This image has gone viral on social media with many giving up on Black love and relationships. So we asked Donnell Wright to provide us with his perspective. Please feel free to share your thoughts – send them to editor@themetrorecord.com
Written by Donnell R. Wright
I believe that there are various reasons for the visually controversial differences between the two Black families depicted in the photograph. However, this imagery is consistent with the historical, continuous, and progressive devaluation of our cultural identity by undermining our cultural, ethical, moral, and traditional spiritual foundations within the Black nuclear family.
The enslavers were influential and highly successful in systemic conditioning and destroying the Black man’s spiritual and emotional desire to exist as one with his wife and family.
This was bred out of him by the harshest of methods and instilled a desire to run! This took a mental hold in its place, and Black men left their families for reasons out of sheer survival and ran North and would start new families there.
Before the 1950s, by all accounts, poverty and racism were worse than it is today. Then, the Black man faced ramped discrimination and oppression, but the Black family was arguably more stable than now, as most Black women married before they had children.
As the Black man faced increased structural and institutional racism regarding employment, employers began to feel the pressures of workforce integration via President Lyndon B. Johnson’s emerging policy called affirmative action government workforce integration. Because they found the Black male intimidating, they would hire the Black woman. This accelerated well into the women’s liberation movement, as Black women became more employable. And made more money!
The Black family would seek assistance and then transition into the State welfare system, ultimately becoming the surrogate father for millions of Black children. This continues to be a contributing factor in the destruction of the Black family unit. Even today’s policy states that if the mother seeks assistance from the state, the father must not be in the home; if he is, he must leave, or his family will be cut off. This policy, I believe, has done more to destroy the foundational unity of the Black family than almost any other.
I believe that caused the Black man to lose his status as the breadwinner in the household and thus would cause him to become extraneous.
Many Black men turned to drugs, alcohol, and crime; others would end up in prison. Again, they lived up to the enslaver’s conditioning, and once again, he would run as he was forced to leave his family.
Then in the 1980s, crack cocaine was introduced into the Black community and subsequently proceeded to devastate Black neighborhoods and families via gang violence, drug addiction, and incarceration.
Then lastly, what I believe to be the most significant culprit that has caused the most damage to and the difference in the imagery depicted in the Black families photo has been our creation, hard Core Gangsta Rap! With derogatory and degrading lyrics normalizing Black women as bitches and hoes, violence and the quest for money and power gain transformed a generation of potential community and political leaders into gang bangers, drug dealers, murderers, and yes, deadbeat fathers and booty-shaking baby’s mammas!
With its funky beats, this music permeated the subconscious minds of our men and women with misogynistic male-dominated sexual images ladened with foul language severing the pathways in the brains of millions of Black people. Albeit born out of the pain and despair of those confined to this nation’s ghettos, the music has corrupted the internal essence of our people.
They say there is a message in the music; I believe there is also a message behind the music imprinted by those who created, developed, pushed, planted, and nurtured these subliminal seeds of self-destruction.
These agenda-laden people use the power of music to transmit negative vibrations that birth vile and inappropriate behavioral attitudes toward our women and children. Messages that cause us to disrespect ourselves and our people and actively participate in the demise of the power base of our people had a significant role in undermining the emotional, physical, and spiritual foundation of the African American family.
Donnell R Wright BS Interdisciplinary Studies Social Justice
CEO InnerVizion Empowerment and Consulting Center
