Good morning from Philadelphia!

Well, I’m sitting here this morning, listening to a youtube video entitled; Frustrated: Black American Men in Brazil (POWERFUL DOCUMENTARY)

Look, lemme cut straight to the chase, nothing raises my eyebrow faster than when I see a youtube or anything else! That tells you just how f’n powerful it is, IN THE TITLE! It’s like someone walking up to you & saying out of the blue “YOU NEED TO GIVE ME MONEY RIGHT NOW, CUZ I’M SO F’N AWESOME! YOU SORRY BASTARD WHO NEEDS ME RIGHT NOW TO TELL YOU HOW F’N GREAT I AM! OUTTA THE BLUE!”

Cap craziness aside, I’m listening to this right now as I’m typing this & it’s pathetic. This youtube is nothing more than a bunch of my peers, as Black American men, bitching about how our Black American women here, have “lost their way”. First? Nothing says “crazy” like a fool who pretends like they’ve forgotten the foundation of how their particular people got their “place”, in said society, country, culture, customs, etc-etc! Right now one Black man is bitching about how Black American men are “put down” in Essence magazine. Look, during my high school & college days I used to read Ebony, Jet, & Essence magazine. But I could already see how many of these magazines weren’t keeping up with modern-day Black American societal & cultural changes & trends, which is always a red-flag. When your day-to-day &/or monthly magazines that claim to be all about keeping step with WHO YOU ARE, are more than half-a-block behind you? You’re in trouble.

It’s like when a society or country or community makes laws, that aren’t in step with current societal, communal or national issues. Problems are bound to multiply when the reality of everyday life is being hampered & hindered by the stupidity of out of touch & out of date, laws, that make matters worse way before they ever make anything better. The Rambler & I have talked for many a time about these types of things & we both got to see it last night, when we watched the “Urban drama”, the Coalition. And of course “urban” means; Black American. Shhhhhh, don’t tell anyone I told you!  

This movie? Has my sweethearts R&B friends in it from Baltimore, MU WET, one of their songs is in this movie. Congrats to them for getting that done, because my woman has constantly told me about how hard these guys have been working to try to get themselves on the map! So Mrs. Geese was definitely pumped up them getting a song into this movie, written by Terrell Suggs & Monica Mayhew, I believe her name is. And for the record, I’ve paused the Frustrated: Black America youtube, because the s---t the’re talking stinks as much as I’d told my sweetheart last year, that the Coalition would. Now, I see you snickering! Oh Geese, you just some grumpy ole bastard from Philadelphia!

This is true. And while my mother & father may not have ever married, that doesn’t dull my ability to sense the same old tired ass Black crap that we keep churning out & trying to claim the crap is “entertaining” or is actually “doing something” for us or our cause of rebuilding ourselves back to respectability. And lemme check that box off right quick & clarify, when I say rebuilding ourselves back from respectability I mean, restoring ourselves as Black People, not just as an “AMERICAN” Black, but as a member of the Black race. Back to a level of respectability where we can sit at the table & not have to yell & scream to be heard. Or go so far to the left or right to look like idiots to try to prove that we can handle ourselves in a tight situation. For many Blacks throughout the world we are still shaking off the psychological cuffs of being reduced to dirt either within our own lands or communities, INTENTIONALLY. So nothing shows progress more than when former slaves & former conquered colonies can actively sit down & say;

“We will not do business with whomever you are, unless you pay the actual worth of the goods & services & skills we are able to provide to you & yours. If you will not pay the actual value of our services, then we have better things to do than waste more of our precious time talking to whomever you are.”

So that’s what I mean by getting back to respectability. It is considered a-okay & “respectable”, when anyone sees a Black person ANYWHERE FROM ANY COUNTRY, playing some kind of goddamn sport. But then the skepticism & cynicism comes out when Black doctors, lawyers, business people (note I said PEOPLE, MEANING MEN & WOMEN), PHYSICISTS! Are shown doing anything, if they are ever shown at all. This movie, the Coalition? I told my love that it is too clichéd, too tired & too much of the same-ole-same-ole stereotyped tripe! That has Black Americans mired in the mud of non-progress & productivity that we’re currently stuck in! The characters in this movie, for starters, the primary “antagonists” or whatever you wanna call this guy was nothing more than a cookie-cuttered cardboard-cut out, named PRIME ALEXANDER! Prime… Alexander…? This is why the Rambler talks about being on the juice when a woman is just looking to take the edge off from child birthing pains & just wants to be KNOCKED OUT!

So? The main character is named Prime Alexander… And, guess what!? He’s a professional Black American athlete! O_O ORIGINAL! ISN’T IT! But he wasn’t from the Hood. Awwwww, & he wasn’t a cross-dressing Black man either, booooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!! Nor was the D, silent, damn!

So now we have Prime Alexander, & I just turned on the DJ Aladdin Remix of Ice-T’s song, Ya Played Yourself. This song alone, would have probably increased this craptastic movies street cred by ten points! I’ll be the first one to say my street cred is probably dropping while I type this & I could care less, because I’ve actually seen & been too close for comfort to the street game that fools like Jay-Z glorify. So anyone with any sense, who happened to GROW UP IN TIME & see where they were headed, much like Ice-T too. They don’t shower that kind of shizzle for nizzle my dizzle, cuz that shizzle is straight up wa-zack, for real Black! Now if you can ACTUALLY DECODE WHAT THE HELL I JUST SAID, then you’ve got it & actually UNDERSTAND BLACK AMERICANS. But if you did anything other than understand that as stupid as what I just said looks in type, I just told you that telling other people how “dope” & “great it is” to sling drugs & play women & run around having kids you can’t afford nor invest any kind of actual knowledge in, is bound to doom your dumb-ass. Thus the reason why I’m rockin the Ice-T remix right now as I type this. And I’m not foolin myself, people could read this & be like; who’s this sanctimonious a-hole on here?

I’m someone who is tired of watching my people make fools of themselves & tell other people, Black or not, to make fools of themselves too. While we are still struggling to produce stable, large-scale results, where anyone can see how far we’ve come from no longer being in control of ourselves & our lives, to being respected as more than just “physically gifted fools”, which we are not. But when you go & keep beating the same dull-ass drum & then asking why don’t I get any respect? When anyone makes entertainment like what we saw last night & what I told her when she showed me the trailer last year, where I told her; the story has been beaten to death already. These women in this movie have too much access to know that too many professional athletes of any race, have all kinds of T&A tossed at them from every direction. People bend over backwards for them & often times they fall victim to their own success where they’re allowed to be irresponsible & disrespectful for as long as they can kick that ball, throw that ball, catch that ball, run that ball!

Then when the wheels come off & they get put out to pasture, all the friends, fame & attention, gets ghost! And they’re left with people now looking at them & treating them ten times worse than what they should be because it was always known that this person was always an a-hole. But now he’s a BROKE A-HOLE, WHICH IS TWENTY TIMES WORSE! So this movie makes the Prime Alexander character a typical Black American athlete, supposedly smooth with the ladies & likable, but he’s actually scum. He’s got the prototypical crew of friends who condone his stupidity & live off him, for the most part. Not one of his “homies” ever tells him to cut the crap out & by the time this movie “starts”. It’s made clear after we see his “first victim”, that he’s always been like this. But aside from the bad acting, this first Black woman we are introduced to is clearly more aware of who her “man is”, than the writers of this slop wanted us to know. Instead of her moving on when the clichéd ditch move is made on her by Prime, she instead turns into a laughable wanna-be Fatal Attraction type chick, who can’t even get that right.