by Minister Paul Scott
Guest Columnist

The patience required to deal with brothers who were less culturally aware during the Black Power Era of the �60s, spawned the adage that �every Negro is a potential Black man.� In the 21st century, �The Afrikan Power Era�, our slogan should be �every Thug is a potential Afrikan.�

It is imperative that we look at this Thug/gangsta image that has been held up as the essence of �Black manhood� and more importantly the ramifications that it has for Black men, Black women and Black children.

If we trace the creation of the �Thug�, we must, of course, start with the destruction of the Black masculinity during the African Holocaust (trans-Atlantic slave trade.)

Before the Africans were brought here bound in chains, they had been stripped of their manhood through an intense �seasoning� process, the horrors of which have never been fully realized by this society.

Upon arrival to America, the enslaved African was treated like one of the animals of the field and used for two purposes: labor and �breeding.�

It has been recorded that many Black men were lynched right in front of their pregnant wives so the fear that she felt would be transferred into the unborn child. It is also said that the slave owner would sometimes snatch a Black woman away from her husband in the middle of the night and make the husband watch as he brutally raped her, further stripping him of his masculinity.

After the end of �physical� slavery, instead of declining, the attack on Black manhood intensified as the white man never would forget to �put the Black man in his place� by constantly regarding him as a �boy� regardless of the age. That is why we have so many �men� behaving as �boys� today. I have heard it said that the trend of �sagging� (walking around with your pants hanging off your behind), which many of our young people think is so cool, came about because when a white man would see a Black man with his pants pulled up, he would make him drop them down because �only  men were supposed to wear their pants pulled up.�

During the Civil Rights era, while the emphasis should have been on regaining our manhood and culture, the mainstream Civil Rights groups concentrated heavily on sharing a toilet or a lunch counter with white folks.

One of the main failures of the Civil Rights Movement was focusing on integration instead of the social, economic and spiritual empowerment of the Black community. We bent over backwards to love white folks all the while hating our Black selves.

We made an attempt to recapture our Black manhood during the Black Power Era of the late �60s and early �70s, but that was quickly crushed by COINTELPRO and other attempts by the white power structure to make sure the transformation from boys to men would never take place. This created a fear that anyone who stood up to fight for Black people would be killed.

All of this has led to an internalized anger which, when coupled with the conscious or subconscious fear of white power, has produced the Thug image of today.

Where the fear was too great to challenge white supremacy  head on, a pseudo-culture was created which allowed the Black man to let out his aggression without becoming a threat to the white power structure. It has also given him the ability to search for self-respect in material things�clothing with the name of a white man on the label or gold medallions.

The MEDIA (MisEducation Destroying Intelligent Afrikans) has been a willing ally in this endeavor with the movies that have degraded the Black man from the pimp/player roles in the black exploitation movies of the early �70s ( �Super-Fly�, �The Mack�) to the gangsta flims of the late �80s to the present (�Menace to Society�, �Belly�, etc.)

The effect on the Black community has been devastating. The reason that you have 30-something-year-old men acting like teenagers is because thug life has no age limit.

When I was a rebellious teen, we would laugh at anyone over 21 still �trying to be down� because the bad boy image was seen as something that kids did. Today, every other song  on the radio is about grown men trying to be Thugs/gangsters as if that is something to be proud of. Some of the rappers have sons that carry the same Thug image as their fathers (Lil Romeo and Master P.) There is something very wrong with that.

Recently, I listened to a sister on the radio telling the DJ how she needed a man with a �little Thug in him.� It is sad that while the sisters of previous generations wanted a man to give her R-E-S-P-E-C-T, some of our less conscious sisters today want a man to treat them thuggishly.

We are currently raising a generation of young people that has no sense of Black culture outside of the Thug culture. When asked to name two Black men who �died for the struggle�, instead of naming Malcolm X and Fred Hampton, they will tell you quickly Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. Or, if ask them the meaning of political prisoner, they will say, �Yeah, that�s what they tried to do to Puff Daddy.�

What our community is missing is a complete analysis of the Thug Life phenomenon in the context of the Black Liberation Struggle. We cannot let the �fear of blaming the white man for all our problems� or the fear of �preaching hate� prevent us from giving our people a correct historical analysis of the condition of Black people.

We must give our young people a sense of culture. We must remove the red and blue bandannas from the heads of our children and replace them with the African Liberation colors of red, black and green. We must replace their gang signs with Black Power fists raised proudly in the air. We must replace Black self-hate with Black love for all Black people.

We must replace the desire to be a Thug with the desire to be a strong African man fighting for the liberation of his people.

(Minister Paul Scott is founder of the New Righteous Movement based in Durham, N.C. He  can be reached at [email protected])