Being Black is Not an Excuse to Stop Trying

It doesn't matter whether one's skin tone is fair, brown or dark, if we use it as an excuse to keep from moving from point A to B, then we deserve what we get.

I thought about this when I reflected on the reactions I received over the years from all sorts of skin tones.  You are damned if you do, and damned if you don't--too light for this group or too dark for that one.  Blessed if you're one skin tone, "Come on over here, my sister!" or cursed if your another, "You do realize you're colored, right?"  I realized that no matter what a person saw, I had to make up in my mind that my skin tone would have no bearing on what I aspired to be and to do in my lifetime.

There will be those people who will attack you, because they sense that you may be one of those who are sensitive about the color of your skin.  It doesn't matter how old or young you are, they know that if they say certain words about the way you look, you will flip out.  Some people think that they are privileged because they look a certain way while others think that they can't get ahead because they aren't the right shade.  This kind of mentality stems from another's opinion of what they deem as "good, sweet, and beautiful."  But the truth of the matter, one's appearance means nothing to your Creator.  He will open doors that no man can open!  Think of a few testimonies you have heard over the years and you thought, "How in the world did she get in?  What did he have to do?  Neither looked or fit the part!"  But they got in, didn't they?  They moved ahead, right?  Maybe you were one of the blessed and highly favored ones!  Encourage someone!

The word, "black" means nothing to some and a whole lot of something to others.  This is why some will say, "The blacker the berry the sweeter the juice.  I'm black and proud!  Oh that is a sexy chocolate looking man!"  While others will say, "Look at that black baby!  She so black!  Take that off, you already black!"  Some people choose to be far removed from anything black because of a past riddled with such abusive "black" talk.  There are those who think there is nothing wrong with commenting on someone's blackness positively, but for some people it's all bad.  "Just see me for who I am!" some will say.

Whatever shade our skin tone, we all should be comfortable in it.  Maybe some of us need counseling to heal from an ugly past.  (You know you have issues when you are looking someone else up and down because they are light, brown, or dark before they even speak to you!!) Some people are just fine being who they are and can mingle with the best of them no matter what color they are.  Whatever the issue or lack thereof that some have, our blackness should never be an excuse for us to stop progressing in our dreams.

Nicholl McGuire

Cold-blooded: That Dark Side

Has anyone ever described you as "cold, hard, ruthless, heartless" or similar words. For some of you, you may have been called that behind your back. I have been called a couple of these words a few times in my life. It doesn’t feel good, it implies that you have no conscience. To be a cold person, means one has participated in some down-right dirty deeds that has hurt someone else. You may have left the person accusing you of these things out in the cold so that they can't take advantage of you any longer! Sometimes it’s what you say or think that also makes you a cold-blooded person.

On the bright side of things, being cold-blooded has its benefits. CEOs, managers, business owners, even ministers over large congregations have first-hand experience. You can't get to the top without bending the rules and stepping on a few heads along the way even if they are relatives or long, dear friends. There are some people who have stepped on so many people in their quest to make it to the top that they walk around with bullet proof vests. Some of us envy people with a lot of zeros in their bank accounts, but if you knew the unadulterated truth about how they got the money, would you still be admiring so? What would you be willing to do for those dollar bills? That’s why some of us stay broke.

So what brings me to this subject today of acting or being cold-blooded? Well, thinking of the family specifically my own, back in the day, we all gathered somewhere as children and had a good time with relatives and/or friends at different reunions, birthday celebrations, weddings and so forth. Then someone in the family would decide to lessen the good time we would all be having by making us children, minding our own business, do something. Now it could have been something simple like, "Gone now, sit your behind down and stay out of grown folks conversation!" or something more serious like, "Come on over here and let me..." whatever that “let me” was that still makes some of my cousins flip out to this day. Liquor, drugs or just some troublemaker took great pleasure in ruining what could have been happy family memories. Sometimes the police were called and other times issues were settled with someone hitting the floor.

Well, I thought about a few past memories while listening to a black mother make her otherwise happy child playing with the other children, go out into the pool. While I'm writing this, the child is hollering and hollering crying for, “Mama!!” She kept telling the girl to, "Be quiet! Be quiet! Shut up! You ain’t fallin’!" The little girl still screaming, “Mommy! Mommy!” The girl is obviously scared and making a scene.  Whoever is teaching the child she doesn’t feel comfortable with her and the water. One person witnessing the event just laughed.

With all the yelling between Mama outside the pool and child in the pool, I was ready to call someone. It was obvious that the child wasn't ready to learn how to swim and whoever was trying to make her should have been scolded for letting the girl cry like that! I can only imagine what kind of memories the poor child will be having about the water in the future. Not that long ago, there was a black man by the same pool pretending like he was going to throw his child in and the toddler just wailed. Now some will say, “Well that was how I learned how to swim someone just threw me in.” Glad to see you’re okay, but there are others who never make it while others live with regret.

So I thought to myself, the issue of being hard, cold, etc. is a trained behavior. Some black parents do it unconsciously. A mild form of torture, if you will, for the victim to do what the dictator wants. Does this kind of action remind you of say, the movie, Roots? When that white man kept beating that young black man and telling him his name is Toby, I couldn't help but think about all the black children who was watching that and still getting whipped like a slave with paddle, belt or something else.

The school showed that movie when I was a young teen in public school a little early psychological programming to obey one’s master, eh? How about that Denzel movie when the white man is beating him and he doesn’t yell out or cry a flood of tears. That scene was worse, because it dragged on as you saw his will being broken with each lash while he was trying hard not to submit by expressing deep emotion.

So the black parent says to his child, “I’m going to make you mind me or else…You better get your black a*# over here right now…If you don’t, I will force you…You will do as I say or I will knock the black off of you!” Then the threats are followed with whatever the action. Some children will run around hollering, others will beg, and some children will just give you that slow tear and just stare at you with a look like, “Your day is coming.” I grew into that child by the time I got to my latter teens. A child that stops crying when most children would cry over the same kind of punishment is a cold-blooded child and one day someone will get hurt. It might not be the parent, but someone has got to pay the price.

Childhood physical abuse creates a cold-blooded adult, so don’t ask why some people can kill another human being, destroy a career, or steal money with no conscious. What might be the technique of choice to get a child to submit to the will of the parents and we aren’t talking about no use of a rod like in the Bible? Maybe a father might cave his teenage son’s chest in as explained to me by a boyfriend when I was a teen. “My mother would call my dad if I was acting up and then my dad would draw back his fist and punch me in the chest.” A mother might blacken both her daughter’s eyes for back-talking. As a teen, I often saw black girls walking around with a black eye or two and it wasn’t because they were fighting with another girl either.

Maybe it isn’t physical beatings at all, maybe it is a slow, psychological punishment whereby the parent puts a child in a nice setting around a bunch of family members and friends, then turns the setting into something bad to get the desired results. “Don’t think because you around all these people I won’t beat the.…out of you!” Meanwhile, the child is all confused in the mind trying to figure out, “Did I do something bad for not wanting to stand up and sing in front of all these people? Did I do something bad because I didn’t want to ride the roller coaster? Did I do something wrong for not wanting to talk about my school achievements? Did I do something wrong for telling grandma ‘no thank you’ or Uncle for asking me to take a drink and smoke some weed?  Did I do something wrong because I said yes instead of yes ma'm?”

Being punished for standing up for yourself is what the child is taught. Falsely accused of “sassing, thinking you cute, too good, or better than me” by someone who says they love her or him. No wonder some of us are cold-blooded.

I think of those old men back in the day that could walk in a room and their mere presence would lower voices. The kind of men that made the hair on the back of your neck stand up. You knew that these men had blood on their hands. They could look at you with such a piercing stare and then just laugh. They took great pleasure in seeing your fear. Evil, callous men that didn’t care whether you lived or died, but as long as they were around you, you better do what you are told. I thank God I wasn’t taken advantage of by these hard-hearted men as a child. It was probably because those that were around me were as equally cold.

There is an evil that we all have somewhere way down deep inside ourselves. If someone provokes you enough, it doesn’t matter how close you are to God, you are going to do or say something that you will repent for later. It is inevitable. Living with or being around an evil person long enough will taint the holiest of Christians every now and then. It’s what that child of God does when he or she is being tested that matters. Will he or she turn an evil for good? Every now and then along comes a trial to see just how much you have changed, whether for better or worse. Oh sure, we will tell people, “Praise the Lord, I thank God I’m not what I use to be!” Uh oh, here comes the devil with his schemes, “You sure about that?” He’s all too ready to create doubt, cause confusion, and resurrect fear.

I think we are targeted by evil organizations run by cold-hearted men and women for our money and time, because many of us have already been through various mind control tactics as children. Easy prey, if you will, for the devil to recruit and then use us to get others involved in some shady groups. Think about the different entertainment groups, cults, fraternities, multi-level marketing associations, businesses, and churches that specifically go after blacks. Some of them know more about us then we know about ourselves especially the way many of us have been raised by our parents.

So what do I mean by the use of mind control and who would use such a thing? Someone, usually a parent or individual or group who we highly trust, that appears to help us when we are in need. However, we quickly learn that as quick as the help is given to us so too is the smile taken back. “What will you be doing for me?” they might ask or demand. This person or group may use various demeaning techniques during childhood (when we were most susceptible to all sorts of programming including TV shows) into adulthood to get us to do what they want. I know people 50 and 60 plus who are still being controlled by their parents, church groups and civic associations. They try to break from their programming, but mama, daddy or staff knows how to keep drawing them back.

Whether that dictator for a parent or leader of a group used things on us like cursing and name-calling when we did bad while keeping back most praises when we did well, they got us to perform didn’t they? During childhood, a parent may have physically assaulted his or her child especially during times in life when a child already feels bad about things like body image, menstrual cycle or school grades to get desired results. Some parents may have forced children to go to bed hungry because they didn’t want to eat everything on their plates. What was the pay off for that? No food is to go down the drain because you would be wasting your parent’s hard-earned money. Yet, later on in life for saving your parent money, you become obese.

These cold-blooded parents may have bad mouthed their children in front of other relatives and friends while they laughed. "You so fat and lazy...whoo child he black...girl so bright gone and get some sun...she an ugly child!"  There are those parents who made their children give up school activities in order to help around the house, get a job, or care for other siblings leaving them feeling guilty for wanting a life outside of the family.

The idea behind childhood mind control or what some would argue, “I was just raising my child. You lucky you didn’t turn out bad! Kids is so d*mn ungrateful!” was to take away what you love the most in order to get you to do what they wanted. A simple request is just that simple, but a parent with a few too many loose bolts in his or head will make everything a big deal!

From pets to favorite toys, when a parent uses these things appropriately to discipline a child, most always a child will get an item back when he or she complies with what the parent wishes or something to the equivalent. However, a cold-blooded parent, like the devil, will kill, steal or destroy the things the child loves the most usually right in front of the child. Someone once told me a story of a parent doing something as simple as breaking a child’s favorite toy in front of him while the child screamed. Another person told me how her mother got her to keep her mouth shut about family business with repeated threats to punch her in the mouth and that all she would be able to do is eat soup. One day she messed up, and one day she got slapped so hard she felt her teeth was going to come out. Someone else told me how his daddy used to beat him and his siblings with an extension cord while smoking a cigarette. Needless to say they also got cigarette burns in the process.

Young abused women have talked of being abused by both people they know and didn’t know and relatives did nothing but ask, “What did you do?” In my own abusive situation, at 21 years, with an ex-boyfriend, I managed to avoid being raped but almost suffocated from a pillow being put over my face on different occasions for crying and/or screaming after being repeatedly insulted and shoved. Things like that and more happened to me over a nine month period. I wrote poetry while I was in the abusive relationship, it was my only therapy. I published it over 10 years later on Amazon.com called, Laboring to Love an Abusive Mate. It took just that long to break emotions of fear as a result of mind control programming.

I went through some brainwashing being in that relationship without realizing it at the time, and interesting enough the ex boyfriend had been in the military as well as many other men that I had known both in and out of my family. So the mannerisms were familiar to me. Most of these military men were divorced.

In my abusive relationship, I was often thinking that I was at fault even during times I wasn’t. The abusive ex had been forced to watch adults having sex as a child which he at times would get emotional even at 30 plus years. He also had suffered some harsh discipline from his mother. At one time he had a drug addiction. Then later in life he became trained to kill our countries’ enemies like so many young men. However, when he got out of the military, his programming went haywire, as far as he was concerned all women were the enemy once he had sex with them. There was a long list of women who got abused by him. Now the trained, has become the trainer.

Psychological and physical abuse is serious and when you know someone is going off the deep end with their so-called discipline, it’s time to speak up. As for the mother with the frightened child (I spoke about earlier), her and her family left the pool before I could finish this article. I guess her baby’s screams was drawing too much attention.

In closing, we mustn’t confuse acting cold-blooded with acting righteously.  Stand for truth when wrongs have been commited against you without killing, stealing, and destroying another's person's will to live. 

By Nicholl McGuire

Playing the Lottery on Our Sons

I have four boys and I can't tell you how many times I have heard from different family members and friends a reference made about, "They might be the next..." you fill in a ball player's name.  I just look at the person speaking with a blank expression.  I don't say anything.  A few minutes ago while writing this, I heard a ball bouncing in a neighbors driveway, I was curious because there are no young people nearby.  Who do I see?  A young, black man bouncing a ball visiting a neighbor.  A man now, he couldn't stand there long enough without bouncing a ball.  I expected that sort of behavior from a child.  He stopped, finally.  I guess someone told him.  I wonder how many times a relative or friend when he was younger told him, "Keep working at it son, you might be the next..."

Let's just be honest with the following: ourselves, God, family and country, for a minute, not everyone is going to have a Lebron or Michael Jordan for a son.  As I type, one of my sons will be traveling around different counties playing basketball, some local scouts are already eye-balling him, but am I getting all excited about it?  Nope.  You see, one day I am going to look up and see, not a ball player, but my son doing what God has willed him to do.  I taught him as a baby about a divine calling on his life and ball playing is just a recreation for now as far as I'm concerned.  Now what it evolves into or what bridge might it lead him into, it's far too early to tell.  However, wherever God is taking him, he will be more useful to Him then to the devil that is for sure, I can just feel it in my bones.  Now if my child stays close to God, he will have the insight to resist the devil's temptations, but if not, his issue not mine--I had to learn back in the day too.  So I'll pray for him.  Anyway...

There is a psychology behind all of the brainwashing concerning these pro athletes from the people who own them, and unfortunately what used to be behind closed doors is now hidden in plain view.  It's one thing that athletes want to sell their souls for fame and fortune by joining fraternal groups, but when their oaths start showing up in my home, we cut the TV, game and whatever else off and then we do research to find out what is going on behind the scenes so that my children aren't walking around here talking about, "Evil is good and good is evil." 

Lebron is paying allegiance to the elite, Kobe, and many other athletes by using various handsigns and handshakes.  Just conduct some research on different video websites if you don't know what I am talking about.  Look up things like "freemasonry" for starters.  Check out other organizations and learn about their oaths.  You will find that people don't make it to the top just on talent and who they know, but how well they follow the script.  Good listening skills go a long way.

Anyway, I think that far too many "black folk," especially black folk who never had too much of anything, is playing lottery with their children.  That's right, gambling with them.  Hoping that their lottery ticket will win.  Some folks I know don't have a savings account trying to give their children everything--I WAS one of them (okay!?)  Others are so busy doing for their children, that their bodies are blowing up and they are often sick.  They don't have any time to exercise, watch their weight, and are still on the same prescribed medicine for far too long.  If you tell them, "What if your child doesn't make it?"  You might as well get cursed out, "The devil is a lie, my child..."  Some still singing the same song and dance and baby boy in jail and his girlfriend is knocked up.  "Stop lying to yourself," I'm thinking.  He will be lucky to get out and get a job.

The truth hurts, so the old adage goes.  I for one, use to hate listening to people tell the truth about the things that were supposed to have mattered in my own life back in the day, but you know what I learned something in this present day, that the more one fights against the truth, the more the truth wins.  "So ain't no sense in getting all mad!" someone told me once. 

Seriously, some of our people need to stop holding on to children like old lottery tickets, let them go.  If you didn't win, stop dreaming about "my son or my daughter buying me a house or car one day," it's not happening.

Maybe if we as parents do get "lucky," we will be grateful for any blessing our sons and daughters choose to give us if we have raised them right.

Nicholl McGuire