Let’s Deglamorize D’Jango for Black History Month

It’s a cinch that hundreds of thousands of teens have seen D’Jango, the fictionalized account of slavery, and have begun to glamourize Jamie Foxx’s character. Therefore, D’Jango seems like a good place to start the conversation with black children about Black History month. Let’s begin the discussion with, there were no D’Jango actions back then that didn’t go unpunished. D’Jango’s weren’t stopping whippings and turning the tide on the white overseers. There were no D’Jango’s riding tall in the saddle, guns strapped around their waists.

That slave story is a figment of Mr. Quentin Tarantino’s imagination. A real account of slavery would be more like Roots, which is a more brutal account of slavery in that it shows the everyday horrors black people endured for(seemingly)ever with no glamour injected.

“It’s too depressing,” a youngster will say about Roots. The answer has to be that blacks may be the only race who haven’t internalized and learned from their history. In spite of Barack Obama, Beyonce, Jay Z, Kobe Bryant, and a few others, we aren’t doing so well. Too many of our young people have turned to violence for instant gratification.

In Chicago alone 43 youths were murdered by other youths in January. This cries out with disrespect for the struggles our forefathers endured. They didn’t die trying to escape injustice so our children could take up guns and kill each other? Slaves wanted to go to school. They wanted to read and write. Fredrick Douglass and other slaves hid down by the river so they could practice reading and writing. Where is the justice, the gratitude in kids cutting up in class or just giving up and dropping out because it’s too hard.

This has become a rambling diatribe, so I’m going to stop it now by saying that children need to be raised. Parents must give up drugs and become responsible for the lives they brought into the world. Kids must be fed, clothed, taught divine retribution, and shown love. We must hold great, great expectations for our kids no matter what we have not accomplished ourselves.

Finally, we have to lobby our politicians for more afterschool programs and jobs for youths. A mayor on tv crying over a child’s death is nothing to me! Where are the jobs? Where are the programs? An idle mind is the devil’s workshop!