Children – The Potty Mouth Granny

PTSD, Black Youth, Drugs, & The Lack of Empathy

My daughter is 22 years old and she’s been through a lot mentally over the past eight years. She’s lost so many friends to murder on the streets of Chicago that it’s heartbreaking. Some of her classmates from grade and high school. Friends from the various neighborhoods we have lived in. So many lost children because that’s the way I look at the younger generation because they could be my children.

Black children and young adults are dealing with trauma. The trauma of seeing their friends being killed at the hands of each other due to gang violence. The trauma of having friends struggling with drug addiction and who have committed suicide because they got tired of existing. The saddest thing about this trauma is that the no one cares. Not society and and the not the community that is supposed to love, protect, and nurture them. Not even their parents in some cases. Due to the trauma, they have PSTD and the ramifications of this is going to affect the Black community for generations.

The conclusion that I’ve come to is that Black folks don’t give a fuck about Black children. If they did, they would raise them properly, make sure that their homes were a haven, not just a place to lay their heads down at night.

They would understand that parenting doesn’t stop once the children become teenagers. So many of the crimes taking place in Chicago have been committed by teenagers under the age of 16 and the crimes were committed at night past curfew. Why aren’t these trifling ass parents concerned about where their children are? I’ve seen activists whining about how the teenagers need something to do and that’s why they’re out at night. Lies. It’s something for teenagers to do during the day but their parents aren’t interested in signing up for the various programs. It’s no reason at all for teenagers to be roaming around past 9pm. What youth centers exist that is open all night long for teenagers? No where in the world because they are supposed to be home.

I love Blackness but I’m so tired of Black folks making excuses for stupid shit. Justifying bad behavior in the name of Blackness. Ignoring the new generation of young drug addicts who are strung out on pills and Lean. Worried about petty shit while our children are suffering and self medicating themselves to early graves and to the prison system.

That’s my baby in the picture above and she’s been loved and nurtured her whole life and how could I not? I carried her underneath my heart for nine months. She’s my legacy to the world along with her older sister and brother. The streets weren’t going to take my babies away as long as I had breath in my body and I wish more Black parents thought like me.

Violence, Mayhem, and Chicago

My family migrated to Chicago during the 1940s and they told the most marvelous stories of living here during that era. From dranking at juke joints in Bronzeville to eating the good cooking at various Black owned restaurants scattered throughout the city. Then I have my own stories of growing up on the South East Side. Memories of hot summer days, running through open fire hydrants and buying icee cups. But I’m starting to hate the city of my birth because of the violence. It’s barely two weeks into the new year and it’s already bloody. Pregnant women getting shot down like dogs. What the fuck is going on!!!!

It’s something sinister in the streets of Chicago. Its become a place where life has no value and anyone can become a casualty of thugs. Believe or not, it was actually a time in Chicago when the elders, women, and children were considered off limits to gang bangers but something changed in the 90s. The thugs decided that anyone could get this heat and and since then, Chicago has become a cesspool of ignorance and violence. And Black folks in this city have no one to blame but themselves because they coddled this shit. Nurtured this shit in the name of racism instead of looking in the mirror. White folks aren’t coming into neighborhoods such as Englewood and South Shore where violence is a daily ritual. Nah this is strictly a Black thang. Black people are committing these crimes and Black people are protecting these criminals.

If it wasn’t for my grandson and future grandchild, I would move to Las Vegas and never look back but I have to be an integral part of my grandchildren’s lives. I have to live near them, see their faces up close on the regular. Touch them and sniff them like a mother cat does to her kittens. So for now, Chicago is where I’m at. I’m praying for the day when this madness will disappear.

A Village Without Love

There has been an ongoing war between the sexes in the Black community for decades and it is time for it to end because it is pathetic and the only people hurting are the children. 70% of Black children reside in a single parent household; usually the mother and Black children are highly over represented in the foster care system. Black children are only 14% of the American population, but are in the foster care at the rate of 23% and that is a damn shame.

Some folks are so busy arguing amongst themselves about who is more trifling, Black men or Black women that they have absolved ourselves of all parental and community responsibility. No one wants to look in the mirror and change themselves but would rather sit back and blame each other while making a slew of babies that will grow up confused and fucked up. Ladies its too much birth control out here to be having children you do not want to be bothered with. Motherhood is a tour of duty that never ends and if you really don’t want to be bothered with responsibility of children, don’t have any. Stop letting these dudes whisper sweet nothings in your ear when that coochie is on fire, trying put stupid shit in your heads about having babies but ain’t said shit about marriage.

And men, I have not forgotten about y’all: if you do not want children, strap your boy up or get a vasectomy. Any man who is stupid enough to put the fate of his unborn children in the hands of a possibly unstable and vindictive woman deserves to have the child support system hounding his dumb ass for the rest of his life.

In past five years, there has been a big movement online, encouraging Black women to date outside their race and it has been fascinating to read the comments from some Black women on various websites as to why they have decided to date interracially. Because ironically, they sound just like some of these Black dudes when they give their reasons for not dating within their race but I ain’t the one to gossip so you didn’t hear that from me. American culture is a patriarchal one in which all men, regardless of their race or ethnicity, has been socialized to believe that they are superior to women. So if a Black woman thinks she will be escape patriarchy by turning to another race, she needs a reality check. The same premise goes for those Black men who told themselves that if they get a White woman, they will be as good as the White man and history has shown that premise to be a complete and utter lie.

Stereotypes about Black men and women that were originally created by the dominant culture are now running amok and being perpetrated by Black people themselves. The community is on the edge of a precipice but instead of coming up with feasible solutions to the problems of a poor educational system, poverty, lack of economic opportunities in blighted areas, and the high murder rate in inner-city neighborhoods, some of us would rather discuss the lives of celebrities who wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire.

All these stereotypes do is keep Black folks at each other’s throats and Black communities throughout America are on fire as a direct result. It takes a village to raise a child and what happens when the village is at war with each other? A generation of angry children without love and compassion, hence the state of current Black America.