The hip-hop generation must come out of their denial that racism is dead. Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown are the examples that racism is alive and well. It is beyond the police brutality or the senseless deaths for Trayvon was not killed by a police officer. The economic disenfranchisement that has occurred due to our lack of cohesive, collective thought of demanding our share of our economic participation in the American economy as a community, as a race, as humans, only suggest that an individual like a Eric Garner would not have had to sell single cigarettes if he’d had an opportunity to realize his full potential.
It is the denial that we have as a community that allows slacker pants to suggest that this will be the interview uniform or that all white tees have actually paid dividends to all the young brothers who’ve chosen to dress in this manner. Yes, economic discrimination is creating economic unemployment for thousands of youth in the hip-hop generation for they are big receipt shareholders to corporations that do not do business with African American business, corporations who do not open and have African American marketing firms yet they know that 30, 20, 15 percent of their business and still African American marketing and advertising individuals who no longer think that there is a need to speak directly to or use Black-owned media.
Total market advertising will put African American businesses and agencies out of business and that is the goal. It is the race card of a generation of advertising execs who have found that inside corporations that are no longer committed to having or producing and want to suggest that all African Americans speak and look at the same programs as the white community but when you look at Facebook pages and Twitter pages our friends do not look like a multicultural huge single market monolith that a marketing agency can speak to. Yes we all have some or a few friends that are outside of our community that didn’t go to our Black HBCUs or didn’t pledge a fraternity or sorority.
The hip hop generation has to stop sitting in and saying we don’t need to be thought of as Black or that we’re speaking in a language that everybody understands so you don’t have to worry about my race. These type of conversations for the hip hop generation have allowed the general market, the white community, marketers who are racist by nature exclusionary economically retarding and economically repressing and entire community by not choosing to invite African American vendors to participate in general market or total market programs instead most African American firms are regulated to only talking to African American business and there is no question why African American businesses can’t employ more African Americans or white Americans based on the fact that we don’t have the opportunity to participate the same way. African Americans have for generations known that if there was not someone who could advocate for African Americans to do business that those African Americans that are inside the walls and receiving checks from major corporations whose job it is to act and be as efficient as the NBA and the studying that they have garnered to be efficient will not and cannot fight back if fighting back would suggest to someone that it creates inefficiency in a market place where the very market or total market is actually more African American and Hispanic than ever but still this doesn’t stop the reducing of African American budgets. Much of the unemployment related to some of these disenfranchised young brothers who have met a very horrific end can be lead back to the fact that they can’t find the jobs that are not in the community. They can’t get the skill set for they’re not thought of as positive and enough to actually be getting those dollars and here it is our trumpeting Jesse Jackson as our is telling us that even the places we put our social media, people that we spend our financial dollars with like PayPal, our favorite technology devices Beats and Apple aren’t hiring African Americans and yet we are in denial and we will go buy and support without requiring that they do anything with HBCUs, do anything with African American-owned companies like asking them to do that is not their responsibility, it is. It is their responsibility to understand and participate and grow African American businesses that participate and whose communities support their products and services.
This is an issue for us and if we do not discuss the murderous attitude toward African American economics, the continued killing of young African Americans by our own hands and other hands will be a continued practice. This is an economic country. The very conversation in our community from the lowering of gas prices to the technological value of a social media company that we participate in that doesn’t hire us has left us confused as the hip-hop generation must understand economic participation is a primary objective within this game called capitalism and the society.
We mourn with these young brothers whose lives have failed to be able to live in its fullness. We mourn with the families who no longer can see their brothers and sisters for the lack of economic opportunity that is in the African American and Hispanic communities but let us not say and continue to say that racism is not alive both economically and socially and the oppressive aspects that leave many who know major cities that are huge and large have the very feeling that resembles Johannesburg where apartheid or food deserts exist in American. Food deserts, educational deserts all exist within our community and individual corporations and individual elected officials know it and see it every day but this isn’t about them. This is about a generation who has taken for granted that there are freedoms that must not be paid for. These freedoms must be paid for collectively if we were not coming together to march but we must march as much as we do for injustice as we do for economic justice. Economic justice the hip hop generation must be a part of this protest or it will fail for the advancement of your future is based on your economic progress. Removing the wealth gap, removing the educational gap and sustaining the pillars that build our community as a collective group.
Peace.
