Something my father taught me as a child is the power of the closed fist. Now I know that sounds awful but I am not talking about my father striking me. What I am referring to is what it represents. He told me that if you slap someone in the face with your hand open it hurts and is irritating but shouldn’t cause any serious damage to that person but if you take that same hand by that same person and they close their fist the damage inflicted is greatly magnified. Thus the metaphor of the closed fist. I would like to argue that both the black community and America as a whole is weaker because we are not using the closed fist. I don’t think that it is any surprise that our country is divided. Now, how divided we are can be argued. I actually believe that we are not as bad as it would appear to be looking at the news or reading every other headline on Facebook and other outlets on social media but still divided. Our leaders are pushing and pulling us in so many directions that it is starting to feel like we can not agree on anything. Not even simple things. Things that seem like they use to be easily agreeable. This has made us weak. Our country is not having the impact it uses to because we are all operating as fingers rather than a unified closed fist. Our products are not as amazing because we are only focused on ourselves and not remembering that we are all in the same boat.
This is especially prevalent in the African American community. Our communities have very little to no support for itself. Our money never stays within the community and any leader or someone that tries to push the community forward is normally met with a large amount of skepticism. I have been guilty of this and still to this day struggle against this issue. I remember when Obama declared that he was going to run for president I thought to myself “who does this negro think he is”. I still to a large part have similar feelings but that’s another blog for another day. Any feelings I may have about president Obama aside he was more than qualified and did a very good job. Yet I still was skeptical to give him a chance. I don’t really know why this is. I mean there have been several targeted plans to keep the black community down by destroying our families and making sure that our communities stay poor and ignorant but there is also an element of blame that falls on the shoulders of black people. In other cultures and communiteis, you see the support they have for each other. They will live together and pull all their money to support each other. There is a sense that if one makes it we all make it but I don’t see that in the black community. I think some of the issues are there is a sense that there can only be one or a couple of black faces in the room or at the table. I see it all the time. Black people become successful and not only do they not reach back to help their community but they seem to do everything they can to prevent them from moving up. I don’t know why. I can’t understand why which means I don’t know how to fix it. I think the easiest way is to lead by example. I plan to push for the fist. I think the black community needs to be the fist. We need to be the fist that protects us from criminal injustice. Police brutality and poor education. Against the destruction of the black family and home. I am not calling for violence. Violence solves nothing and to be blunt is not a game that we want to play. What I am calling for is support. I am calling for us to rally around some of our poorest communities and people that are the most at risk. We need to spend our dollars in our own communities. We need to help educate our lower-income families and support our black-owned business. I am not saying that you should not work with or for other races. We just need to start acting more like they do. Before a dollar leaves their community is circulates through their own serval times. That matters! I don’t know but I know this really bothers me both as a black man and also as an American. We have to come together and support each other. We are so obsessed with what we could possibly get that we are not considering what it cost for what we are getting. These are just my random thoughts but hopefully we can figure out a way to make it happen.
BG
The Closed Fist
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