Happy New Year everyone!!! Here’s hoping your year goes the way you want it and even more!!! As we enter into this new year, I have been contemplating the essence of Kwanzaa and contrasting my meditation against a couple of recent and hurtful events.
New Year’s Day is the final day of the Kwanzaa observance. The principle of Imani is applied to this day. Imani means faith and we are encouraged to ” To believe, with all our heart, in our Creator, our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders, and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.” As I consider the principle, I begin to question my faith. yes. Most specifically my faith in people. My people.
I see our people engaged in a strenuous battle for equality. A war against racism. Renewed and intense, this present time is rife with hate. Meanwhile our society is anesthetized with pornographic music, weed smoke, bad nutrition, backward slothful mannerisms, and clownish clothing styles. But even more than that is how those who are so called enlightened treat their own people.
How often have you been in a professional business environment and presented a well researched, educated informed proposal to other blacks only to be dismissed and minimized. I’m talking about being dismissed by the brothas and sistas… Not the dismissal you will get from white folk. But then when the white man (or woman) comes through and share a proposal or concept that is similar, then the brothas and sistas are like oooh….aaah….. There’s that old adage that says “The white man’s ice is colder”
Have you ever been in a networking event, a business social environment that is attended by what we call the “general market”? You know you attend the professional society or organization’s mixer and you walk into the room, scanning the room to see who is there no doubt. your white colleagues, your clients, everyone is there.. There aren’t many of “us” in attendance but we in here. We belong. And then you see a brotha (Or sista). He sees you but quickly looks away, even turning his back as if he does not want his white colleagues to see that he has noticed another black person in the room. Or even worse when you engage the circle and they blatantly don’t even speak to you even as you greet the circle he or she is participating in.
It’s the worse.
Or when you commit your soul and experience to those black organizations that are supposedly advancing the culture or improving the community. Or if you are in business providing professional services, our people will backstab, sabotage, and even minimize your value. It is a travesty.
As for our leaders, that is a relative proposition. Who are the leaders of this time? And there are so many stories these days of so called leaders falling from grace or doing shady dealings that are adverse to the very mission they are supposed to be leading.
Imani. Faith. Faith in our people is difficult. Not because of some outside force, but by our own doing. We are so envious of one another. We hate each other. We are in danger of remaining in this present condition because of the cancer of envy. Envy so strong that faith in our people is a casualty in our litany of social folkways.
I’m losing faith (Imani) in my people.
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