Wreh Jr: What is ‘gettocentricity?’

Joseph Wreh Jr, Reporter

We as a people have long been removed from the days of Dr. Martin Luther King, Marcus Garvey and the forgotten originator of Black History, the honorable Mr. Carter G. Woodson. The glorification of African-American history and the fulfillment in its prevalence within our communities is slowly decaying amongst our youth.

Many have died deprived of precious knowledge that we often refuse to covet. Lacking the consciousness of our treacherous beginnings and distorted origins, which stem from long rooted acts of European subjugation, we deliberately give credence to the very stereotypical traits and behavioral patterns that are afflicting the proliferation of African Americans engrained with an acute awareness of true self-worth.

From the genesis of our conception we are preserved within the wombs of ignorant black women. Far too consistently, African-American mothers are being inseminated in the early years of teenage livelihood. What truly compounds this problematic issue is the absence of self-worth amongst young black women. It becomes vital to develop a staunch belief that true wealth surpasses tangible and materialistic value. We must urgently begin to embody the most significant conviction a man can take on during his lifetime. In essence, we must adhere to a key principle of life: knowledge is a direct correlation to self-worth.

As we continue to prematurely bring our children into unstable circumstances, as a collective nation, we are ineffectively establishing a solidified foundation beneficial to the success and triumph of future challenges our children will face. We are unable to exemplify a meaningful representation of self-respect and dignity for our offspring to latch on to because we do not associate the value of such traits with the accumulation of knowledge. In regards to raising a child of color with the persistence and intuition to seek and thus discover the potency of knowledge, as a unified nation, we are failing.

Each integral nation that has made a profound impact on the chronological accounts deemed significant within the annals of history is solely dependent on the children unknowingly ordained to sustain and further supplement the vitality of its existence. If we look within the homes of our communities it becomes easy to identify where blacks began to misinterpret the true value of self-worth. The men who have the difficult task of fathering the future representations of an entire nation are suffering from the same ignorance that plagues the mothers. The disconnection of black men from the nucleus of their families is detrimental to the uprising of a powerful nation that has only exhibited remnants of unification throughout various time periods of history.

Fathers refrain from expressing any attentiveness towards the existing condition that has consciously been created for their child to endure, thus the absence of a predominantly patriarchal household diminishes the perceived self-worth within the mind of the child. The mothers that are single-handedly raising and instilling our children with lasting beliefs of moral comprehension and characteristics reflecting that of God-fearing individuals are sacrificing an outstanding amount of effort towards the progression of our lost nation, but even the assistance of these invaluable influencers can only do but so much.

James Arthur Baldwin broke racial and social barriers as a writer, poet and a novelist living amongst the crude turmoil and the civil unrest that shaped the lives of many African-Americans striving to survive the harsh realities of the 1960s and 70s. Baldwin once posed this question to his African-American contemporaries in a book-length collection of essays entitled, “The Fire Next Time” and “Whose little boy are you?” This question, a question proposed more than 50 years ago, has become my physiological stimulus. My reason to exhale after years of inhalation and suffocation seemed to be the sweetest means of escaping a life with no identity of my own.

Long ago, footprints were formed from the grey-and-white-marked feet of African slaves in villages where the darkest pupils gazed upon the glory of nakedness, (an uncomfortable sense of freedom stripped away and traded for a white tailored suit and a grey pinstriped tie, I bought in Macy’s) to the infamous shores in Ghana, Africa, filled with hot sand resembling the skin of a child born from an interracial relationship. These footprints are no longer visible to the eye. They now take the form of a mirage upon my summer visits to Ghana. The correlation between African slavery in North America and the African-American struggle upon emancipation has been severed. A severe detachment to the origins of African-Americans created a generational gap that became the catalyst for a new culture to rise.

Ghettocentricity: With no desire to reclaim the origins that were required to be forgotten, our children, the lost representations of our nation, are forced to absorb the deceitful stereotypical stigmas that loom around them at every corner, alleyway and street within the unforgiving ghettos of black communities. A new generation of African-Americans has risen in America, like a rose growing from concrete that was once fresh cement poured over the heritage and traditions of a proud culture. However, African-Americans have detached themselves from the past while embracing many of the crude and controversial aspects of Black Culture.