Above Average

It was a very humbling experience to be told "No" or nothing at all when I applied to jobs after I graduated. When I graduated in December 2008, I really felt like I would kick down doors and I would be on my way to a higher place. This horrible economy has forced me to be humble in ways un-imaginable. I haven't bought myself a pair of new shoes/clothes in over a year and a half. And for those of you who know me really well, YOU KNOW I like to be "fly as that one thang" I've had the pleasure of having good people in my life because Lord knows I've borrowed enough money, food,shelter and other things to last a life time. Because of God's grace I've been able to keep my head above water and maintain a quality of life that shouldn't have even been possible without a job. But I've done it and this is my testimony to the world.

It's a very humbling experience to walk amongst your peers that have seen you at your highest peak and to now see you searching for a new direction in life. People who used to be your biggest fans will now say "what the f*** are you doing with your life????" Oh yes, even family members will doubt your veracity. I've told my reasons for my position in life countless times but people still give you the suspect look like "yea n**** whatever, get a job". Luckily I'm a humbly- arrogant person who doesn't listen to people because If I didn't know myself enough to know my heart and Gods plan as well. I would have caved in to the ignorant thoughts of others. I have taken the left,right, up and down route to even move one inch closer to my dreams. I'm still searching for that one particular thing that gives me the most joy but trust me my heart and God are working hand in hand nowadays.This experience has taught me to hold steadfast in your belief in God's promise and your own heart. I knew all along that me not finding a job didn't have shit to do with me. It wasn't my time. If you believe that God doesn't make mistakes then your unemployment is no mistake. I knew that my RESUME SHITS ON 80% of the people in the job market, it just wasn't my time. So instead of being impatient and getting down on myself, I kicked it. Why be depressed about some shit that you cant control. Yea yea fill out some job applications for a job that you can get without your $80,000 degree so you can make minimum wage while your boss with no degree can tell you what to do. Have fun!!!!(BTW Subway can "S my D")

This leads me to another issue I have. I'm so happy that this recession hit because if it didn't I wouldn't have gotten the gumption to start my own business. I thought to myself why am I selling myself short and wasting my time applying for these SUS-ASS jobs that I can get without a college degree. Why spend $80,000 plus on a degree for a job you can get without one???? Thats hella dumb and if you did it big shoutouts to you and I'm not knocking you for it. BUT AS FOR ME, Daunte Martez Henderson, I'm not doing it. Why would I??? I don't have a problem with a regular job but I don't like the idea of being regular when I have above average qualities. I don't think I'm more special than the next person BUT I have a firm belief in the BEAST inside of me that's why I'm not settling for a regular job. Regular job=paying the bills, but if all you do is PAY BILLS and go to work .That shit sucks. And most likely you're unhappy. Why be unhappy and u only get one life???

So after countless times of overdrawing my bank account and being broke. I thought to myself. I run my mouth tooooo much and toooo well not to get paid for it. I give excellent advice, I'm motivational(big shoutouts to Jeezy and Yeezy), and I believe in 100 % of anything I say. Make it Happen Daunte!!! I'm started my own business, and its called M.A.D.E.M.A.N(Making a Difference for Each Man). I will be going around to local high schools ,middle schools and community centers talking to youth about the importance of getting your education and doing more than graduating from high school. I fully believe in going to college. College is more than just the books for me. I've grown into a well-equipped human being for the experiences I've had in school. There is a large number of people out there that don't know/feel that they deserve this opportunity. So yea Daunte has his own business.

Oh yea I'm moving to Chicago this Thursday September 15, 2009 to be an assistant manager-trainee at U.S. Cellular.. I gotta be "regular" until Diddy calls me.

Brother, Can You Spare Some Class: Black Men In The Media

Brother, Can You Spare Some Class: Black Men in the Media
By: Tolu Olorunda
Staff Writer - YourBlackWorld.com

On October 15th, Comedy Central is slated to premier a “satirical fake news show” called, Chocolate News. David Alan Grier, most famous for his many characters in the ‘90s hit sketch comedy series In Living Color, will be the host. The show is reported to be a cultural spin-off of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, but judging from the released trailers, Comedy Central is aiming for a much different objective. The scene is an all too familiar one. The trailers feature Grier, like past Black comics before him, dressed up in feminine outfits, yelling at the top of his voice, acting erratically, and operating in an incoherent shuffle. It is as though this long national nightmare, of which President Ford spoke, is far from over.

In early 2005, Chappelle’s Show, Comedy Central’s most popular series at the time, received a set-back from production because Dave Chappelle, star of the show, had come to a sobering conclusion that he did not wish for his soul to be purchased at the price of corporate America’s offer. As the legend tells itself, Dave Chappelle turned down $50 million – the allotted price for the third season – and escaped to South Africa for a “spiritual retreat.” Comedy Central, uneasy about the kind of message being sent to Black boys and girls across the globe, initially spun Chappelle’s departure into a battle with the flu, but subsequently reoriented it to suggest a meltdown of insanity and eccentricity.

Dave Chappelle, upon a return to The States, informed TV icon Oprah Winfrey, that he was motivated to halt production of his ultra successful show because it had grown increasingly “socially irresponsible.” In response to the growing concern from within the Black Community, vis-à-vis his many overtly stereotypical sketches, Chappelle remarked that he didn’t want “black people to be disappointed in me for putting that [message] out there. … It's a complete moral dilemma.” What an unusual and unprecedented act of solidarity and candor.

What Dave Chappelle understood, quite explicitly, is the depth to which images matter. Dave Chappelle, unlike his counterparts, has a concerted knowledge of history and is aware of the degree to which Minstrel shows, in the past, have damaged the quality of life for Black folks worldwide. For Chappelle, stoking the flame of suffering would be unforgivable and unacceptable. If contemporary Black comedians, artists and entertainers in general, possess a similar amount of self-worth, the world would undoubtedly be a much better place for Black people. Veteran Black Panther activist and presently incarcerated political prisoner, Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin a/k/a “H. Rap Brown,” once noted that in the stadium on entertainment, Blacks “dominate the field,” but stop short of actually “controlling” it. In essence, commercial Hip-Hop artists foolishly parade around with diamond-encrusted slave chains on their necks, but ultimately realize who the “master” is.

Hip-Hop, a musical genre constructed from the agonizing and cruel conditions of inner-city life, has now morphed into a safe-haven for over-sexed men, over-sexed women, cutthroats, pimps, promiscuous females, testosterone-filled adolescents, capitalists, criminal international bankers, government agents, drug-dealers etc. What once represented, as Public Enemy founder Chuck D put it, the “CNN for black people,” is now a disseminator of filth, uncleanliness and impurity. Corporate Black male rappers – powered by big name industries – operate like cranked-up robots whose sole purpose is the further degradation of Black women. With the much publicized studies claiming 72% of Hip-Hop’s consumers to be White kids, with 80% of that being suburban White females, one wonders for whom the proverbial “studio gangsters” flex their steroid-laden muscles.

The triple evils of BET, VH1 and MTV have wreaked more havoc – in the 21st century – upon the Black psyche than at any other period in entertainment history. Under the umbrella of Viacom, owned by the 85-year-old White Sumner Redstone, BET, VH1 and MTV have risen to great heights as the primary source of amusement for the 18-35 demographic. Even more foul is the reality that BET – also know also known as “Black Evil Television” or “Black Embarrassment Television” – has extended that margin to accommodate, through marketing schemes, kids as young as 9 years. old.

Like every rotten apple, BET was once a ripe beacon of illumination and intellectual stimulation. At a certain period in its formation, the now withering BET entertained a diversity of programs and a line-up embroiled in novelty. As the late Notorious B.I.G. once quipped, “Damn, sh-- done changed.” With long-axed variety shows including, “Our Voices with Bev Smith,” “BET Tonight with Tavis Smiley,” “BET Tonight with Ed Gordon,” “BET Nightly News,” “Teen Summit” and “Lead Story,” it seemed odd that Black Entertainment Television would, in a pathetic move, attempt to substantiate the magnitude of such loss with the addition of a weekly half-hour political talk show, hosted by noted activist, Jeff Johnson. In 2007, many activists in the Black Community grew weary of BET’s stubborn reluctance to feed its viewers healthy material, and therefore employed numerous avenues to send a strong message of resistance to the corporate monsters – mostly white – whose programming decisions are wiping out the consciousness of an entire generation.

One of such activists, Opio Osokoni, created an international “Turn off Channel Zero” (TOCZ) movement in mid 2007. Through a self-produced documentary, Osokoni searched for answers to the over-saturation of Black male buffoonery on Viacom and the mainstream media at large. The documentary featured a panel of acclaimed activists such as Public Enemy member Professor Griff, Hip Hop journalist Davey D, Last Poet's Abiodun Oyewole and Morgan State University Professor Ray Winbush. In less than 80 minutes, Turn off Channel Zero was able to accomplish what most mega-budget Hollywood scripts constantly fail in fulfilling. It exposed the corporate characters that pull the strings behind big media companies.

One intriguing development was the fact that most of those forces, who now sit atop the Hip-Hop and “urban” industry, are Caucasian or non-black. These corporate criminals are, without a doubt, the chief culprits in the continual cheapening of the Black Community’s integrity. With the stroke of a pen, they have outlawed positive/uplifting imagery, and promoted – with full force – the incessant caricature of Black life that has grown into a normative state on most entertainment and News channels. Rosa Clemente, V.P. nominee of the Green Party, spoke out eloquently against this reality in a 2005 protest of the Hip-Hop station, Hot 97. “Believe me, when you look at Emmis.com, and you see the 7 top executives of Emmis Communication, they are all white men over the age of 50, programming poison to our children,” Clemente said. “As a new mother, with a two-month old, I refuse to let these companies, these corporations, call my daughter a bitch, a hoe, a nigger. It’s over. It’s not about ‘free speech.’ It’s about your peddling drugs into the mind of our community. What you do is addicting our children to violence.” Another sobering finding, that TOCZ uncovered, is the reality that White corporate executives have always found – and would always find – Black males who would readily submit themselves for the usage of the devil.

Many older Blacks are familiar with Stepin' Fetchit and the horror of minstrel shows. White directors, in the 1800s, formulated a plan to keep their pale-faced audiences everlastingly entertained. The way they figured it, if Black men soon resolved their internal battle with self-hatred/self esteem and decided to abruptly refuse the role of “lawn jockey” for White-owned media production companies, white actors could simply darken their faces with cosmetic products and perform in a way they believed was natural to Black people – that of drunkenness, laziness, ignorance and incompetence. Luckily for the swine, locating Black men who perceived their prime objective in life to be that of lackeys and coons for White satisfaction has proved to be no daunting task.

In the ‘70s, CBS found it amusing to promote a sitcom called “Good Times.” The premise of the show was apparently to propagate the concept that a family with unpaid bills, horrible living conditions, insufficient food, and domestic commotion was somehow dwelling in “Good Times.” As expected, the cast of gifted characters was incomplete without a silly-acting son whose self-obsession, poor taste and preoccupation with promiscuity was accommodated, and sometimes encouraged, by the loving, yet misaligned set of parents. It was also in the ‘70s that NBC ‘made a killing’ with the variety show, The Flip Wilson Show. A show which, amongst other factors, was most popular for the Geraldine Jones skit, featuring the host, Clerow Wilson Jr. reduced to the role of a sharp-tongued black woman who was devoid of any sense of personal responsibility and always retorted – when caught – “The devil made me do it!”

This phenomenon of Black men unashamedly embracing offers that require appearances in dresses and drags have blossomed into a cash-magnet enterprise. Tyler Perry (Madea) and Martin Lawrence (Big Momma’s House), two very famous comedians, are perhaps the most treasonous in reprising self-imposed roles, where the mocking and open denigration of Black women (whether consciously or subconsciously) is entertained as “humor.” It is somewhat ironic that these two acts are most beloved by Black women, whose mass consumption of “mammy-like” stereotypes helped make Perry and Lawrence instant multi-millionaires.

It is no surprise that the same media which revels in the destruction of Black male identity seeks to fulfill the same with today’s most important Black male: Sen. Barack Obama. More disturbing is the reality that Sen. Obama, like prominent Black public figures before him, is too uninformed to acknowledge the degree to which such acquiescence would redound toward the disadvantage of generations to come after him. One thing is for certain however: Black folks of consciousness have work cut out for them. For Change is not a cheap political exercise, but rather a unified hegemonic force against a system of convention.

Reposted From Black Commentator

Your Black World: Lost Ones (Revised) - By Yorri Berry

Lost ones (revised)

Dedicated to my former students and young brothers labeled as throwaways

By: Yorri Berry

On his eighth birthday

He doesn't get a bike

Just a prison cell with his name engraved on the exterior

Because he can't read as well as his counterparts a little less tan than he is

And his intellectual inability has less to do with his tanness

Rather his lack of in-demandness

Because his blackness means that he doesn't make the priority cut on their checklist

So instead of buying more books and hiring more qualified and credentialed educators for the underperforming school that never taught him how to read

They add a pair of handcuffs to the inventory list because he'll never graduate anyway

Check the rates

For little colored boys like him finishing high school makes him the exception

So no need for a college fund

No need for updated books and a college preparatory curriculum

No need to build state of the art computer labs when we can just install more metal detectors

Because his name is no longer little colored boy failed by the system, the schools, the inactive daddies held hostage in the prison cell a few blocks down from the one they're building for him, and the high and mighty middle class of educated black folk who dare not care long enough to matter

His name is just criminal

Or criminal junior who looks just like his criminal senior pops he never met

So we treat him like one

And when we walk down the street next to him clutching our purse noses in the air we greet him like one

And when we fail to feed him truth that says you better read until you can't read anymore because by age 18 they expect you to be in prison not college we deceive him like one

Little black boy when I see you I don't clutch my purse

Nor do I perceive you as violent as if you are out to get me

Allow me to inject two pints of reality into your mind

Because young brother the hit is out on you

The racism is no longer blatant

Instead it is covered in whipped cream I call institutionalized

While the media sells wholesale societal lies

That you will amount to nothing more than a dangerous, illiterate, unemployed, HIV infected throwaway

That your life isn't worth the same as the Laura Bush's and Cindy McCain's

And if you don't believe me do a comparative analysis of black men who kill white women versus black men who kill other brothers and tell me if the penalties are anywhere near the same

Lame

Is the fact that when we see your underwear and little tighty whiteys because you're too cool to wear a belt we simply shake our heads

When we hear you use the words woman and bitch interchangeably we simply shake our heads

When we see you chillin on street corners during school hours we simply shake our heads

We shake our heads and keep moving because we didn't birth you so that means you are not our problem

And like much of society we too have given up on you

Throwaway

But I dare someone to reach their clean hand into the garbage can and take back our boys and show them how to be men

Stop shaking your head because they are teens reading on 4^th grade levels and tutor them

Because criticism from afar won't bring about change

See

The birthing of these words aren't for fame
Or critical acclaim
Rather my mind being shaken from mental orgasms arising from reality relationing my brain
In the middle of morning
And right now I'm in the middle of mourning truth confronting me
A newfound peripheral actuality
When I examine our communities
I see slave ships moving down the street
Except they look like you...and me
I'm just a truth-seeking rational being
Bleeding black representative of the need to go back

Not only to examine the past but analyze the present and force a burial of unequivocal jargon that some of us have "arrived"
I have no PhD yet but I'll assert that 23 years ought to qualify my perspective affirming that regardless of how many advanced degree-getting gated community living colored folk out there

If we still have public school systems graduating fewer than 50% our young men then one of our wings is broken therefore none of us can fly
I open my eyes

Only to see his fist effortlessly pounding another compelling me to envision his future in prison or a mortuary
Little brother
Son of a mother who doesn't care
Conceived of a sperm who ain't there
While last night's dinner and body wash was elsewhere
Because he came to school hungry with unclean fingernails
Didn't physically smell
Yet from the look in his eyes I knew his home life was dirty
For change he was thirsty
But the only water I had to offer were the dried up tears I cried last night as
I pondered the fate of his classmates
The one with the fresh Jordan's who could barely read
The one who uses woman and B.I.T.C.H. interchangeably
The one who has the potential to be a genius unable to focus because of his past
The one who hasn't turned in a completed homework assignment since he's stepped foot in the class
Then I think to myself

What percentage of these boys have never used the word DAD

Some days I try not to care so much

Because when I think of him I find myself unable to focus, losing sleep
But like so many others I can't overlook the reality looking back at me
While aspiring bourgeois wannabes are having tea parties and networking socials
I sit here immobile

Emotion filled with tears because I lack solutions
Wishing it was just an illusion
Yet the conclusion to which I have come is that without mental and physical individual and institutionalized change

It'll be a miracle if one of these boys graduates from college
I don't see him in juvenile detention because Jena's America attempts to sentence 28 yrs for fighting
Some look at me like my vision is skewed for not accepting this version of normality
But It'll never be normal to me because its not supposed to be
Each day I drove from work thinking about those boys I cried the entire way home
And I lived 35 minutes away
Apathetic to his pain
Terrorizing my life
When I leave, I still care
Even after I close my eyes in slumber he's still there
Yes

I understand he just may encounter more crack heads than he does college graduates
Still, I'm angry because he can't read and
HELP ME HELP YOU

Directly, indirectly, subconsciously, spiritually pleading
I wonder if King ever got tired of dreaming
Or illiterate slaves hungry for knowledge got tired of reading
I'm tired of writing but my journey and work has just begun
I'm experiencing feelings reflective of needing an emotional gas station
Instead of the violence perpetuating misogynistic videos BET needs to air my 9-5
Monday through Friday intertwined
Harsh realities
Crisis in the community
Yet how many of us are prepared to dedicate our lives to lending Minds...dollars...hearts...hands
Revolutionizing to give a damn
Longer than two-minute tears
Inactive fears
Complacency for future years
Of witnessing historical cycles remain unbroken

Yorri Berry is a Katrina Survivor and a poet who has granted YourBlackWorld.com permission to offer her thought-provoking poems to the masses. Look out for more of her highly enriching poems. Click here to Contact Ms. Berry.