Transcription
Culture now. Culture is a very important aspect of being a human. And what culture is, is it's a set of practices and also a set of beliefs that when mixed together, they position people to achieve certain goals or to produce certain outcomes. So, culture can be extremely useful in getting places. On the other hand, culture can be extremely detrimental and could be a barrier to getting places that are outside of the realm and the sphere of what that culture can provide.
And so, for this example, we're talking specifically about Black Culture. And Black Culture has a variety of practices, just like any other culture, that when practiced, lead to to certain results. And so, what we're going to do is go in this book here by, uh, Jason L. Riley, who is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and he's also a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. And we're going to read about a person named Trevor, who was his best friend at one time.
[Music]
Who fell victim to Black Culture. And because what we understand is that Black Culture, the product of it, a lot of the time, leads to death, imprisonment, um, degradation, destruction, at least to a lot of things as the outcome of the practices that take place within the Black community. And so, stories like this are important to understand because they tell a reality to people in order to get them to understand that whatever it is that you are practicing and your belief set around those practices, lead to certain outcomes. And if you don't want to have these outcomes, then you have to change the culture, the practice, and the identity.
So, let's get into the story about Trevor and let's meet him. Of course, many of our friends and most of our extended family lived in the Black sections of town. Now, leading up to this part of the story, Jason has already moved out of the Black community. His father moved them out when he was, uh, at the age of one. And they moved him out because the father wasn't satisfied with what was happening in the Black community: the crime, the, um, uncleanliness, and all those sorts of things. So, they moved to another area of town where it met their needs at that particular time. But still, a lot, a lot of his friends and a lot of his family still lived in the Black community.
Growing up, my best buddy Trevor lived on the same street that we had before moving to University Heights. So, Trevor, who was Jason's best friend at this time, still lived on the street that Jason had lived on prior to them moving and getting out of the Black community. Like my family, Trevor's was middle class, like me. Trevor had a mother who was a Jehovah's Witness and a father who wasn't. His parents were married. He and his younger sister had a good relationship with their dad, and Trevor was a solid student who excelled in math and science. Buffalo had two selective public high schools that used entrance exams. Trevor attended one of them, and his sister attended the other.
So, this is how Trevor's life is starting out. Both parents, middle class, public schools that you need to be, uh, have an entrance exam to get into. Middle class, everything sounds, you know, sounds like it's perfectly fine. But Trevor's neighborhood ultimately got the better of him. The neighborhood got the best of Trevor. What aspect of living in the Black community got the best of Trevor? Over time, he was taken in by the knuckleheads and thugs. The knuckleheads and the thugs, which we know, when you go to Black communities, if you've lived in Black communities, been inside of Black communities, you know that there's a lot of knuckleheads and thugs that terrorize those communities, especially in the projects, all in the inner city. They terrorize those communities, and they're prominent, they're rampant in there. And so, the knuckleheads and the thugs are influencing Trevor, and they've got a hold of him now.
The ways, the seductive ways, have seduced Trevor. School became less attractive to him than running the streets. That's one of the trade-offs when you run off with the knuckleheads and the thugs. School becomes less attractive. Running the streets becomes more attractive. You can't have both at the same time. Trevor is deciding to choose to run the streets and give up his education, which he once was good at in math and science. He drank and smoked weed. His language and attitude changed. Always a little quiet, he became sullen and much more withdrawn. He listened to gangsta rappers like Ghetto Boys and Ice-T. Girls became, this is one of the ways that the language starts to change, the vulgarity, the profanity. This is part of living in that culture. A massive part of it, from the rap songs to, to just the things that that culture, uh, creates, right? This is one of the things, and everyone knows this. Everyone knows it. It's not something that's a surprise, or it's not something that's hidden. He got into fights, and best believe, you have to be able to throw hands. That's one of the hallmarks of being in that, in that thuggish and that type of knucklehead society. Is you have to be able to fight. That's how you get your respect, being able to fight. And in many instances now, it's also, uh, being able to shoot. Being disrespectful to women and living that type of life that basically doesn't appreciate life. So, women turn into this, right here. The BW. They turn into a whole bunch of other words too, but this is just one of the examples that they turn into. This is the transformation of Trevor's life from a middle class going into deep into the Black community and Black Culture. What, what it really stands for.
At the [inaudible] he asked me why I hung out with the white boys. In Trevor's mind, white is associated with the math and the science. Black is associated with the thugs and the knuckleheads. Why are you doing that? Still over here in this middle class thing, is basically what Trevor's thinking. Why don't you come over here to the thugs and the knuckleheads, back into this Black community? We would cross paths from time to time as teenagers, but by the end of high school, I hardly knew Trevor anymore. We lived in different worlds. Cuz Trevor is now making a transition from a middle class all the way over to a knucklehead, into a thug, is becoming solidified now, where you can barely recognize the person.
Now, let's think about it on a deeper level. What is this saying? People have the ability to change different ways that they act. They have the ability to change the way that they perceive reality and the way that they see and interpret the world out, outside. When they make that change. So, Trevor made this change. He's making a change and saying, I don't want to be middle class anymore. I don't want to stand for this. He's using his human innate ability to create, to create what? A personality and a character for himself. And he's saying, I don't like this middle class thing. I want to go over and do this Black Culture thing. It's more specifically within the thugs and the knuckleheads. I want to be this. I, I am this. I want to become this. Now, they're at a point where they were both middle class, same background. Now they can hardly recognize each other, or at least Jason can hardly recognize Trevor. You're another person now.
He kept company with a crowd that I consciously avoided at the time. Trevor's "white boy" comment stunk. I did have a number of white friends on account of the schools I attended. So, long, long as we could afford it, my father sent me to private institutions where Black students were scarce. Now, why would Black students be scarce in private schools? Because Black Culture does not value education enough to spend the money that's necessary to put people into, into private schools as a community as a whole. Education is not valued to that extent. The things that Black Culture values are Jordans, uh, basketball, football, sports, entertainment. Those things, they'll invest the money in. But the culture doesn't prioritize education. And therefore, because of the culture, which I, which we said in the beginning, is a driving force moving you towards a certain goal, because it does not prioritize education, you will not see, or you should not expect to see, a lot of people in Black Culture with a Black identity in private school. Right? That's just the way it goes. It's a cause and effect relationship.
I went to public schools in 7th, 8th, 11th, and 12th grades, but I wound up in honors classes where the vast majority of kids were white. Now, why is that? That's because white culture is going to be centered more around education, prioritize more. That's the cause, right? We're talking about cause and effect relationships. The cause is the white culture having priority on, on, on education, and the effect is that there's going to be more people in white culture who are in the honors classes. Contrast to that, you're going to have Black Culture, which is going to be more centered around sports, rapping, music, and all those types of things. And as an effect, you're going to have way more of the kids grow up to want to aspire to be that. That's why you're going to have things like basketball and football, which has a large proportion of, um, of Black people in there, or people who would classify themselves as Black in there, right? This is a cause and effect thing. And so, which tells you, when you turn the key on it, which tells you that if you want to find your way into the honors classes, you need to come back to the cause and start tweaking the cause. The cause is the culture. You tweak that culture, and then from there, once the culture is tweaked, then you can go forward and you can see those, uh, effects.
My two sisters, to my father's chagrin, opted for the neighborhood public schools. Nor did they take to the church, which distressed my mom. Uh oh. So, now he's introducing his two sisters into the story, and they're going to play a part at the end too, along with Trevor. And so, they're taking their power of choosing and saying, we want to go to the neighborhood school, right? And there's a result from making that choice, as we'll see later on. Both of them fell in with the wrong crowd. Both of them, not one of them, but both of them fell into the wrong crowd. Now, who's the wrong crowd? Now, he, from Jason's perspective, the wrong crowd is going to be the thugs and the knuckleheads, that, and the people who are in the in-crowd, the ones who want to be socially accepted. Now, let's put it in proper perspective. To people who want that outcome, you want to be a thug and a knucklehead and in the in-crowd, which is a desire and an aim for many people, believe it or not. If you want that, then that is the right crowd. That wouldn't be the wrong crowd, right? That would match your, your objectives. So, that's the crowd you would need to be in. But Jason is saying that it's the wrong crowd because he's not, he's looking at it from someone who believes in middle class values and education and, and, and things that align with that. So, he, that's why he's calling it the wrong crowd. But it's not necessarily the wrong crowd. It just depends on which side of the coin you're looking at it from.
Indeed, they largely rejected the middle class values that our parents labored to instill in us. They went above and beyond to reject the middle class values. They said, we don't want to be that. Which, which are those values that were instilled to them? Instead, we want to be this. Being in the in-group, hanging around the thugs and the knuckleheads. We want to immerse ourselves in what really, what Black Culture stands for. Let's turn the key one more time. The human has the ability to be whatever it is the human desires to be. And the faster you can understand that, the faster you can take control over your own personality and your own character within your own self and create new causes within your own self that, as a result, create different effects.
They did this willingly, and not withstanding the geographic distance, soon they were sliding into Trevor's world. We lived under the same roof, but I spoke, dressed, and generally behaved in ways that were not only different from my siblings, but associated in their minds with acting white. Acting white is going to be associated with anything positive: education, uh, proper speech, studying, self-development, reading. Any of those things are going to be automatically tossed and labeled as acting white. On the contrary, we understand that acting Black means staying in darkness, ignorant, not breeding, sexual perversion, promiscuity, all those type of things, killing people, shooting, being a victim. These are the things that people associate with being Black. And white, unconsciously, or if they know consciously, then you can start to make decisions and start to see what you want to associate with and what you don't want to associate with, right? You can, you can use your human ability to make that decision, just like his sisters and Trevor are making the decision to make their association.
The teasing was good-natured for the most part, and I didn't let it get to me, but it was constant throughout my adolescence. It came from friends and family, from children and adults, from fellow congregants in the church, and on one occasion, from a Black public high school teacher who mocked my Standard English in front of the entire class after I'd answered a question. I very much enjoyed school. I was outgoing, athletic, made friends easily, but it wasn't the social life that attracted me. I also liked learning. I liked books. I was curious about the world. I wanted to be smart, not because I associated it with being white, but because I associated it with my father. Dad was smart, and I wanted to be like Dad.
Understand that nobody has a monopoly on being smart. Nobody owns the patent to being smart. It's accessible to anybody, whatever your skin color is, whatever your background is. Anyone could say, I want to be smart. I want to be intelligent. I want to be upstanding. Anyone has that ability to be. When you understand the human gifted creative powers that a human has, right? So, what he's saying is, he saw his father, and he wanted to mimic what his father was. His father was intelligent, therefore I want to mimic that, not because he wanted to be white.
I didn't avoid Black friendships, but most of the people I came across who shared my sensibilities, particularly about education, were white. There were other studious Black kids around, but not many, and there seemed to be fewer as I got older. The reality was that if you were a bookish Black kid who placed shared sensibilities above shared skin color, you probably had a lot of white friends. By contrast, the Trevors were everywhere. I was related to them, attended school with them, worshiped with them. These were Black kids from good families who nevertheless fell victim to social pathologies. These are the people who went from middle class and fell back into the pit. Their parents did all that work to climb out of the pit as much as they could, and to be sucked right back into it. Did somebody pull him back down in there? There's people always pulling to get people down into the pit, but it's not only the pulling, it's also that these people made choices to go back into the pit. Perfect example, Michael Irvin, who's that, um, uh, used to be an NFL, um, football player with the Dallas Cowboys. He talks about how his son lived in a gated community their whole life, and his son fell back into the pit, wanting to go off and be a rapper, and rapping about things that he has zero clue about. And so, a lot of people who don't come from that, once they learn, "Oh, this is what it means to be Black," throw all that aside, middle class values, throw all those values away. I'm going for this, right? That's exactly what happens. And there's a lot of them that this happens to. Parents working hard, climbing out of the pit, making it to almost making it to the free world, raise the kids. The kids see it, and they're right back down there to create the cycle once again. And they'll teach their children that, teach their children that, until you always have these little lumps of people who keep climbing out, right? And that's why you have to come to the conclusion that you have to just get all the way away from it.
Crime, drugs, teen pregnancies, and a tragically warped sense of what it means to be Black. And I come to the understanding that this is what it really actually means to be Black. A lot of good talk about what Black means, but I'm not looking at the talk, I'm looking at the action. People can talk a lot of talk. I've heard a lot of people talk, "Oh, I'm about to lose weight. I'm going to do all this." Okay, sounds great. Then when you see the actions, okay, well, we see that that's totally against losing weight. That's not what you're, you're really about. What the Black Culture is really about, is we see when you soon as you get on here and you click and you go on YouTube, you can see what's in the mind of Black people: dysfunction, disorganization, it's all types of stuff, right? And it's not that they're bad people. People is just that the vehicle that they're driving leads to that outcome.
Some were ghetto kids from broken homes with the odds stacked against them, but a surprising number were middle class children from intact families who chose to reject middle class values. They were not destined for Buffalo's mean streets. They had options, and they knew better, right? They know that they had other options. When you read Thomas Sowell's book, actually, it's in this book here too. He talks about it. When they did a study, people coming from families that are doctors and lawyers, talking about they don't know how their, I don't know how my parents made it. The struggle, being a victim, coming from doctors and lawyers, talking about they don't know how their parents made it. "It's rough out here. It's rough out here for a Black person." That type of talk circulates through the psyche of that community, right? And it reinforces, it reinforces itself to where it becomes a reality into the way that the people see the world. And only things that they see out in the world begin to be, um, be things that reinforce that idea. So, you look for things that make it true that it's hard out here, and you don't look for the opportunities where, dang it, it's way better. It's way better out here, right? You don't look for those opportunities, right? Those things are blocked off.
Yet, the worst aspects of Black Culture seem to find them, win them over, and sometimes destroy their lives because it's very seductive, very, very seductive. It's like the McDonald's of culture, seductive. Once you get in there and you get hooked, hard to get out. My Black peers were getting pregnant and fathering children. My cousins were compiling criminal records and doing drugs. And anyone who has family that comes from that background, you're going to know somebody in there that's either in prison, dead from the violence, or, or, um, actively involved in that type of life. It's just the norm in there, right? It's a normal reality in there.
My parents did what they could, but in the end, neither the church nor University Heights proved impenetrable. Because you have to understand, people do what people want to do. This is one thing that it was one of the greatest lessons that I had to come to terms with. You can't convince people to do anything. And when you come to that understanding, it releases the burden off of you, and it makes you focus on yourself because you can't get somebody to do anything that they don't want to do. People are going to do what they want to do. If somebody wants to go and be involved in, um, the activities of Black Culture, that's what they're going to do. No matter how many church sermons you show them, no matter how many, um, priests you bring to them, it doesn't matter, right? You can't convince and force anybody to do anything, and neither should you want to.
By the time I graduated from high school, my older sister was a single mom. Remember his two sisters? They were saying that he was acting white, and they instead wanted to go to the public school instead of the private school. They wanted to go into that in-crowd. And he said that they eventually got caught up with the wrong crowd, right? That social crowd. And now, that was the cause. What do we see as the effect? One of the sisters is now a single mom, probably got involved with one of those guys that are in that world, with those values that they have, with the standards and morals that they have. And when you get caught up with one of those types of guys, you can only expect the results of being with someone who has those type of standards and morals and values. And in this case, left without a father for the child.
By the time I graduated from college, my younger sister was dead from a drug overdose. A short time later, Trevor would also be dead, and his sister would also be a single mother. So, Trevor, who grew up in the middle class with both parents, middle class values, decided to reject that and say, "I don't want to do that anymore. That's acting white. I want to go off and go act Black, hang around the thugs, the knuckleheads, get involved in other types of cultural practices, fighting and all these other things, smoking weed and drinking." That's the cause. The effect, later on down the line, he died at an early age, right? And so, this teaches us a lesson about the importance of culture and how culture is the driving force of the results that you can expect later on down your life. And when you have a culture that is surrounded by murder, killing, drug dealing, pimping, prostituting, just, and just being as wild as you want to be, then you cannot expect the same results as someone who has a culture centered around studying, self-development, becoming educated, order, uh, within the family, and, and structure. Those two lead to two different paths.
And so, and so stories like Trevor teach us invaluable lessons on how to approach going forward. And how it is a high likelihood that once you continue to identify with certain sets of people who, who don't have a desire to change en masse, that when you start to have children and offspring, that it's easy for them to fall into that group mind and to become like that and to get those same results. And that therefore, Black people keep going on a cyclical type of roller coaster, or just keeps going round and round, round and round, until finally coming to terms with what the problem actually is, and then actually addressing it. But before you can come to terms with that, with the actual problem, there has to be a sense of receptivity and a sense of responsibility. Then, only then, can people see the problem for what it is, if you understand it to be a problem, and then you can make the proper adjustments for the people.
Sometimes I get people who say that they, that they want to be Black. And my response to them is that that is absolutely 100% okay. Right? If your values, practices, goals, standards, if it aligns with what Black is, then I would say, continue to, to do that. The message that we have here is for people whose goals for themselves and for their children do not align with that. That the, the solution is to remove from that. And you only need a small amount of people to do that, and then you have a culture built up that, that can push you towards the goals that you have, right? So, this is a very important, um, lesson to learn from Trevor and just to face the realities of what the culture is and what impact it has on people and the results that they end up achieving, uh, in their lives, right?
So, hopefully, you found this, uh, lesson valuable. And, um, and we have many more, many more to bring out that show a plethora of examples like this, right? To help you make informed decisions on what you want to do with your life, and you can be what you want to be, right? Okay, so my name is Brooklyn St. Michael, and I want to thank you for watching the video, and I'll see you on the next one.