Culture of Freedom pt.2

One of the most disturbing things that I have witnessed about blacks today is the practice of poverty. I understand that in our society there is a class structure in place whereas some people are going to be poor while others are not. But the issue that I am going to attempt to discuss today is that far too many blacks have em brassed poverty and have made it a part of who they are. Let me give an example.

When I lived in Memphis, TN I lived in what is referred to as east Memphis. For the most part at the time this was the outskirts of the city. Just after me moving there the city acquired the area from the county. I lived in a hotel property that was very well maintained and manicured. It was a quiet community where in the morning everyone got up and made a mad dash for work. Well about a year after the city ha taken over the area, the complex announced that they were going to start accepting section 8 applicants from the city. This action bothered a lot of the tenants and you started to see a mass exodus. no more than a few months after the blacks from the inner city started to move into the complex you saw the climate shift. The once serene and beautiful area in which I called home had drastically changed. There was writing on the walls trash dumped in the parking lots and in the common areas. And Ironically enough the night before I moved my car was broken into and some personal items had been stolen.

The point that I would like to try and make here is why is it that "you can take the person out of the ghetto but you can not take the ghetto out of the person." Now when these people came from some of the more impoverished areas of Memphis they brought all of their belongings with them including their impoverished mentality.

What I am forced to conclude is that poverty is a state of mind and not a state of being. Where I had always thought it was a state of being not a state of mind. I guess it depends on how you are conditioned. Why did they come to a nice area and instead of working to help keep their new surroundings clean and respectable they merely made it feel and look more like what they are used to. The slave mind is a concept that will plague blacks for many more decades to come unless we start to treat it and work on correcting the problems now. We continue to raise our children instilling in them the madness that the slave master instilled in our grand and great grand parents. How long will we allow this cycle to continue?

Some how we have to learn that we can achieve more if first we realize that we are more than what we have been told we are.