like i said, this is permanent.

Maybe it is just me, but I increasingly run into black men with degrees up their kazoos who can’t find a way to make a living commensurate with their education or no living at all. Though most of ‘em are still trying to put up appearances.

I’ve started a policy of insisting on paying for lunch meetings even if the meetings have been requested by the black men I’m meeting with, because I find that increasingly they are embarrassed cause they at the very least need to split the check, even if the check is only $30. And they.

It ain’t their fault.

It’s by design.

Those of us over 50 have seen it before. Lots of us are prepared for it mentally. I have random conversations with brothers of that age range about this stuff everywhere. Just had another one a few days ago while I got my car serviced. We see it coming down the pipeline and most of us shake our graying heads at the fact that the young ones don’t.

So it is going to be much worse than ever because the young ones have not been trained to either recognize and/or handle an age-old situation and system. Plenty of young “professional” black men just dream on that it is an individual matter and refuse to connect the dots of the system that puts them under this constraint.

Things are gonna come down on each individual black man like a ton of bricks.

And them brick ain’t gonna just “fall” they are going to be thrown with great deliberation and aim.

Ya’ll better keep your eyes open and get prepared for this shyt.

and craig i think your central point is a powerful one, something that you’ve been pushing (correctly) for a while now. i was just suggesting that among the black professional class this isn’t a new thing (brought on perhaps by integration).

I think the decline actually began when the black elite and professional classes began acting in ways that clearly signaled to less affluent and educated blacks that everything we had come to value was fungible and reducible to transactions.

On Craig’s party tip, I am absolutely right there. It’s rather a kind of astonishing dynamic. I last experienced it at the Cass Tech reunion for my wife a couple years back, but it was in an interesting form.

What I think - without getting too deep into it, is that a lot of blackfolks ‘regress’ into a safe kind of behavior which negates the reality of other blackfolks when they see a kind of phonyness. This creates an artificial gap that’s a bit tough to bridge. I think the ‘bourgie’ vs ‘country’ dynamic is so thick in African America because of this. And I think that our common sense understanding of mental health comes from home training paradigms. I believe that there’s real dissonance here - that ‘bourgie’ folks do not have a sense of awe or propriety about ‘big mama’ and that country folks have no reason to believe that ‘uncle clarence’ is for real. And so our approximation of those archtypes are met with extraordinary skepticism.

Speaking for myself, I take characters like Richard Pryor’s ‘Mudbone’ with a grain of salt. It never really occurred to me that anyone like Mudbone would or could be a respectable patriarch. So I would perceive dysfunction where others would get comfort. Similarly, the very concept of ‘Da Mayor’ from Spike Lee’s “Do The Right Thing” or the three cornermen resonated only comically with me. Whereas several black men with 4 inch afros on a dais wearing beige three piece suits and wide ties would get my immediate recognition and respect.

When I consider the bourgie party, I also recognize another dynamic through which I’ve passed. The stereotype is ‘the oldest man in the club’ and it’s about brothers who are finally getting a game on that we played long ago. There’s a grudging recognition that yeah, that was once me. But also what Craig says, man are you still dancing in suits?

There’s a kind of interesting extra critical dynamic at work here. Are we accurate in our criticism? Have we purged the guilt out of our observations as African Americans?

So what am i gonna do about it. Gonna holla at a couple of bruthas and over a malt/beer/coolaid see where we can take it.

Good to know that even over here in the cold UK I am not the only one concerned about our communal health on these issues.