From Within

WORDS ARE POWERFUL

Greetings everyone,

I hope all of you are doing well. Something serious has been on my mind lately. It's been a very hot topic in the media, and should have been a thriving topic in Black communities all over the world. It is the language that we choose to use in addressing ourselves. Since the whole Don Imus situation, it appears that there is a lot of talk about banning the "N" word (even though Don didn't say the word). It's hard for me to get angry about this topic because many Black people refer to each other as the "N" word, the "B" word and the "H" word. It is overly saturated through out our culture and our language now, and it's a shame because I remember when many of us referred to each other as Kings and Queens, or Brothers and Sisters. How did we go from this to B's and H's and N's? Huh? Can somebody please tell me why we call ourselves holding on to these negative words that were used as we were lynched, attacked, tortured, killed, raped, stripped of our integrity and respect, and of our self-esteem? No one can justify the use of these words and make it make sense. Tupac once said that he was a "Nigga", standing for "Never Ignorant Getting Goals Accomplished." I'm assuming that he wanted us to adapt this new meaning, but I can't seem to remember that being a true statement for him, or anyone calling themselves that. We need to take our communities back. It was cool at one time to be intelligent and smart, but now, being a thug with little to no knowledge of anything other than street life is the route to go. I feel for the children of the world today. I feel for the future children. I feel for the current state of America. More racially charged news reports are surfacing each and every day. Everyone disrespects us, because we publicly disrespect ourselves. We put all our igronance to a beat and sell it on a CD, then we get mad when the people who are buying the records (other than Blacks) adapt the language and start using it. Once I heard two white women talking and one of them said "Yeah, she was acting real Ghetto." Is that the new racial slur for us and we just don't know it? I didn't know if I should have been angry or what, because we say that all the time. For some reason, I felt uncomfortable when she said it. I rarely hear other cultures calling themselves racial, or oppressive terms. It's time for us to rise up y'all and stopping holding on to being ghetto. We need to think about the future of our people. Only we can change our direction.

SpokenVizions recently recorded a podcast about this subject and we interviewed spoken word artist Marc Marcel. It's a wonderful interview. Check it out. You can listen to it on this myspace page, or you can go to www.spokenvizions.podomatic.com.
On this myspace page, there is a telephone number you can call for free and leave a vocal message on the topic, or you can simply leave a text comment on the web site. Well, I think I have written enough for right now. I'm just kind of disappointed in us and our direction right now. It's time to make a change, starting today.