What Black People Need to Thrive & Flourish
Black people in the U.S. live a very different experience than everyone else in the country. We are consistently divested from economically, politically and socially, yet expected to compete at the same level as those who receive regular support, opportunity and sustained financial undergirding from all levels of government, as well as society at large. While most other populations in this country are permitted to flourish and thrive, are cultivated and nurtured, or at least are not fettered, Black people do not receive these same benefits—these same basic human rights.
As it is practiced, American policing is terroristic and brutal against a Black population mostly defenseless and traumatized. Black Americans are preyed upon by police officers who are paid to oppress them and contain them in impoverished circumstances. It continues to be life-threatening for Black people in America to traverse the highways and byways of life (Terrence Crutcher, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, et. al.). This is not how white the mainstream experiences law enforcement. These conditions most certainly do not create success for Black people (as they couldn’t for any population). They guarantee collective failure. Law enforcement, how it is practiced, and on whom primarily it focuses is the principal yin structural impediment disrupting Black people’s ability to thrive and flourish in this country. Blacks are dragnetted and funneled into the criminal criminal justice system, where we are chewed up and belched back out into the yang of poverty always intended for us. We are again dragnetted and funneled back into the criminal criminal justice system, thus mechanizing the cyclonic action impeding Blacks from participating in the Blessings of Liberty—blessings neither bound to nor for us in the first place. And so it goes.
When I was nine, I got into Columbus School for Girls (CSG), the premiere private girls’ day school for Central Ohio. I was awarded a scholarship for 89% of the tuition. My family was asked to come up with $400 of the $3,700 that was required. My mother, an administrative assistant for the State of Ohio would pay half, while her mother, a cosmetologist and domestic, was to pay the other half. My grandmother went to one of the ladies for whom she cleaned and asked her for a loan of $200. This took place in 1984. Old Lady B said no. She felt that I should not be at a place like CSG; incidentally, an institution where some fifty years earlier, one of her own daughters was asked to leave. Though Mrs. B was intimately acquainted with my grandmother’s credit quality—indeed, she was a principal contributing factor—presumably, she did not like the idea of her maid’s granddaughter being educated at the same school where her own children had attended.
My grandmother then requested the loan from the other lady for whom she cleaned, Old Lady B’s eldest daughter, Mrs. L; Mrs. L said yes. As my grandmother explained, Mrs. L happily obliged, believing firmly “that all anyone needed was a chance.”
While I am tremendously appreciative of Mrs. L’s loan of $200 to my family (and may she rest in peace), I vehemently disagree with her rationale: people do not just need one-off ‘chances’; they need sustained support and nurturance, in addition to adequate opportunity, in order for success to be able to take root and grow…PRECISELY WHAT SHE GOT. That’s what Black people in this country require in order to thrive and flourish. These are things that we have never received from our society, despite all of the blood and sweat equity we have painfully invested into it. These are the things the rest of our fellow members of society expect and receive without question.