A short film I made a couple of years ago. It wasn’t the best of quality, but I did try my best on it. The premise of the short is a satire of the black male experience in the United States.
Tag: America
The Entertainment Dilemma: Black Success in White Markets
Black America has become white America’s source of entertainment. At a glance, a list of the richest African Americans, I noticed an alarming trend. Here is a link to the list so you can see for yourself: “http://www.ranker.com/list/the-20-richest-african-americans/worlds-richest-people-lists”
Have you figured it out? Basically, with the exception of a few, nearly everyone on the list are entertainer of some sort. Whether it be sport, music, or film.
Now look at a list of the richest Americans in general, “http://www.forbes.com/forbes-400/top20/#3df0ffc3d8d5”, not one person is an entertainer; the list is made primarily of tech entrepreneurs, energy tycoons, and media moguls.
Black people have been “chucking and jiving” for white America since the minstrels of the 19th century. The only difference today is the market reach and the profitability. Many African Americans take great pride that black people have an influence on pop culture, but at what cost? Have black people become so ghettoized in how they aspire to be successful in this country?
Go to any urban school in this country and ask the typical black child what he or she aspires to be, and the most popular answer is either a sports athlete or a rapper. You will be hard-pressed to hear a child aspire to be a tech entrepreneur or business mogul. Why do young black people have such a limited scope of career choices? The answer lies in what black youth see in the media. The media is very important in how people view themselves. Films, music, television, etc., inform us on how to think, how to behave, and how to view life. When you’re black, you are particularly sensitive to media influence. This is because, as a minority, you have limited exposure to representation that you can relate to, and when you do get that representation, it holds a lot of sway on your thought process.
The worst of this is that black Americans don’t even fully profit from their talents; behind every multimillionaire black entertainer, there is a much richer white person in the background profiting handsomely from black ingenuity. Yes, Michael Jordan became a billionaire from his signature sneaker, but Nike, in return, became a multi-billion-dollar sportswear company with a near-monopolistic hold in their industry. Yeah, rappers make millions of dollars from tours and single sales, but record companies make billions of dollars every year in licensing royalties.
Black America epitomizes cool in this country, and corporations gladly use us as marketing tools, finding an athlete to petals their sneakers, rappers to wear their clothing, or appear in their soda commercials. I’m not at all angry at anybody for profiting off their marketability, but I do just want to fully analyze the situation in terms of race in this country.
We, as black people, need to do better for ourselves; we need to teach our children to have a diversity of aspirations. You have a lot better chance of becoming an oral surgeon or an electrical engineer than a rapper or an athlete. It is vital for the future of Black America that our youth have realistic aspirations.
Why Black America need a conservative revolution!!!
I know many black people took the victory of Donald Trump very hard, but I would like to suggest that maybe such a victory isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Black people in this country(certainly not all) are content with receiving government handouts. A Trump victory was seen as a sign of a reduction in public housing, food stamps, and Medicaid. My issue with this is how so many black people become so reliant on the government for self-sufficiency.
The bottom line is that the government is not going to help black people with their issues, which are (but not limited to) high rates of violent crime in black communities, low educational achievement, a high incarceration rate, high illegitimate births, and high instances of poverty. All these can neither be solved by either Democratic nor the Republican party.
In the case of inadequate education, is it a system of bad funding in the school systems or a culture that prompts anti-intellectualism in the black community? What is a school but not just bricks and books? It’s the pupil and the quality of teachers that truly set the educational standard. The chief reason Asians do so exceptionally well in school is because of their collective attitude towards education.
In the case of black crime, when will individual accountability be taken into account? The same sob story that has been going on for decades, of black men being forced into a life of crime because of a lack of opportunity. My argument against this is that there was even an attempt by many of these black men to make their own opportunities by investing in themselves through education, setting up their own business, etc. In a predominantly black city of Detroit, where African Americans make up 80% of the population, only 10% of the businesses are black own. Who’s at fault for this? Is it the opportunistic South Asian immigrant or the sluggishness of black entrepreneurs in these communities? Many black people complain about the inability to get loans to set up businesses, but is it racism or lack of creditworthiness that prevents many blacks can attaining loans?
Black Americans are currently caught up in a downward spiral. Black people in this country have one of the lowest median incomes of any racial group, currently standing at about 35,000$. There is absolutely no wealth being generated in swaths of black communities across this country. Constantly, people complain about gentrification, but many times, gentrification is the only way to invigorate these blighted communities with the investment and capital that is needed to improve these areas. Without urban renewal schemes, these communities, Harlem, Brooklyn, and the South Bronx, would remain poor.
Let’s talk about housing projects and how they basically became a way to keep millions of people in concentrated intergenerational poverty. Many of the urban developmental programs can trace their history back to the 1930s as a way to provide low-income citizens access to modern housing. What started out as a progressive housing policy became an urban-policy disaster from Cabrini Green to the South Bronx; thousands of public housing projects became infested with crime, poverty, and almost any case of urban blight one can think of.
The solution for the Black American for his advancement is to, as I proposed in the introductory paragraph is to stop relying on the government and start relying on himself, no more food stamps, no more public housing, no more government welfare. It’s quite simple: get educated(particularly in a marketable skill such as engineering, finance, and medicine), wait until you are married to have children, invest your money in stock and bonds instead of a pair of Air Jordans. Bottom line: take responsibility for your own life!!!
Da Joanis Project 