money and notoriety off of bitching about it). There’s much too much focus on the problems facing African-Americans, and while ignoring them will work to detract from improving things, continuously talking about just the problems andjust the reasons why the community is struggling isn’t helping either. Far too much focus on the negative and not nearly enough on positive strides made each and every day by a relative few in the community that brings the whole people up each and every generation.

These images like the one posted in the OP are nothing new, not even remotely. It serves little to no purpose to continually thrust in peoples’ perspectives how bad black people have it or how they’re so self destructive, because when all anybody’s dialog is about is that, then, for all intents and purposes, that is all the situation is.

I personally would like to see more (quantitatively speaking) positive black art and media exposure. African-Americans are not so much a race as we are a culture, and culture (as well as, in part, art) is all about perspective, so when such negativity dominates the spotlight, that’s all there is.

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