It’s no secret that Black America has gotten very complacent over the years.  Gone are the days when standing up and demanding better for your family and your community was a way of life.  If you’re looking for the objectification of women and the perpetuation of negative stereotypes to become unpopular in TV and media sometime soon, I’d suggest that you stop holding your breath.

I take the unpopular position of pointing the finger at the long-standing “leaders” in our community who may have done a few things in the 60’s and 70’s but haven’t done anything since then, the Old Guard.  The Old Guard has not done their part in cultivating new leaders and passing on the torch

Complacency and the pursuit of a dollar at ANY cost has become our undoing in our communities.  Think about it: …every African-American community has churches and a NAACP branch.  When was the last time you heard about a congregation stepping outside of their sanctuaries and knocking on doors, doing REAL outreach?  As far as the NAACP is concerned, can you name ONE program, event, or MEMBER of your local branch?

Let’s talk about this “worship” of the dollar in our community, especially by our youth.  How many Facebook statuses or Twitter updates have we seen saying “Get Money” or “Getting’ this money”…by people with NO JOBS!! Well, not legal ones, at least.  Even with that, is the chase of an easy dollar worth the deterioration of families and being unable to look our children in the eyes when they ask why you willingly and unapologetically sell DEATH to the community in which they grow up? It’s time for us to WAKE UP, plain and simple.

The truth is this: we, the Black community, have waited and suffered long enough.  Statistics aren’t getting any more hopeful, and disparities aren’t getting any narrower.  How many more of us have to be incarcerated before we decide to re-evaluate how our young boys and girls are being raised?  How many more children have to slip through the cracks of our educational system before we call for action from our local school boards?  How many of our young people with aspirations of excelling in life have to lose hope and go in the wrong direction because they lacked mentors to give them proper guidance?

If change in our community is to occur, and I mean REAL, SUSTAINABLE change, we have to make solid demands and stand by them. What demands? I thought you’d never ask.

1)     WE HAVE TO DEMAND MORE OF OURSELVES. 

Ignorance and lack of interest in current events must be deemed unacceptable from this day forth.  Whenever people become one-dimensional, they lose. Period.  How we go from a one-dimensional people to a dynamic one starts with you.  We can never stop learning or stop improving.  We can’t afford it as individuals, and we certainly can’t afford it as a community.  I will go deeper into this next time.

This also has a moral aspect attached to it.  We must learn to support each other, empathize with each other, and treat each other right. In order to do that, we must do the simplest thing that is seemingly so hard for us to do, which is SPEAK to each other. (MESSAGE!!)

2)     WE HAVE TO DEMAND MORE OF OUR LEADERS.

Just as we can’t afford to stay complacent ourselves, we can’t afford for people in leadership positions to sit and not do the work they were elected to do.  It’s time to tell these people and organizations to SHAPE UP OR SHIP OUT.  We must do away with these “cute” programs and community service projects that don’t have any true impact. 

Look at your long-standing activist organizations, cornerstones of the “Old Guard.”  What made activist organizations such as the NAACP so effective is that they were ACTING, really doing things and havingdiligently creating and sustaining a strong presence in our communities.  Today, some of these branches are more RE-active than anything, and they’re terrible at that, too.  When organizations become stagnant, we have to call the leadership to the floor and demand answers.  If they’re unwilling to get with the program, they must be replaced. B, bottom line.

3)     WE HAVE TO BECOME LEADERS.

All of us have to accept the challenge of turning around our communities.  If for no other reason, we must because we have been part of the problem at one point or another.  We’ve seen our young children model themselves after negative portrayals of Black men and women on television, yet passed on opportunities to address and correct the detrimental words or behaviors.  The reason why we’re in our current predicament to begin with is because we have collectively turned our heads and closed our ears to the things going on as if nothing was ever taking place.  That has to end, on ALL levels.

Furthermore, if we have to uproot stagnant, incompetent leaders, with whom will we replace them?  The[AG1]  We have to be able to recognize who is for the betterment of our community and who is against it, reaping the benefits of the position by doing nothing more than doling out empty promises and cheaply posturing themselves for the media.  We must step up, accept the call for us to do more than the status quo, and do the work that doesn’t just benefit us and our household, but our neighbors and the generation after us.

We can talk about gangs, drugs, economic disparities, and a broken family structure until we’re all blue in face, but what we really need to move forward is a CHANGING OF THE GUARD.  We are in desperate need of new leaders and, new ideas, …revitalizing our neighborhoods, our organizations, and, ultimately, our purpose. 

In the same way, one can’t do the same things and expect different results, the Black community cannot be led by the same people and expect our situation to get better as we move forward.

Stephen Smith is a recent graduate fromt the University of Tennessee-Knoxville with degrees in Political Science and Africana Studies.  He is currently working in Tennessee as a Field Organizer for Organizing for America.  In 2009, he created StephenJSmith.com, a fully -interactive site, featuring the latest world news, blogs, interviews, social commentary, and preferred readings.  He can be contacted at stephen.smith1911@gmail.com.