BET cultural commentator ‘Cousin’ Jeff Johnson says the African American community could transform itself nearly overnight if we replace hollow rhetoric and frivolous pursuits with more sincere desire and focused effort. He implores blacks to leverage the strong emotional responses we have to community ills and use that to contribute to a solution.
“What moves you emotionally? What pisses you off? What makes you cry? What keeps you up at night? Because on the other side of that is a potential solution to the problem,” Johnson says. “You never have an emotional response to an issue unless somewhere hidden inside you there is a potential solution.”
As he signed copies of his new book, Everything That I’m Not Made Me Everything I Am, at CNN Center in Atlanta, Cousin Jeff admonished the community to spend less time on trivial activities and put that time and energy into uplifting the community.
“Negroes know how to get online to find where the party [is]. We can go on Twitter to find what [insignificant] group they can get with. They can get online to date somebody that they ain’t gonna like. But you can’t go online to find out who believes what you believe politically?”
Johnson also rejected the notion of a singular black agenda that we all should operate from. “I think that when we start talking about the black agenda, it’s challenging because which black folks are we talking about? We don’t live in a monolithic community,” he says. “When we start talking about the black agenda, I think we need to start being more sophisticated. Let’s begin to target the issues that we care about and roll with the people that agree with it, not just black folks. Because in many cases we have allies outside our communities and enemies inside [our community].”
Johnson asserts, real communal progress is retarded or stunted because too many people, spend too much time dwelling on or talking about the myriad of ailments instead of taking action.
“If you combine monetary contributions with people donating their skills, real community progress will commence immediately,” Johnson adds. “… If everybody in our community would find what their passionate about, [and] use their existing resources to have an impact with it, then evolve with it, our communities would change overnight.” –terry shropshire
